Good evening and welcome to Fox News Primetime.

Thank you for joining me on this blessed

Memorial Day, when we remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in defense of this
country. We all should honor those men and women who gave all in her defense. As Ronald
Reagan said:

"It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who died in defense of our country, in defense of us,
in wars far away. The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and
wise. We see them as something like the Founding Fathers, grave and gray haired. But most of
them were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives -- the one they were living and the
one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers
and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for
our country, for us."

But what does the country they shed blood for look like today? Is it a country that looks like it is
worthy of their sacrifice?

Imagine a country in dire straits. 

    • It’s a country convulsed by riots, pitting police against protestors, and ordinary citizens
against activists.
    • It’s a country gripped, nearly obsessed, with issues of race and ethnicity.
    • It’s a country that just exited a long and grinding foreign war — as the loser.
    • It’s a country where a divisive Republican president is succeeded by a genial Democrat who
promised healing — but proves too inept to lead.  
    • It’s a country whose campuses are in the grips of fanatical ideologues: men and women who
don’t hesitate to stoop to terror and force. 
    • It’s a country where young people hesitate to marry, hesitate to form families, and hesitate to
put down the roots that are the stuff and sustenance of society. 
    • It’s a country afflicted with political violence. 
    • It’s a country whose great cities are rapidly becoming unlivable thanks to crime overtaking
neighborhoods where families used to flourish. 
    • It’s a country stripped of all trust in her political leadership, her people stricken with a deep
cynicism earned by the failure of elites.

What country am I talking about? You might say I’m talking about the United States of America
in 2021 — but this is the United States of the mid-1970s. 

We don’t like to think about that yesteryear America — or if we do, we think of it as an

unpleasant interlude between the aspiration of the 1960s and the revival of the 1980s. But that’s
the exception. 

Mostly, we don’t think deeply about the 1970s at all. Why would we? There aren’t a lot of happy
memories there: Watergate, the Fall of Saigon, home décor with a lot of muddy browns and
sickly avocado greens. 

But we should. We should think of the 1970s quite a lot, because we need its lessons now. As
America of today descends into violence — criminal and political alike — it’s worth looking
back to the last time that happened, to understand how we got ourselves out of it. 

The ‘70s were violent indeed. It was the first decade of the modern era in which major American
cities, once the gleaming envy of the world, became bywords for crime. Watch a movie of the
era — 1973’s Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” starring Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro will
do, and there are plenty others — and you’ll see the rundown, corrupt, trash-strewn, menacing
New York City it showcases. It wasn’t just Gotham going under, of course, but the greatest
American city was the template for the rest. 

The 1970s were also the decade in which terrorism became an endemic and near-constant feature
of American life. Americans today worry about terrorism from the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda,
mostly foreign actors with mostly foreign causes. Back then, the terroristic bombers and killers
were largely our own people: The Weather Underground … The Symbionese Liberation Army
… The Armed Forces of National Liberation … and a dizzying array of individual actors, with
motives known and unknown. 

The 1970s in the United States saw far more terrorist attacks than the next three decades
combined. As the author Bryan Burrough wrote, "In a single eighteen-month period during 1971
and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil — almost five a day."

Look back on all that, and what you see isn’t a mere unpleasant interlude between the ‘60s and
the ‘80s. What you see is an America in profound civic crisis, defeated abroad and at home,
coming apart at the seams and without much reason for optimism. It’s a country that shouldn’t
survive.

But she did. She survived — and she thrived. Why?

The conservative-movement answer is simple enough: a California cowboy by the name of

Ronald Reagan rode into town and cleaned it up. That’s certainly what the Reagan ’84 reelect
wanted voters to believe. But it’s too simple, and Reagan himself wouldn’t have agreed with it.

The truth is that, battered and tottering as 1970s America was, the foundations remained strong.
The United States in the ‘70s was a country sunken in a historic crime wave, yes — but it was
also a country where a high-school graduate could get a good union job and live in middle-class
dignity, supporting a family of four even while mom focused on raising the kids.

The United States in the ‘70s was a country rife with political violence, yes — but it was also a
country where a majority of Americans still had, according to Gallup, a “great deal” or “quite a
lot” of confidence in organized religion, public schools, health care, the Presidency, and the
banks. The United States in the 1970s was a country defeated in a foreign war, yes — but it also
still possessed the most advanced military in the world. 

America’s foundations in the ‘70s, half a century ago, were strong. That was then. 

I said earlier that all the woes of America in the 1970s could be those of America in the 2020s —
and that’s true. They could — and they are. Fifty years after the dark passage of the ‘70s, we are
repeating the errors and descent of that sad decade, in a more grand and emphatic fashion. But
though the critique is the same, this time it’s different, because the country is different.

That good job and life of dignity for a high school graduate? Today, count yourself fortunate if
you can understand what you read. Trust in organized religion, public schools, the Presidency,
and the rest? We can’t even trust our health officials to be honest to us. And about that most
advanced military in the world? It’s currently busy tearing itself apart at the seams with Critical
Race Theory while China is egging its nationally destructive racial animosity on.

When we look to the 2020s, we see the foundation is rotted — and the seeds are dead. And the
future, always unwritten, assumes a darker cast … unless Americans wake up.

What does it take for Americans to wake up? You see it in a hundred Rockwellian moments at
school board meetings across the country where parents are standing up to the racist mob. You
see it in the faces of the schoolgirl athletes who will not submit to the fiction that men can race
against women just because they feel like it. You see it in the quiet determination of black and
Hispanic cops, screamed at by woke white ladies, called out as race traitors, who still get up
every morning, put on the blue, and protect and serve.

At the beginning of the pandemic, my wife found out she was pregnant. We’d been through a
terrible miscarriage before, and so my job became protecting her. I pulled her out of New York
City before the rioting started. Returning to it now is haunting. 

I stepped out of Penn Station yesterday and my foot crunched on a needle. I want New York to
be the greatest American city again, but under the leadership of the left, there’s no way it will.
And I’ll be damned if I’ll pay a failed pothead like Bill De Blasio for the privilege of raising my
baby girl surrounded by homeless encampments.

This time around the ruling class is not on our side. You can’t count on Democratic mayors to
stand up to murderous race mobs in their cities, as they once did. You can’t count on a lot of
Republicans to stand up to Silicon Valley or Anthony Fauci or even Black Lives Matter. 

Don’t fool yourself: The Pentagon isn’t secretly on your side, and while some men and women
trading down on the stock market floor might be, the titans at the top certainly aren’t. They’d
rather sell this country out than try to save it. If you want to fly the flag, don’t even count on
American baseball to stand with you. This is up to us. But it’s always come down to us -- the
people. And we have the power to answer the call.

That’s the twist in this ending. Every omen is real, and every signal is grim — but Americans are
waking up. 

Thirty-five years ago, in the reverberating aftermath of the 1970s, as a great nation ascended
from the edge of its own abyss, the father of America’s worst governor — Mario Cuomo, after
all, used to be a bigger deal than Andrew — exhorted his fellow citizens to see all that was awful
about America: 
“[T]here are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help
but can't find it …” — he said —  “[T]here are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter,
where the glitter doesn't show … There is despair … in the faces that you don't see, in the places
that you don't visit in your shining city.”

The left loved it: this was the America they believed in. The America of despair. The America of
decline. Three decades later, the New York Times was still running articles reminding its
readership just how great it was. In fairness, by then they’d come a long way toward making it
true. 

But I’m here to tell you that it isn’t true yet. Because Americans are waking up. Because in the
city streets, where the glitter doesn't show … in the faces that they don't see … in the places they
don't visit … there is something else:

Determination. 
Fortitude. 
Grit.

It’s time to wake up. It’s time to get off the mat. It’s time to be the Americans you are called to
be and take back the country you love.

I’m Ben Domenech. This is the American Crisis.