What Would It Take to Destroy the United States?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I was looking at the news this week and I thought of an experiment. What if you really wanted to destroy the United States? What if you’d had ill intention for America? What would you do? What agenda would you pursue?

And then I started thinking of civilizations. What was the stuff of civilizations that made them work? And it’s basic: their borders, their finances, their unity, their fuel, their food. So, if you really wanted to, in civilizational terms, destroy the United States, the first thing I would do if I were an enemy of the United States is I would destroy the borders.

In other words, I would just let anybody come across our version of the Rhine or the Danube, as they happened in fifth century. And that’s pretty much what we have done the last 40 years, but particularly, the last four years.

We talked about comprehensive immigration reform as needed to stop the influx, but President Donald Trump, before the Biden administration and after the Biden administration, had no such recourse. He just simply stopped it, temporarily. And he has now.

But what was behind all that? Former President Joe Biden, apparently, thought that if he let in 12 million people, without audits or background checks—would it alter the demography? Would it give him new constituencies for big government? What was the thinking about it?

But it’s caused billions of dollars in increased expenses. It’s really damaged the inner city. It’s damaged the Rio Grande Valley. It’s damaged the San Joaquin Valley. We have all of this crime spike. Was it deliberate?

If you also wanted to hurt the United States, you know what I would do if I had nefarious intent? I would keep printing money. And I would call that, in fact, “Build Back Better.” And the more inflationary it got, I would say it was going to be the “Inflationary Reduction Act.” And in that process, I would borrow maybe $7 trillion within four years, maybe $8 trillion, and add to an existing $38 trillion in national debt, $37 trillion, so that the interest per day would be $3 billion. That would really hurt the United States.

You know what I’d also do? If I looked at the United States and I said, “Oh my gosh, they’ve got almost limitless supplies of natural gas, they’ve got almost more coal than any European country, they’ve got all of this oil. They once had a vibrant—they were the nuclear energy, they were the founders of nuclear power. They have all these dams of hydroelectric,” I know what I’ll do. I will castigate all of that and say it makes either the environment too hot, global warming, or it ruins the natural landscape with dams. Or it will kill us all through radiation.

Whatever particular complaint I’d have, I would stop it as much as I could. Dismantle nuclear power plants. Cut back on natural gas. Stop full drilling, fracking. Blow up dams rather than build them. And I’m talking about California, for example, where the result would be 40 cents a kilowatt. Would make it unaffordable. That way, if you did all of that, a quarter of all the people who paid their power bills would default. And that model would sweep across the United States.

The third thing that I would do—and I think it’s besides debt and borders and fuel—I would sow disunity. And I would say that the content of our character is not as important as the color of our skin. And I would go back and reinterpret all of the hard-won progress of the civil rights movement and sort of get rid of it.

I would just say the color of our skin matters more than anything and so we’re going to hire on the basis of superficial appearance. We’re gonna have reparations to go back eight generations and adjudicate who might have had an ancestor that owned a slave and who didn’t. And then I would say I’m gonna predicate graduations, dorms—who gets to go into a dorm, who gets to go into a library, a safe space—oh, on the basis of race. But I’m not gonna call it racism or segregation. I’m gonna call it diversity, equity, and inclusion and mainstream it.

If I also wanted to create disunity, I would just say, from now on, after 7,000 years of civilization, there are three sexes, not two. And women’s sports must include biological males. Not that it was an important topic, but it would create enormous tension and disunity.

What am I getting at? It seems to me that in the last four years, if you had an agenda that was designed to hurt the United States, in terms of an influx of 12 million foreigners that were unaudited, an unprotected border, a repression on energy, a desire to print money rather than to cut expenses and save money and go toward a balanced budget, and a way to divide the people—if you wanted to do all that, you couldn’t have done a better job than what we have seen from 2021 to 2025.

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