by Victor Davis Hanson
At the end of the year, we are on the razor’s edge of many things that soon may blow up.
Americans are far beyond President Joe Biden’s serial untruths of some eight years that he never discussed Hunter Biden’s various get-rich-quick schemes.
All were predicated on the perception of foreign interests purchasing from the Biden family the influence of then-senator, vice president, and possibly soon-to-be President Joe Biden.
The Bidens now risk exposure to criminal charges of multimillion-dollar tax fraud, perjury, influence selling, and bribery as congressional committees and a special prosecutor unravel years of tangled-up quid pro quos.
A newly indicted Hunter remains reckless and unpredictable. He continues to publicly blame his mounting legal problems on everyone and everything other than his own selfish excesses.
Hunter deliberately involves his family and may even bring down his own father. His tax lawyers have previously threatened to call President Joe Biden to testify on his behalf under oath.
He continues to court public scandal by hawking amateurish “representational” paintings to the quid-pro-quo wealthy and wannabes wishing clout with the White House.
His laptop messages reveal a prodigal son angry that his bagman services were never fully appreciated by his familial beneficiaries.
Hunter’s wayward laptop is a felonious trove of drug-addled, illicit Petronian excess and sex, interspliced with his self-incriminating family communications on the distributions of pay-for-play payoffs.
Hunter’s business aides will be called back to elaborate on their already incriminating testimonies.
The contents of Joe Biden’s various alias emails will soon see new scrutiny.
Given Biden’s physical and ethical frailties, age, and bad polling, the left-wing media and Democratic hierarchy may cease circling the wagons around him. Instead, some may fuel the effort to sandbag a 2024 Biden candidacy by releasing or even leaking incriminating evidence.
Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tenure is even more tenuous than Biden’s. Harvard can either claim to be the nation’s preeminent academic institution or continue to protect a plagiarist as president — not both.
It can profess to be at the center of academia’s moral and intellectual universe, but not if its president cannot punish those on campus who daily call for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jewish people. Gay cannot lie to Congress that Harvard in the past has also allowed “hate speech” against entire groups the way it now allows against Jews.
Nor is it sustainable for Gay to fob off calls for her resignation as “racist.” In fact, the more the public learns about her academic career, the more she seems to be a lifetime beneficiary, not a victim of racially-weighted policies.
Since the October 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Jews, anti-Israeli/pro-Hamas protests, often violent, have swept the Western world, particularly in the big cities and on campuses of America.
Protestors no longer distinguish being anti-Israeli from being anti-Jewish. Now they just openly mouth anti-Semitic chants and harass individual Jews.
Almost every hallowed monument — from the Lincoln Memorial to the White House gates, nearly every cherished national icon from the famed Christmas tree in New York’s Rockefeller Center to New York’s Naivety scene, and our most famous infrastructure from the Manhattan Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge — has either been swarmed, defaced, or disrupted by pro-Hamas demonstrators.
Americans are growing weary of these escalating protests for a variety of reasons. Most remember that the October 7 war started not with Israeli preemptive attacks on an independent Gaza, but only after Hamas killers launched a sneak attack to commit atrocities against Jews residing in Israel.
The current war is waged between a constitutional state of free elections and a cruel, autocratic terrorist clique.
Indeed, Hamas has refused negotiations over a ceasefire that would have led to internationally conducted free elections for the people of Gaza — something forbidden by enriched Hamas kingpins ensconced in luxury abroad.
Many of the loudest and most violent anti-Jewish protestors in the U.S. are immigrants, green card holders, or on student visas. That fact is confusing to Americans.
Why would those who have fled despotic regimes in the Middle East to study, work, or reside in a free America, once safely here, rally for the very dictatorships they left behind and apparently do not wish to return to?
Why trash the very foundation and values of their American hosts that ensure their newfound freedoms?
For weeks, the American people have been relatively silent as they digested these ongoing catastrophes. But at some point, their patience will run out.
Americans will then collectively conclude that Joe Biden has never been truthful about vast ill-gotten funds that have enriched his family; that Harvard is no longer preeminent or even prestigious; and that people who do not like us, our laws, and our values should try cheering on the work of Hamas from their own homes.
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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.
