By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
If we were to wake up in 2022, would we be more likely to see a 15-person Supreme Court, a Senate without a filibuster, a nation without an Electoral College, and an effort to admit two more states and with them four more senators if Joe Biden or Donald Trump were president?
Why would we blow up a nine-justice Supreme Court after 151 years, or a 233-year Electoral College, or a 170-year Senate filibuster, or a 60-year 50-state Union? And why now? What is the theme, the argument, the momentum for shattering these traditions, other than that progressives see them as ancient impediments to their radical ends?
Who, if president, would alter our ways of governance, and who would resist? Why are the proponents of these radical changes to the way we are governed so fanatical and yet so quiet about their intentions?
We know that about 99.7–99.8 percent of those under 60 who are infected with the coronavirus survive the disease. We know that the more we lock down everyone under quarantines, the more we risk scattering our resources to cover everyone — many of whom do not need such investment — only to short the vulnerable and elderly who most certainly do need the protection.
In which administration — Biden’s or Trump’s — will more Americans die or become ill under quarantine from increased substance, familial, and spousal abuse, from missed medical procedures and surgeries, from depression and suicide, and from the loss of their livelihoods than will die from the virus itself?
Will the forced loss of school time and ensuing economic lethargy hurt the future of today’s youth, the 20-year-olds and younger Americans, who are nearly immune from infection? Are we nuts to wonder why our “health-care professionals” swear to us in petitions that demonstrating in the streets — packed with people screaming, often without masks and sanitizers, and in phalanx-like ranks — benefits the mental health of the oppressed but sitting in a pew in church is insurrectionary and nearly felonious?
Are we crazy who watch the violence in our streets and scream at our TVs that that masked man, this hooded woman on the screen is, in real time, assaulting the police, looting a family’s store, tossing a firebomb at a police car — and all with virtual immunity? Did Americans miss out on some new state or local law decreeing that it’s now legal to ransack a store or demolish a business?
Are we callous and uncaring to expect the police to arrest those who destroy the livelihoods and property of others, or are those who commit such violence the real merciless ones? And which candidate is more likely to support the equal enforcement of the law, and with it the present and future of the those cannot protect themselves and their own?
Is this even an election year, a campaign with two candidates? Is there a media Left, or is it a Big Tech/Big Media ministry that rents itself out to the most opulent left-wing candidate, and now assures that what is aberrant is perfectly normal?
Is Joe Biden even campaigning in the American tradition of an election year? Does he go hammer and tongs with the press, wake them up at rallies, bring the press into his hectic traveling circle?
Has any reporter asked him to just assure us that Hunter’s emails are indeed Russian disinformation, that he never met a single one of Hunter’s foreign lobbyists/agents, that none of his income came from foreign interests via his son — in other words, that all that he has assured us in the past is not a complete fabrication?
Which septuagenarian, Biden or Trump, is more likely to allow a journalist’s question and then give an answer? To crisscross the country? To take flak and return it? Who will seek victory through meeting the people, and who by avoiding them? Are we unhinged to trust our senses that in the year 2020, for the first time in 100 years, a candidate simply stayed home and outsourced his campaign to an obsequious media?
When they tell us that abortion does not kill the living, that our elite follow the science that nonetheless shows that life is viable in the womb if not ended by the scalpel, who is crazy, who sane?
For a generation so prone to damn the past by the standards of the present, what will our grandchildren say about us in 50 years, we who have aborted 2,000 to 3,000 infants a day? Will they scream that we were racists to allow 1,000 African-American lives to be extinguished every 24 hours? And which current presidential candidate would be more likely to say, “Please, don’t do this” and which to boast, “Who are you to object?”
When listening the other day to the senatorial furor directed at Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder and CEO, I thought of the 19th-century agrarian venom against the railroad monopolies that rigged freight rates when farmers had no other way to ship their produce. Dorsey essentially admitted that, as a private tech baron, he too can do as he pleases. And as he pleases means censoring conservative content on all he owns.
Dorsey, like the late-19th-century railroad conglomerates, operates a virtual octopus, as do Facebook and Google. Their tentacles squeeze out all their competition. They are vertically integrated. Long ago they strangulated competitors and censored and rigged their operations in a way that assumes that they are neither operating in the public domain like a utility nor subject to antitrust and anti-monopoly laws that tend to reappear when moguls express open contempt for their customers.
Which candidate, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, is more likely to rein in Big Tech? In 2023, will our Google searches, Twitter accounts, and Facebook postings become more massaged and warped under a President Trump or a President Biden?
What memory hole have we fallen into? If any of us did what Hunter Biden has for 20 years, what jail would we be in now? We thought we had seen, read, and heard evidence that Joe Biden and his brood have for decades crafted a family influence-peddling syndicate, in which his family sold the Biden name to help foreign and domestic profiteers gain an advantage over their competitors, as “Pop” Biden raked in 50 percent of Hunter’s profits. Is there yet any argument that Joe Biden has not done this?
Trump is for America. Biden and his manipulators are for anything BUT America.