Our adversaries can’t quite believe their good fortune. Had they thought up ways to divide and impoverish America, they could not have improved on our own collective meltdown.
By Victor Davis Hanson, AM GREATNESS
This Fourth of July holiday we might pause for a moment from our festivities to ask how we collectively lost our minds over the last 15 months—and are we yet regaining any semblance of our sanity?
A pandemic caused by the leak of a Chinese-engineered virus and its coverup was cause enough for nationwide madness. But the spread of COVID-19 was followed by a nationalized and often politicized “flatten-the-curve” quarantine that soon ensured a stir-crazy nation. Tens of millions saw no people, and heard nothing human other than what was fed to them through television and computers. No wonder they grew paranoid, conspiratorial, and angry, and soon forgot the therapeutic nature of personal interaction and the shared humanity of being in the physical presence of others.
Our first self-induced recession came next and lasted over a year, destroying all the hard work of the prior three years. Next ensued the death of George Floyd and a subsequent 120 days of rioting, looting, and arson. The immediate costs were $2 billion in damage, over 25 deaths, 14,000 arrests, and a Lord of the Flies anarchy with no-go zones in our major cities. A McCarthyite frenzy followed, as remote-controlled America hunted down the supposed “racists” among us—while career agendas, personal grudges, and ideological hatred fueled the cancel culture.
All this was antecedent to our first election in which Election Day voting was incidental, not essential, to the outcome. This was also our first presidential campaign in which the incumbent was stricken by a pandemic virus. And his opponent, due to his age and infirmity, simply reverted to the 19th-century style of staying home and outsourcing the electioneering to the Democratic-media complex. Biden’s basement became the equivalent of the “front-porch” of homebound candidates of a century and more ago.
The derangement was then capped off, first, by a buffoonish riot at the Capitol followed by a Reichstag-fire style militarization of Washington, D.C., in a “never let a crisis go to waste” psychodrama. Then came a novel second and unprecedented presidential impeachment, without a special prosecutor, witnesses, or cross-examinations. It was based on the myth of a deadly “armed insurrection” fueled by President Trump, which purportedly led to the murder of a police officer. Later most of the writs of the House impeachment were proven fantasies, from the idea of “armed” and “well-organized” to “murderous” revolutionaries. The only mysteries were the identity of the unnamed officer who fatally shot an unarmed female protester and military veteran, and why the government has still not released thousands of hours of video detailing the riot.
That impeachment charade was followed by a trial in the Senate—without the chief justice presiding—of a president, who was no longer in office.
The finale was the promise of a “moderate” good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton—the supposed correction to Trump. In reality, Biden’s first 150 days proved, as the cynics predicted, that he was mere cover and conveyance for the implementation of the most radical agenda since the 1930s.
So we can cut America some slack when we ponder why the entire country is now descending into a collective madness, given the amount of propaganda and media distortion pumped out during the quarantine, and since.
The Chaos of Daily Living
Within the space of about 6 months in 2021, the costs of the essentials of life have skyrocketed—food, gasoline, housing, appliances, cars and trucks, and building materials. Non-ending streams of stimulus money, huge deficits, and pent-up demand so far have ensured that Americans would pay such spiking prices. And soon radical inflation may trigger 1970s stagflation and then recession, as the “why-go-to-work?” checks and consumer zeal finally cease, but the government printing machine keeps going. What good is free government money if spiraling prices eat away the entitlement?
California is the worst run of our states. But it is also always a helpful bellwether of where we are descending. The state has plenty of oil and natural gas. There are still remnants of a once-thriving nuclear and hydroelectric industry. But power outages are now commonplace—to the point that, like Third-Worlders, we merely shrug when the lights go out as if it were a green way of reducing carbon emissions.
Forty million people driving on roads and highways intended for 20 million people—27 percent of them not born in America—becomes a “Road-Warrior”-like wildness intended to discourage the kind of driving to which we became accustomed in the 20th century. Any trip over 200 miles cannot be calibrated by traditional “arrival times.” Ad hoc repairs on ancient roads paralyzes traffic not already slowed by accidents. Speeding and traffic violations are commonplace. Either the population ignores or does not know the law, or a paranoid law enforcement is reluctant to enforce the laws, or there are simply too few patrol cars responsible for too many drivers.
Gas can range from $4.00 to over $5.00 a gallon; $100 fill-ups are common. To go to a California Home Depot or Lowes store is to be amazed at grades of plywood priced at nearly $90 a sheet.
Californians are leaving in droves, but housing costs are still soaring. Californians love nice houses. But those who have them don’t like to allow anyone to build new ones for others.
A horrendous drought has dried up reservoirs and dropped the water tables of most aquifers. Privately, Californians know that it was madness not to build reservoirs, all canceled over 30 years ago, or to allow the California Water Project’s infrastructure to decay, or to continue to allow scarce fresh water to flow into the sea, or not to invest in new technologies of underground water savings and storage.
But they also know that as long as the Bay Area’s activists have sufficient supplies of water (from their own early 20th century, far-seeing politicians who created the huge Hetch Hetchy transference and won first-dibs allotments from the subsequent California Water Project), they will continue to push green agendas, the disastrous consequences of which the elite avoid, given their own wealth and power.
High-speed rail is a tragic joke. It is inert and unfinished. The ostentatious half-built overpasses stand like modern graffiti-stained versions of Stonehenge. Its only ostensible purpose seems to have been a green plan to siphon money from road repair and expansion.
Mention San Francisco to a Californian, and the same, monotonous warnings arise: don’t go there! And if you must, don’t park there—since smashing into a car and stealing its contents are viewed as understandable redistribution rather than criminal acts. Others advise to check constantly the soles of your shoes: human and animal excrement is ubiquitous as the city’s sanitation regresses to something resembling Old Cairo or medieval London.
I drive often to the central Sierra. For the last four years the talk there was “Why don’t they do something about the millions of trees that have died from drought and bug infestation?” The locals now say of the incinerated forests “Why don’t they do something about the millions of those charred black trees?” Such sincere questions assume people matter more than ideology. They don’t.
In a state where defecation on the sidewalks apparently hurts no one, drought and fires consuming a forest are also OK—as long as it is likewise deemed a function of nature. In California, logging an acre of timber is insurrectionary; 400,000 acres going up in smoke is “stuff happens.”
Policies and Politicians
The truth is that the necessities of life—safety, affordability of the essentials, transportation, power, and fuel—are now iffy. If 15 years ago, Americans more or less saw each other as fellow citizens rather than as members of rival tribes, now they are resegregating into Dark Age bands. In place of oral bards and mythic sagas, we have dry and racist “critical race theory.”
There is no media credibility left after assuring us for years that the Steele dossier was the gold standard, that Robert Mueller’s dream team would prove “collusion,” that Donald Trump sicced the federal police on demonstrators for a cheap photo-op stunt, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, and that only conspiracists could make a looney connection between COVID-19’s ground zero origins in Wuhan and a nearby Level-4 virology lab, with ties to the Chinese military.
The current chaos of everyday life of course follows from national policy and politics. The streets are on a reverse trajectory into the 1970s, since crime is redefined as either tolerable collateral damage, “equity,” or a collective indictment of society rather than one of individual culpability. When mayors claim that burning a police precinct is a mere loss of “brick and mortar,” or taking over downtown Seattle is just part of a “summer of love,” or when the architect of the “1619 Project” claims looting is not violence, then crime is no longer crime.
The Left says it has not defunded the police because there are still police to be seen. But progressives have done something far more insidious: America has destroyed police deterrence by a year of anti-police venom, by prosecutors selectively and asymmetrically exempting the arrested, and by prompting police retirements, resignations or simple slowdowns. There is now in the minds of all big-city cops a constant cost-to-benefit calculation: going into the inner city has become a lose/lose/lose/lose/lose proposition in which a 911 call from the danger zone can get an officer killed, injured, fired, suspended, imprisoned, or rendered a fool, as the successfully arrested are summarily let go.
The country has gone mad with debt. Both parties are responsible for the massive spending. The Republican defense is that Democrats would spend even more—and, if they are lavishing entitlements to buy votes, why shouldn’t we?
The Left’s excuse is not just the old idea of redistribution, but a new revolutionary myth that money and debt are really irrelevant constructs. A novel economic pseudoscience has revised or discarded the oppressive idea of having to pay back what was borrowed.
Traditionalists and conservatives always assumed that the military, the intelligence, and investigatory agencies, and the prosecutorial industry were at least above politics, defenders of traditional and constitutional norms, and completely professional in their service.
No longer. There is now a new military-industrial-intelligence-legal complex. Its hierarchy is politically weaponized, and amply remunerated. The careers of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, General Mark Milley, and a score of retired four-star officers, Robert Mueller and his dream team, and the Department of Justice are characteristically determined and calibrated by politics rather than competence.
The usual consequences follow: half the country no longer trusts its once esteemed FBI, CIA, or military. And when these agencies veer from their assigned tasks, it is no wonder that they miss impending signs of terrorism in Boston, Fort Hood, and San Bernardino, had little clue that the “JVs” of ISIS were expanding in Iraq, and never really informed the American people about the costs, the benefits, the stakes and the likely future of the two-decade Afghan war. In the 1960s the Left sought to tarnish the reputation of what they saw as hated government institutions and failed; in the 2020s, the Left diminished the reputation of what they now saw as useful and malleable institutions and succeeded.
America does not quite know what will follow from the first months of the Biden Administration. Already, it has managed to destroy the idea of a border, with an anticipated 2 million entering the country illegally over a 12 month period. It demolished the idea of the police and prosecutorial deterrence curbing crime. It is ending the trajectory of America’s natural gas and oil renaissance that enriched the country, and freed it from Middle East entanglements. And it killed off the notion that government should seek to ensure that race is not how we collectively define the content of our individual characters.
Abroad
Meanwhile, our enemies and rivals—China, Iran, and Russia especially—are giddy at what America has become. The American Left, they believe, has done a much better job of denying Chinese culpability for a Chinese-engineered virus than had the Chinese communist media.
When billionaires, such as Michael Bloomberg, see China as essentially democratic (“The Communist Party wants to stay in power in China, and they listen to the public . . . Xi Jinping is not a dictator.”), when Charles Munger applauds their clampdown on outspoken capitalists like Jack Ma (“I don’t want the, all of the Chinese system, but I certainly would like to have the financial part of it in my own country, . . . Communists did the right thing. They just called in Jack Ma and say, ‘You aren’t gonna do it, sonny.’”), and when Bill Gates believes that in the midst of the pandemic, a lying China had done “a lot of things right in the beginning,” we can conclude America’s richest are placing their bets on a Chinese-Communist controlled 21st century, and will adjust accordingly.
Our adversaries can’t quite believe their good fortune. Had they thought up ways to divide and impoverish America, to see its cities burned, and looted, to weaken its economy and currency, to erode the unity of its once-feared military, and to entrench the most effective critics of America in America—not in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, or Tehran, but in corporate boardrooms, campuses, newsrooms, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the Pentagon—they could not have improved on what has happened in 2020-21, the era of our collective meltdown.
I twice posted an article about massive robbery and looting in San Francisco , tolerated by the police, in broad daylight, from the Daily Mail. On two occasions, the article was printed in the comment section under Mr. Hanson’s brilliant article. The Daily Mail story documents one of Dr. Hanson’s points–that “woke” ideology has led to a massive increase in crime.
Both times I posted it, it was first printed and then disappeared from the comment section. Ted, please explain to us how and why this happened.
From Today’s Daily Mail: “Horde of shoplifters fled San Francisco’s Neiman Marcus, undeterred, carrying stolen designer goods
This comes as Target made the decision last week to close its San Francisco stores at 6pm – four hours earlier than elsewhere – and Walgreens shuttered 17 stores in the area because of shoplifting concerns
A video posted to Instagram captures yet another brazen act of shoplifting in San Francisco, this time at the luxury department store Neiman Marcus where at least ten people stole armfuls of designer goods and then fled without anyone trying to stop them.
The footage reveals the shoplifters leaving the Union Square store, each carrying bags of stolen items with the security tags still dangling off of them. The perpetrators then ran in different directions, with a few speeding away from the scene in a white sedan.
One person watching says, ‘They can’t do anything,’ perhaps referring to security at Neiman Marcus.
Shoplifting cases are all too common in San Francisco, where charges of property theft less than $950 in value was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor in 2014 – meaning that store staff and security do not persue or stop thieves who have taken anything worth less than $1,000.
Brazen thieves make off with armfuls of goods from Neiman Marcus
A video posted to Instagram captures the moment at least 10 people stole loads of designer bags from Neiman Marcus in San Francisco and fled undeterred
A video posted to Instagram captures the moment at least 10 people stole loads of designer bags from Neiman Marcus in San Francisco and fled undeterred
Police are still investigating the incident and the suspects were already gone by the time they arrived
Police are still investigating the incident and the suspects were already gone by the time they arrived
Witnesses told KTVU that the store was about to close when the suspects came in and smashed display cases before nabbing the goods and leaving
Witnesses told KTVU that the store was about to close when the suspects came in and smashed display cases before nabbing the goods and leaving
Shoplifting cases are all too common in San Francisco, where charges of property theft less than $950 in value was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor in 2014
Shoplifting cases are all too common in San Francisco, where charges of property theft less than $950 in value was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor in 2014
The person who posted the video wrote a message demanding San Francisco crackdown on shoplifters and called for District Attorney of San Francisco Chesa Boudin to be removed from office.
‘Everyone in the city is tired of this so please sign the recall petition to oust Chesa Boudin now! Crime is legal basically and allowed and tolerated due to policies put in place and supported by all our supervisors and mayor and DA,’ Instagram user sfstreets415, whose bio reads, ‘Asian photographer and crime reporter,’ wrote.
The petition was first launched in March to recall Boudin, who has come under fire in recent years, along with the city’s leadership, for allegedly not doing enough to combat San Francisco’s shoplifting problem.
The city’s surge in such incidents arose almost immediately after the passage of Proposition 47, a ballot referendum known as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act that downgraded the theft of property less than $950 in value from a felony charge to a misdemeanor.
The monetary value of the goods stolen from Neiman Marcus is not clear and police are still investigating the incident. According to reporting from KTVU, when officers arrived at the scene the suspects were already gone.
Witnesses told KTVU that the store was about to close when the suspects came in and smashed display cases before nabbing the goods and leaving.
Larceny is the most common crime committed in the Bay Area, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s Crime Dashboard
Larceny is the most common crime committed in the Bay Area, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s Crime Dashboard
Larceny is the most common crime committed in the Bay Area, according to the San Francisco Police Department’s Crime Dashboard.
There 12,194 instances in 2021 between January 1 and June 27, 2021 – the department’s most recent data. This is a drop by around 11percent from the same time period in 2020, when there were 13,804 instances. The next highest crime is burglary and there were 3,624 instances in 2021, a rough five percent increase from the 3,439 acts committed in 2020 between the same time period.
Defined by the department as including ‘thefts of bicycles, motor vehicle parts and accessories, shoplifting, pocket picking, or the stealing of any property or article that is not taken by force and violence or by fraud.’ Burglary is different from larceny because it involves unlawful trespassing to commit a crime.
The most recent retail chain to address San Francisco’s shoplifting problems was Target, which announced last week that six of its San Francisco stores will be closing at 6pm instead of 10pm in an effort to prevent further theft. The retailer wrote in a statement, ‘for more than a month, we’ve been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores.’
One Target security guard, Kevin Greathouse, told Newsweek that management has instructed him and other employees not to physically engage the shoplifters.
Greathouse said he carries a handgun, a taser and pepper spray on him at all times when at Target. However, he described one alleged shoplifter recently threatening him with a knife and said, ‘I don’t have any intention of getting stabbed for $60 worth of stuff.’
It is not clear what Neiman Marcus’s security guard intervention policy is, though the department store sent a statement to the Daily Mail that reads, “The safety and welfare of our associates and customers is our top priority, and we’re relieved to report that no one was harmed in the incident. We’re cooperating with the San Francisco Police Department in their investigation.’
Safai told Newsweek that the city and the district attorney’s office have gotten involved in Target’s case and that many of the retail giant’s alleged perpetrators are part of an organized retail crime group.
“These are people who are recruited, organized and are reselling these good and San Francisco is hurting for it,” Safai said.
Small business owners can’t always afford security guards and must take matters into their own hands when it comes to addressing shoplifting. Such is the case for the family-owned Daniel’s Pharmacy, in the Crocker-Amazon neighborhood, where Ed Nasrah told the Daily Mail that staff won’t let shoplifters get off easily.
‘We approach them and try to take [stolen goods] back,’ he said. ‘Once they know you’ve got a reputation for not letting shoplifters get away, they’re less likely to do it. We do get ripped off sometimes and people get away with stealing things, I’m not gonna lie about that. But when we see it, we don’t just let them get away.’
Jalal Haydari, owner of Limoncello Italian Market and Deli, recently told Fox News that his store in tony Pacific Heights is targeted day and night. He has 32 cameras installed to catch criminals and has caught many in the act.
One video reveals a thief breaking in through a window before stealing from a cash register and nabbing the electronic tablets used to take delivery orders. Another video reveals a man taking armfuls of food containers and drinks off the deli counter before fleeing.
Broken windows are costing him Haydari even more than stolen merchandise, totalling $23,000 in the past year. “My store has been broken into more than 14 times,” Haydari says. “And I have all the police reports, but I have not been notified if anybody got arrested. I think before you open a business in San Francisco you should think twice because you’re not protected at all no matter what.”
A statement sent to Fox News by Safeway supermarket reads, “Like other retailers. we’ve seen a dramatic increase in shoplifting incidents and losses from shoplifting since California sentencing laws changed in 2014 to make all theft below $950 a misdemeanor when it was previously a wobbler, either a felony or a misdemeanor based on prosecutorial discretion. Enterprising thieves have figured out there are few consequences to shoplifting if they keep the value of their crimes below $950.”
The Neiman Marcus video’s surface comes less than a month after another shameless shoplifting case was caught on camera. Footage showed a brazen robber, on his bicycle, as he filled a garbage bag with products at a San Francisco Walgreens and bicycled out of the store – as a bystander and security guard watch
The Neiman Marcus video’s surface comes less than a month after another shameless shoplifting case was caught on camera. Footage showed a brazen robber, on his bicycle, as he filled a garbage bag with products at a San Francisco Walgreens and bicycled out of the store – as a bystander and security guard watch
The man rode his bike to the store, filled a garbage bag with stolen goods and rode away
The man rode his bike to the store, filled a garbage bag with stolen goods and rode away
The Neiman Marcus video’s surface comes less than a month after another shameless shoplifting case was caught on camera and went viral online. The footage posted on Twitter by ABC7 Reporter Lyanne Melendez was filmed on June 14 and reveals the moment a brazen robber filled a garbage bag with products at a San Francisco Walgreens and bicycled out of the store after no one tried to stop him.
According to KTVU, San Francisco’s District Attorney’s Office have since filed formal charges against the perpetrator, Jean Lugo Romero, for the incident as well as other acts of commercial shoplifting and robbery at various Walgreens and CVS stores throughout the city.
The Walgreens scene followed the closing of 17 San Francisco Walgreens locations due to shoplifting cases, where theft in the pharmaceutical chain’s 53 remaining stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. One Walgreens reportedly loses $1,000 a day to shoplifters, the news outlet adds.
Across the city, 18 Walgreens stores saw 94 shoplifting incidents between September 1 and December 31, 2020, according to data compiled by the San Francisco Police Department and obtained by news outlet Mission Local.
Walgreens also spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere, Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii, said at a hearing on retail crimes held in May by Boudin and Ahsha Safaí, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and retailers, police and probation departments.
Safai had not addressed the most recent shoplifting incident as of Tuesday morning.
Last month, he and Boudin announced a partnership with ALTO Alliance, an organization that provides legal support to retailers impacted by shoplifting in efforts to prevent repeat offenses. “
Make sure also to watch the videos with the Dail Mail article about San Francisco: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9760789/Horde-shoplifters-fled-San-Franciscos-Neiman-Marcus-undeterred-carrying-stolen-designer-goods.html
From today’s Daily Mail UK:
Make sure also to watch the videos:https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9760789/Horde-shoplifters-fled-San-Franciscos-Neiman-Marcus-undeterred-carrying-stolen-designer-goods.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoZftznHz7o&t=4s