"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?"
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?" . . .
What became of our sense of right and wrong? ... "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?" . . .
What judgment will future generations pass on us? ..."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?' ”...
Today we have our tech barons just as the 1800s had the robber barons: . . . "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." . . .