“Parasitic Generation”

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest is a must read.

Our Parasitic Generation

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

By Victor Davis Hanson, December 11, 2022

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“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.

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.

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Staff Sgt Chaos

1 year ago

Wow, I am speechless. Knowledge can be POWER and surely this should be a wake up call to some!
Victor, you had me at corrupt and discredited.

One thing though, out of all this, I never saw anything about God, religion, Christians, In God We Trust or maybe I overlooked it accidentally.

I believe some of what Victor is saying is in the Bible but put together a different way.

Anyway the times are going to come down to who is who and what you stand for and that alone will decide your NEW, FORCED Fate/Life!!!

Pick a side and buckle up, one side gets you to HEAVEN and the other side gets you to HELL, NO MATTER WHAT you won’t believe.

I am a Natural, Born,White American, Patriotic, Christian CITIZEN, EQUAL to all and above nobody!
I will defend, protect and honor my Country and the GOOD people in it no matter what SO HELP ME GOD!

Even know it is more beneficial for us to FORM our own Militia and take down these Corrupt, Cheating, Liars, time is asking us to wait a little longer!

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ROY TREPANIER

1 year ago

And so it ends ! The American Empire and the Antichrist Empire cannot share the same stage. One has to go. Can you guess which one it is ??
Maranatha, come Lord Jesus……….

4

Paul Smith

1 year ago

Ancient Rome was unable to stop the rot. I see no indication that we are any better, rather I see accelerated rot with each new generation of “Americans”.

4

Michael J. Swanson

1 year ago

Victor is “spot on”!

4

JoeyJ

1 year ago

Reply to  Michael J. Swanson

As always.

But also as always no one in authority takes the time to read, understand, or act on his warnings.

Meanwhile, Nero keeps fiddling as the Republic burns.

1

D

MD Anthony

1 year ago

Victor Davis Hanson’s Epic “Merry Christmas to America”
Hanson should include California’s Irresponsible Mentor…Canada

2

Andrew

1 year ago

The United States of America will be known in the History Books as the shortest Empire ever, a mere 75 years from 1945 until today.
Old Joe and his merry gang of useful idiots are destroying everything that made America great and he has done it in such a short time and there is more to come.

1

Floridian

1 year ago

Reply to  Andrew

Joe who? The name of the dictator who is “fundamentally changing America” is barack hussein obama. Need I say more?

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Walter Sieruk

1 year ago

The top essay did make mention of George Floyd , therefore some things need to be known, if for nothing else but for the sake a balanced perspective

Which is that George Floyd was a vicious hardened criminal therefore it’s very wrong to make some kind of a “hero” out of hooligan was such criminal that he not was not only on drugs but was also involved in drug trafficking .

Mr. Floyd was so totally despicable that he even entered a pregnant woman’s home under a false premise of deception to let his lawless ruffians lot her home , all the while he threateningly pointed a gun to that pregnant woman’s stomached ‘You better cooperate.”

The list of crimes that Floyd was guilty of can to go on. It’s absurd as well as wrong to make a “hero” out of heinously wicked thug. As the Bible reads “Woe to those who call evil good…” Isaiah 5:20. [N.K.J.V.]

.

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Walter Sieruk

1 year ago

Part of the above article reads “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”

With that very true statement, it should further known that the “No secure border policy” of Joe Biden and his leftist’s political comrades are totally disaster for many reasons.

It was discovered that twenty – three Muslim terrorists just captured crossing the Mexican/US border that really be a wakeup call. Before that a jihadist who was captured who had originally come from Saudi Arabia, earlier yet, two Iranian jihad operatives had also been captured.

First, there are also those jihadists of ISIS al Qaeda and other similar jihadist terrorists may now more easily infiltrate into America and there is drastic rise in drug cartel trafficking .

Second, in opens the door in an “invitation for malicious violent criminal gangs enter America through the US/ Mexican “border.” As the murderers rapists and drug dealing heinous gangster who a call themselves MS- 13. Likewise, now heinous rise in the drug cartel trade because of porous borders.

Third, because the criminals now entering America because of Biden’s porous border policy there is also a terrible increase of murderous violence and vast destruction in America cities.

Forth, there is the drastic and deadly increase and of the coronaviruses by migrants South of the US/ Mexican “border.” So much evil is now infesting the USA, “thanks” to Joe Biden.

The coronavirus will rise and so will the death rate have a drastic increase in the USA because of the COVID -19 positive migrants who have entered America though the open door policy of Joe Biden .

In conclusion, Biden will have the blood of many good, decent American citizens across the United States on his wicked vile hands.

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Walter Sieruk

1 year ago

This article by Davis Hanson revealed that “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.”

That despicable scoundrel and President imposter , Joe Biden, had ordered the US pullout from Afghanistan that awful action of his that reveals the horrendous folly of his judgement in many wrong and tragic ways. As in, for example allowing the Taliban enemy to have all the state of the art high quality US military equipment.

After all the Americans who died and the many others who had been terrible wounded and over a trillion dollars of wasted American taxpayers money invested in that awful mayhem is also awful.

Another horrible consequence of Biden’s treachery in Afghanistan are all those unvetted Afghan /Muslims now spreading across the United States. If any Americans, in any way are harmed by some those unvetted Afghan “refugees” who might be either criminals or violent jihadists then Biden will have their innocent blood on his wicked hands.

Since the end of August and because of that despicable villain Joe Biden, has betrayed and abandoned many Americans and left them to in Afghanistan to be brutally murdered by the Taliban.

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Walter Sieruk

1 year ago

The near beginning of that article revealed the sad and tragic reality that “Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, This is a terrible but true disgrace. For the FBI is no longer the grand all American patriotic law enforcement institution to it once was in the past. Now it’s only been influenced thoroughly infiltrated and corrupted and infected by the politically correct insidious and sinister activists of the Red/Green alliance and now the FBI is their tool as well as the stooge organization acting for Nancy Pelosi and the others of the “power elate” un-American subversives as her.

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