by Victor Davis Hanson
As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us.
The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse.
As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget.
Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher than at any time in 40 years. Yet the prices of the stuff of life—food, fuel, shelter, energy—are far steeper still than the official rate.
No one is safe from thugs anymore—whether a commuter on a New York subway or the Pelosis in Pacific Heights.
The country reportedly has a 25-day supply of diesel fuel—the energy source that runs the nation. Meanwhile, we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil—a commodity we have in abundance but refuse to produce fully.
We never fixed the supply-chain crisis of last year, and so still face shortages of key consumer goods.
The labor participation rate is at an all-time low—given fat government COVID subsidies, the Siren-song appeal of staying home after the lockdowns, fear of COVID, and millions of workers with long COVID.
The post-Kabul Pentagon is quiet about the depletion of its critical stocks of weaponry. We have sent billions of dollars’ worth in howitzer shells, javelin missiles, and Hilmar rocket launchers to Ukraine without replenishing our own arsenals. The Army’s recruitment rate is off 50 percent this year.
Our broken Navy is ossifying as China expands its fleet in expectation of absorbing Taiwan.
When we look to the president for an accounting for these madcap experiments, we get nothing. In the last few weeks, Joe Biden has lied that gas was $5 a gallon when he took office when it was half that.
He falsely swears that he passed his student-loan amnesty plan by one or two votes when he simply signed away a half-trillion dollars in debt by an executive order and bypassed Congress.
Kamala Harris is our border czar but she avoids the nonexistent southern border like the plague.
As the country depletes its petroleum reserves, she gushes about “solutions” like transforming the nation’s school bus fleet to battery power.
On the rare occasion she is allowed abroad, Harris has no idea what North Korea’s official name is—only that it is supposedly one of America’s staunchest allies.
We are now headed for a decisive midterm election. Strangely the hard-left architects of the last two years neither offer a defense of their failing agendas, nor agree to change them.
No Democratic congressional candidates brag about the 3 million people who illegally crossed an open border.
None boast that they helped cancel key pipelines, reduced federal leasing of gas and oil, and shut down the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. None take credit for hammering investments in fossil fuels.
None preen over the no-bail and defund-the-police policies of left-wing, big-city prosecutors and mayors who have spiked crime.
None insist that an annual 8-9 percent inflation rate is a desirable spreading of the wealth.
And yet odder still, no Democratic candidate, state or national—and most certainly not Joe Biden—offers to alter these toxic policies.
If they won’t defend what they have done, they apparently will not undo what they have wrought either.
No Democratic gubernatorial candidate wants one foot built of a new border wall. No House candidate demands that the Keystone pipeline be finished. No senatorial candidate calls for fiscal discipline to lower inflation.
Instead, they stay mute.
Biden mutters lies about MAGA extremists under every bed while daily offering yet another made-up tidbit of his fantasy autobiography.
State and national candidates either avoid debates with their Republican opponents or delay them in hopes they will become irrelevant since millions of mail-in ballots are already cast.
Rarely have voters turned over their country to radicals, socialists, and nihilists.
We did in 2020.
And once the Left took the presidency, the House, and Senate, they tried a deadly experiment on us the American people, their veritable lab rats.
It failed—and has now nearly destroyed us along with the country.
Yet in November the Left apparently demands more time for more experimentation on more of us. But to do what exactly?
Pass more no bail laws and promote more defunding of the police? Make the jails and prisons emptier?
More destruction of what’s left of the southern border?
More biological men overpowering women in sports?
More printing of money?
More cutting back on federal gas and oil leases and canceling pipelines?
Apparently, the only thing that will stop their mad experimentation is that they have run out of us—their once willing lab rats.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.
