Victor Davis Hanson: Biden is the most dangerously radical President in US history
The Most Dangerous President in American History
A new book highlights the ways Biden is putting us at risk.
Prior to Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House in early 2021, it would have been difficult for many American patriots to believe that a worse president than Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama could sit in the Oval Office. Then Biden wasted no time proving those patriots wrong. From Day One he has been such an unmitigated disaster for the country that only 19% of Americans said in a poll last Sunday that they want Biden to run again in 2024. A July poll revealed that only 13% of Americans believe the country is on the right track. Apparently few believe that Biden is building back better, much less making America great again.
His incompetence (or conversely, his competence in carrying out a destructive agenda) has done more than just bring the country to the brink of a failed state after only half a term, though; it also has endangered Americans in many ways, and its legacy will continue to do so for generations. Indeed, bestselling author Nick Adams, in his new book from Post Hill Press, labels Joe Biden The Most Dangerous President in History.
Adams, 38, Australian-born but a naturalized American citizen and proud of it, is the author of several bestselling books such as Retaking America, Green Card Warrior, and Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Civilization. He is a tireless public speaker and social media influencer, as well as a frequent commentator in the news media such as at Fox News. In addition to having been appointed by President Trump as a scholar to the Smithsonian, Adams also runs a nationwide nonprofit called FLAG, the Foundation for Liberty and Greatness, whose mission is to educate Americans about the values and principles that make our country exceptional.
His new book, The Most Dangerous President in History, lays out some of the principal ways in which our Divider-in-Chief Biden is running the ship of state aground. In chapters on shutting down the economy instead of the coronavirus; on flooding our southern border with migrants and flooding cities across the U.S. with Afghan refugees; on demonizing concerned parents at school board meetings as domestic terror threats; on undermining our military; and on demonstrating weak leadership regarding China and Ukraine, Adams makes the case that Biden is creating crises that threaten our national security and put American lives at risk.
On Biden’s border policy, for example: the Left likes to paint anyone concerned about the open floodgates of our southern border as racist and anti-immigration. In fact, conservatives simply think it’s sensible to have a system in place for the vetting of people who want to come here, and to have reasonable restrictions or guidelines about the flow of people we let in. There isn’t another country in the world that doesn’t do that. But Biden’s party isn’t satisfied with anything less than an unlimited number of potential Democrat voters streaming across the border – and drug cartels, human traffickers, and terrorists along with them.
As Adams points out in his book, instead of policing our borders, the Department of Homeland Security is instead obsessed with a domestic terror threat that the Biden administration is greatly concerned about: parents expressing their outrage at school boards over the Critical Race Theory indoctrination and gender ideology sexualization of their children. The branding of these rightly-concerned citizens as violent terrorist threats is one of the most disgusting smears the Left has ever used against its political opponents.
But potentially the most serious threat Biden and his administration present is in its subversion of our military – through diversity/equity/inclusion wokeness, the mandating of COVID vaccines to weed out potential dissidents, and the leadership’s focus on climate change and “whiteness” as our greatest existential enemies. Adams addresses this in a chapter that details, among other things, the debacle of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Gen. Mark Milley’s treasonous warning to China during the Trump years.
The book concludes with a chapter about Biden being compromised on China and Ukraine, a national security threat that our complicit media don’t want to talk about, much less investigate. And then of course, there’s Joe’s embarrassment of a son, Hunter. The Biden family has no compunctions about selling America out to our enemies or dragging us into a nuclear war with Russia.
Adams notes that Biden is dangerous not only not only on his own, but also because of the people with whom he has surrounded himself in his administration, such as the Secretary of Transportation diversity hire Pete Buttigieg, the epically incompetent Vice President Kamala Harris, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who infamously declared before Congress that she couldn’t define the word “woman” because she isn’t a biologist. There doesn’t seem to be a single appointee in the administration that is there because of actual merit and qualifications.
The Most Dangerous President in History, like Nick Adams himself, is a bracing shot of patriotic common sense. If the book has a failing, it is that it does not include more of the ways in which the grouchy old radical Biden and his administration are putting this country at serious risk (admittedly, doing so would have made the book too unwieldy to lift for anyone but bodybuilders).
But to add one more reason to the mix – one Adams couldn’t have included because it arose just after the publication of his book – consider the recent, treasonous prisoner exchange of the billionaire Russian arms dealer Viktor “Merchant of Death” Bout for women’s basketball star Brittney Griner, who was serving a nine-year sentence in Moscow for drug possession. Besides the fact that the Biden administration left retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, unjustly-imprisoned in Russian custody since 2018, this shocking capitulation to Russian demands demonstrated to both our allies and our enemies that America under Biden is pathetically weak, and it exposes Americans to an increased threat of being kidnapped by foreign powers again.
Only the most ideologically deluded Democrat sincerely believes that Joe Biden is anything but a catastrophic failure, both domestically and abroad, as the Leader of the Free World. Nick Adams’ new book demonstrates this abundantly well, but also points the way optimistically forward to the presidential election of 2024 – if we are as committed to taking our country back as the Left is to fundamentally transforming it.
Joe Biden’s Fractured Fairy Tales
The President’s talent for political fiction.
Joe Biden has been called a pathological liar, Pinocchio on steroids, delusional and totally detached from reality.
That’s unfair. Instead, let’s just say the president has a flair for fiction. Think of him as a master storyteller to put Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm to shame. Here are a few of my favorite Biden bedtime stories:
2. The Democrats Freedom to Vote Act will secure the right to vote for millions of Americans the GOP is trying to disenfranchise – Biden said Republicans working for election reform (secure ballots) are on the side of George Wallace not Martin Luther King. So, according to POTUS, to stand with the civil rights icon means supporting ballots mailed out en masse, casting ballots by putting them in drop-boxes, no requirement of signature verification, and no ID of any sort if you vote in person. DC now requires proof of vaccination and a photo ID to enter most indoor venues. That must mean that Mayor Bowser stands with George Wallace.
3. White Supremacy is a threat to democracy – Did white supremacists riot in more than 23 states in 2020, burning whole city blocks? (Actually, that was BLM and Antifa.) Are there hundreds of churches preaching white supremacy? (No, but there are hundreds of mosques preaching jihad.) Are foreign governments supporting white nationalism? (Oh, you must mean the way Iran, Yemen and half a dozen other Islamic states fund jihad here?) White supremacy is the Democrats’ “look-over-here” ploy to distract the credulous from Islamic extremism and leftists subversion.
4. What happened on January 6, 2021 was an insurrection or an attempted coup, if you prefer. – You betcha, struck at the very heart of democracy it did. Except, the only death directly attributable to the riot at the Capitol was an unarmed protestor shot by Capitol police. In fact, none of the rioters had guns. (How do you overthrow a government with supersonic jets by throwing folding chairs?) January 6, 2021 is the Democrats’ Reichstag fire. The goal is to criminalize the conservative movement and the half of the country that agrees with Donald Trump. The real threat to democracy isn’t the non-insurrection of 2021, but using the myth to crush dissent.
5. America does not have a crime problem. In 2021, 12 cities reached new highs for the number of homicides. Police officers intentionally killed in the line of duty hit a 20-year high. Many cities are plagued with smash and grab. In Los Angeles, railroad cars are looted as they stand on sidings. Homeless crazies stab women to death and throw them onto subway tracks. There are mayors who pander to the criminal element, prosecutors who put those arrested back on the streets as fast as they’re processed and a president who all but calls cops racists. A crime problem -- where would that come from?
6. America is racist – We fought a civil war with half-a-million dead to abolish slavery. Segregation would not have ended without the support of the white majority in the 1960s. You can say anything – and I do mean anything – about Caucasians and nobody blinks an eye. But use the “N-word” (even in jest) once and your life is destroyed. POTUS thinks COVID treatment should go to minorities first. We’re racist the way Outer Mongolia is anti-Semitic.
7. Only the rich will pay the administration’s proposed tax hikes – This is a familiar refrain from the party of plunder. Every time they propose a new tax hike, we’re assured that only-the-top-1%, super-rich, multi-millionaires will pay it. How is it then that in 2018 the average filer paid $15,322 in federal income taxes alone – almost $46,000 for a family of three. Democrats use the rich as bait to get the middle class to stick its head in a noose.
8. We can fight inflation with spending – This is like fighting wildfires by spraying gasoline from a crop duster. Spending drives inflation. The U.S. government is now running a deficit of 7.8% of GDP. Of course, it’s just a coincidence that in the same year Washington spent trillions to supposedly fight COVID, stimulate the economy, and repair infrastructure, inflation reached its highest level in almost 40 years.
9. The rising cost of gas has nothing to do with the administration’s energy fantasies. As soon as he took office, President Green set about making America a net energy importer once again – the Keystone XL pipeline cancelled, new oil and gas leases on public land and waters prohibited, an impossible green agenda embraced (promises to cut emissions by as much as 52% from 2005 levels by 2030). We’ve paid for this with a 58% increase in the price of gas in the past year (home heating up 34%). Biden’s policies have worked wonders for the energy sector – Russia’s.
10. There is no crisis at the Border – Think of what’s happening at the border not as a crisis but an opportunity -- for Democrats to import a new electorate. Those midnight flights to relocate thousands of illegals across the country is an urban legend. Pictures of illegal encampments just south of the border – an optical illusion. Just ask Vice President Harris. She was close to the border -- once.
Oh, and the pullout from Afghanistan? It was easily the most successful military operation since the D-Day landings.
As Sinbad the Biden spins his yarns, in thousands of ways a million times a day, life gets harder and harder for the average American. Unlike Biden’s fractured fairy tales, Rapunzel and the Little Mermaid didn’t come with trillion-dollar price tags attached.
Joe Biden is a strategy for the Democratic Party at this point, not a
hindrance or frustration. As the rag known as the Washington Post
declares, “Democracy dies in darkness.” We are living in darkness. I
regret to say that we would be better off with Kamala Harris. At least if
she was president, there would be no unspoken excuse either understood
or accepted for this un-American and totalitarian regime. But if the
Democrats are smart, they’ll keep Joe around as long as they can.
Victor Davis Hanson: Biden is the most dangerously radical President in US history
The question is who should get to decide? On the heels of the Warren exchange, Senator Josh Hawley released damning evidence demonstrating that Biden’s “Disinformation Governance Board” had been interfacing with leftist eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s network.
Warren objects to one billionaire member of the PayPal mafia, but not another making those decisions because they share a common set of political views that include censorship. While Musk put billions on the line to buy Twitter to protect free speech, Omidyar committed $100 million to fight “disinformation”, “fake news” and “hate speech”. That includes funding for leftist “fact checkers” who have been used by Big Tech monopolies to censor opposing views.
Twittergate and the Plot Against Free Speech
What happens when Twitter stops suppressing speech for the government.
“Don’t you think that users have a right to freedom of speech even if what they’re saying is wrong or offensive?” Fox Business correspondent Hillary Vaughn asked.
“I think that one human being should not be able to go into a dark room by himself and decide ‘Oh, that person gets heard from, that person doesn’t.’ That’s not how it should work,” Senator Elizabeth Warren retorted, referring to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
The question is who should get to decide? On the heels of the Warren exchange, Senator Josh Hawley released damning evidence demonstrating that Biden’s “Disinformation Governance Board” had been interfacing with leftist eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s network.
Warren objects to one billionaire member of the PayPal mafia, but not another making those decisions because they share a common set of political views that include censorship. While Musk put billions on the line to buy Twitter to protect free speech, Omidyar committed $100 million to fight “disinformation”, “fake news” and “hate speech”. That includes funding for leftist “fact checkers” who have been used by Big Tech monopolies to censor opposing views.
Warren, despite her rhetoric, is quite happy to have one human being go into a dark room and decide who gets heard from and who doesn’t, as long as he’s running the censorship machine to suit her. The leftist politician and her political allies in the Senate and House repeatedly pressured tech companies, especially Facebook, to censor their political opponents.
And she’s not alone.
The release of the Twittergate files at Elon Musk’s behest revealed the process by which the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was censored.
The general counsel for Netchoice, a Big Tech coalition that
included Facebook, Google, Amazon, PayPal and Communist
China’s TikTok and Alibaba, claimed to have polled
congressional staffers about how tech companies were handling
the Hunter Biden story.
“The Democrats were in agreement: social media needs to moderate more because they’re corrupting democracy.” And when “asked how the government might insist on that, consistent with the First Amendment, they demurred: “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”
The First Amendment is constitutionally absolute. But the Democrats are moving to undo the Constitution and its protections of freedom of expression to protect “democracy.” Twittergate had revealed the long game behind Russiagate which was about manufacturing a crisis, in this case Trump, as a pretext for treating free speech as a national disinformation crisis requiring the suspension of civil rights and liberties in order to save democracy. That’s still the plan.
It’s why Warren wouldn’t answer the simple question, once considered the cornerstone of our freedoms, whether those she disagrees with still have the right to freedom of speech. She’s not complaining that Musk is deciding who can’t be heard from, but who can be heard from. Her issue, to paraphrase the old glib libertarian line, is that he took over and is leaving people alone.
Big Tech’s complicity made the culture of censorship revealed by Twittergate possible.
Unable to immediately impose direct government censorship, the Biden administration and figures loyal to the Obama and Clinton administrations in the Justice Department, worked with Big Tech, the media and fact checking nonprofits fighting “disinformation” to create a speech cartel to maintain a leftist monopoly on speech. The existence of the cartel depended on political cohesion and covert censorship among the corporate leadership in the tech industry.
That’s what Musk’s stewardship of Twitter and the release of the Twittergate files has exposed.
In the Obama era, the formerly libertarian tech industry morphed from renegade hackers into pathologically woke campuses. Renegade college kids turned billionaires followed the Bill Gates ethos of finding a life outside work through social justice. BLM logos, pride flags and assorted causes joined the litter of nerdy paraphernalia of Warhammer figurines and Star Wars X-wings along with inspirational “Move Fast and Break Things” mottos in Big Tech workspaces.
It would have been impossible to imagine Big Tech bosses holding workplace meetings and crying when Kerry lost to Bush, but by the time Hillary lost to Trump, that was the new normal. Google had fought Obama’s censorship push over ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ in court before becoming one of the most strident tech monopolies suppressing a wide variety of views.
The compliance of the tech industry made a speech cartel possible. Until Musk broke it.
The government side of the speech monopoly needed Big Tech to do its dirty work for it by coordinating with leftist nonprofits, like Facebook’s fact checkers, to do the censoring.
But what’s the government to do when a tech company stops suppressing dissent on its behalf?
Warren’s plaint is revealing. How dare one man take on the function that had been allotted to the government. Someone, she insists, has to decide what speech to suppress. It never occurs to her that maybe people should be deciding what they read, watch and think for themselves.
But socialists just don’t think that way.
The exposure of the Disinformation Governance Board documents shows that the government side of the arrangement was more developed and further along than the Biden administration had been willing to admit when it tried to dismiss its existence as a random stray thought.
“Sec Mayorkas told me under oath that the Disinfo Board hadn’t met yet back in May. But DHS emails reveal their Disinfo ‘Steering Group’ held weekly meetings starting as early as February. The Board was up and running,” Hawley tweeted.
Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas had claimed that the board would focus on foreign propaganda and would not monitor Americans. That also proved to be untrue.
Say what you will about Elon Musk, but his decision making remains quite transparent.
Asked about restoring the Twitter account of Alex Jones, Musk tweeted, “My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.” Compare that clear and concise response to secret meetings by a government board, private decisions by fact checkers who are funded by dark money machines tied to billionaires who issue press releases, but don’t discuss individual decisions.
Given a choice between Musk’s transparent plutocracy and a complex oligarchy, one man in a room whose preferences are clear, or a secretive network of political and economic interests invisibly manipulating online narratives to maintain a monopoly on speech, the choice is simple.
The underlying challenges of the internet have not gone away with Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Even assuming he hangs on to it and maintains liberal policies, that’s not any kind of solution. Musk created an alternative to a speech cartel, but the cartel is far more powerful than any one man, one company or one platform. And as the internet has come to be concentrated in fewer hands, a bottleneck dominated by one search engine, one social media giant, one retail channel, and two mobile operating systems, a monopoly on speech is inevitable.
The old decentralized internet was inherently free, web 2.0 is inherently unfree. The fact that it took $44 billion just to create a temporary space of free speech shows the scale of the problem. With someone in a room somewhere always deciding who should be heard, the marketplace of ideas ls constantly in someone’s hands. And that’s the opposite of the promise of the internet.
Change in the form of web 3.0 might be coming. Some believe that the tech monopolies are the final stage of an ossifying dead internet whose giant companies will collapse to make way for new things. But for now there’s little sign of this optimistic ‘internet spring’ in the real world where companies that spent endless billions to fund data centers, hardware and free services, and the investment giants behind them, still control our internet as thoroughly as China’s Xi.
When the Constitution first protected freedom of speech, the nation’s cities were filled with printers, most of them crude amateurs by European standards, who published a welter of contradictory leaflets, pamphlets and papers. A century later, newspapers were becoming concentrated in a small number of chains, and with the addition of radio and television, later created the media that conservatives spent generations fighting until the internet liberated them.
Once the greatest blow to speech monopolies, the internet has become a stifling speech monopoly operated with greater control and precision than CBS or Hearst could have imagined. The complexity and centralization of the internet has made it possible to disguise how it is censored to a previously inconceivable degree. But Musk’s breach in the speech monopoly has also revealed how comprehensive the censorship was the breath of its sudden omission.
“That’s not how it should work,” Senator Elizabeth Warren insists. But information, as hackers used to say, wants to be free. It takes a lot of work and a lot of money to keep it penned up.
Warren and her leftist allies are worried about free speech. They should be.
Booker: Worried GOP Focus Will Be ‘Crazy Hearings’ Attacking Biden, His Son
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) said Tuesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room” that he is worried the Republican controlled House will hold “crazy hearings” attacking President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Anchor Wolf Blitzer said, “You said in the past, senator, you would support a 2024 run for President Biden. Given where things stand now, do you still feel that way?”
Booker said, “Oh, very strongly if the president makes the decision to run. I don’t think we can point to any president, maybe going back to LBJ that a president has had as much of a successful two years. Even today you look at the jobs report we had another quarter million jobs in the United States, the unemployment rate down another 3.7%.”
Blitzer said, “So what are your biggest concerns right now for Democrats looking forward, senator?”
Booker said, “Well, you know, I think my biggest concern is we’ve had a constructive bipartisan Congress. A lot of the things wave gotten done, we’ve gotten done together. So I’m really worried about the House of Representatives and listening closely to what they say, what they’re talking about is not their idea to deal with inflation or help working families. I’m worried their focus is much more attacking President Biden, going after his son, and doing crazy hearings that are not going to be productive and constructive to what Americans really need right now.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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