The U.S. Is In Real Decline—Really! Part Four: Lawlessness and Corruption Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-really-part-four-lawlessness-and-corruption/
Corruption and lawlessness destroy civilizations. The 20th-century American ability to curb both, at least on the everyday level, explains in part the American success story. But now?
On the street level, shoplifting is being redefined in blue cities and states as something like parity or equity, or some sort of Orwellian justified adjustment in income.
The attempt to enforce the law can be far more dangerous than breaking it. We have completely politicized the legal system on the violent end, using race and ethnicity as exemptions from full enforcement of statutes—exemptions that fall most heavily upon the inner-city people of color and poor.
Will the lawlessness continue, as carjacking, car-racing in intersections, smash-and-grab, and overt theft reach the suburbs? Are we more afraid of enforcing the law and being libeled as illiberal for it, or the lawbreaking itself that we cannot always any more avoid?
In Oakland, suburbanites of every race, along with inner-city blacks, now march on government to insist on refunding the police and enforcing the law? But is such a reawakening too little and too late, in the sense that industry, business, and the middle classes now choose instead to avoid the Oaklands of America, on the theory life is too short and dangerous to be martyred on the altar of ecumenicalism?
As Livy reminds us, the remedy for our vices is now deemed worse than the malady itself. Would an attorney general attempting to clean up the DOJ have to be hated and ostracized to succeed? Where and how would an FBI director even begin?
After witnessing the Russian collusion and laptop disinformation hoaxes, the exemptions given Hunter Biden, the Biden family’s free pass to corrupt and profit, the weaponization of the IRS, FBI, CIA, and DOJ, can we still deny that the American government is not systematically corrupt?
We knew the state was politicized and weaponized, but the Biden family corruption reaches new levels of likely criminality, given it is not impossible that Biden profiteering explains in part horrendous decisions in foreign policy, like giving a pass to China on the spy balloon mission, on its stonewalling on the Wuhan origins of Covid, on Chinese systematic spying inside the U.S. and on its abuse of trade and investment.
(NB: A recent “secret” or stealth Chinese-owned biolab was just discovered in Reedley, California, 12 miles from my farm [I think in an old packing house where I once worked for three weeks one summer in my youth], which apparently was out of code, unknown to authorities, and engaged in altering dangerous pathogens like Covid, HIV, herpes, and malaria. [So just imagine a U.S. company conducting a secret and dangerous virology business with impunity in rural China]).
Too many of our generals and admirals retire into defense contractor corporate boards and lobbying firms. Too many of our FBI grandees leverage their work contacts to gravitate to Twitter and Facebook lucre upon retirement. Too many lawyers in the DOJ are political appointments whose task is to create exemptions for high-ranking leftwing officials and influencers. Too many in the IRS take their orders from political hacks in the administration. Too many in the CIA do the bidding of their political masters. Since when did the FBI become a retrieval service—laptops, guns, diaries—for the wayward Biden family miscreants?
Too many in the EPA and Interior Department contract out “green” projects to political donors and cronies, and mask their corruption under the euphemism “sustainability.”
Too many in Homeland Security acquiesce to the demands of corporate America and the identity politics industry to keep the border wide open and ignore the law.
Can America lecture any third-world country any longer either on election integrity or corruption?
Could a new administration vow to be hated and unpopular as the price of cleaning up the miasma of the deep and administrative state?
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