by Patrick Lawrence, The Unz Review:

Not in my lifetime,” I used to think when contemplating America’s decline and fall—a decline and fall I eagerly anticipate as a prelude to remaking our crumbly republic such that it stands for the ideals it professes to uphold but unreservedly ignores. Blind justice, disinterested leaders and institutions, tolerance of others, freedom of thought and speech, a Jeffersonian respect for reason and knowledge: Those who come after me will see the imperium’s collapse and will begin the work of restoration, but not I.

So I long assumed. And so does the pace of events suggest I may well be wrong. Things I used to think would take, maybe, 20 years now occur in five or six or seven. If I reckoned some turn of history’s wheel was a decade out, what do you know but that it now seems hard upon us.

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Decline and fall. It is not pleasant to live in such a time as ours, but it is, as the Chinese are credited with saying (or was it the Arabs?) interesting. Let us not, as we accept our fate, lose sight of the optimism within the apparent pessimism.

On May 2 the House passed a bill that, broadly speaking, defines as “antisemitic” any criticism of Israel, or—heaven forbid!—disapproval of Israel as a “Jewish state.” The kookier House members have been trying to get this rationally disconnected piece of legislation to the floor for eight years. The House now sends the Antisemitism Awareness Act to the Senate on a 320–to–19 vote.

As if to second the House’s intent, President Biden announced, a May 7 event marking the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual remembrance day, a series of new legal and administrative measures to counter the nonexistent crisis of antisemitism that now overtakes the U.S. the way a Communist takeover did in the 1950s. Will someone explain why we hear daily about all this antisemitism but cannot see anything of it more than the odd, unalarming case—the everyday here-and-there variety? Someone, anyone?

This is an assault on reason, language, law—and even that highest of American “values”—common sense. It is a sign of American weakness and further advances this weakness. I would ask what the people pushing this bill are thinking, but the question implies an assumption one ought not make.

On Monday an interesting new website called Zeteo published a letter 12 Republican senators signed and sent to the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, in response to the ICC’s reported-but-unconfirmed plans to serve various Israeli officials, among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with arrest warrants charging them with war crimes in Gaza. You have to read this to believe it, and you can do so here. “Target Israel and we will target you,” the letter reads. “If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.”

And then the much-remarked punchline: “You have been warned.”

Think about this. This missive is an outright rejection of international law. At the same time, we see in it an imperium that broods in a defensive crouch, waging rearguard actions as 21^st century realities arrive. There are only 12 signatories, and they include such Ciceros as Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. But do not kid yourself: Their letter reflects a strong and prevalent current of opinion in Washington—even, I would say, among Democrats such as Chris Van Hollen, who thought the letter, if not its sentiments, “thuggery befitting the Mafia.”

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