Victor Davis Hanson Warns America: ‘Brace Yourself for What’s Coming in 2024’. This is worth 10 minutes.

Victor Davis Hanson Warns America: ‘Brace Yourself for What’s Coming in 2024’. This is worth 10 minutes. 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/KSgemJ6fL6

— Freyja™ (@FreyjaTarte) February 14, 2024

It Was Always Only About Power With the Left

 Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions? 

The answer is that calls for radical equity, “power for the people,” and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the issue du jour of mandated equality often becomes secondary if not irrelevant. There is neither fear of inconstancy nor hypocrisy, given the central theme that governs a leftist party line is political utility—or the ends of power always more than justify the hypocritical means used to obtain it. 

Read the whole thing. 

Weaponizing Death

 Recently, there has been a spate of horrific murders.

The killers, whether committing mass shootings or single homicides, are hard to stereotype.

They can be clearly either mentally ill or simply innately evil. They can kill for revenge, for ideological purposes, out of hatred, for notoriety -- or for no known reason at all.

They are probably left-wing and right-wing, white, Black, and brown, young, and old. While their weapons of choice are semi-automatic rifles, there are plenty of killers who favor handguns and even knives.

Unfortunately, these tragedies have increasingly become politicized.

Yet our media and politicians do not apply a common standard of reporting about either the victims, the killers, or the apparent motives and circumstances of the violence.

Instead, each horror is quickly analyzed for its political usefulness. Then its details are selectively downplayed or emphasized, depending upon the political agenda at work.

A sad example was the terrible murder spree at the private Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. A transgender male shot and killed six people, including three 9-year-old children.

Almost immediately, three media narratives emerged.

One, semi-automatic weapons, not the killer Audrey Hale, were mostly responsible for the massacre.

Two, the shooter's transgender identity profile played no role in the killing whatsoever.

Three, the public had no need to know of the contents of the shooter's "manifesto."

Why?

The media and authorities apparently assumed Hale's written rantings tried to justify the murders because of Christianity's supposed disapproval of transgenderism.

Our French Revolution

 We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.

The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.

...

Elites run this revolution, and is a top-down operation.

University deans all but prompt students to disrupt invited campus speakers. District attorneys release violent arrested criminals without bail. Woke generals call their Chinese counterparts to warn them against their own commander-in-chief.

The Pentagon lectures the country on its supposed innate racism - even as the United States continues to lose wars abroad, abandons billions of dollars of equipment to terrorists, and allows communist China to surveil domestic American military bases with impunity.

Words change their meanings. "Racist" now means "don't dare object." "White" became the pejorative stereotype used by racists. "Diversity" means tired orthodoxy. "Equity" is a synonym for bias. "Inclusion" ensures exclusion.

Institutions are no longer recognizable. The FBI as we knew it no longer exists. Three former FBI directors either lied under oath to federal investigators or pleaded amnesia in congressional testimonies.

Our highest former national intelligence officers lied under oath to the Senate. The IRS is weaponized against political opponents of the Democrats. The Department of Justice is more likely to send the FBI after grammar school parents than mobs threatening the homes of Supreme Court justices.

Still, to thoroughly erase America, our Jacobins must radically alter our customs and traditions.

So under the cover of the COVID-19 quarantines, Election Day was made irrelevant. In the new America, 70 percent did not vote on the designated day but, fueled by third-party vote harvesting and relaxation of audits of non-Election-Day ballots, extended the vote over a period of several weeks.

Like the Jacobins, names, and dates had to be radically transformed. 1619, not 1776, is now America's birthdate, and, we are told, it was an ignominious one.

Statues are toppled, and careers Trotskyized.

Biological males suddenly have hijacked women's sports - destroying five decades of women's hard-won efforts to achieve equal treatment and respect in athletics.

The Left Were the Mad Scientists, We Were Their Lab Rats

 Once the Left took the presidency, the House, and Senate, they tried a deadly experiment on the American people.

As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us. 

The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse. 

As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget. 

Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher than at any time in 40 years. Yet the prices of the stuff of life—food, fuel, shelter, energy—are far steeper still than the official rate. 

No one is safe from thugs anymore—whether a commuter on a New York subway or the Pelosis in Pacific Heights.

The country reportedly has a 25-day supply of diesel fuel—the energy source that runs the nation. Meanwhile, we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil—a commodity we have in abundance but refuse to produce fully.

We never fixed the supply-chain crisis of last year, and so still face shortages of key consumer goods. 

The labor participation rate is at an all-time low—given fat government COVID subsidies, the Siren-song appeal of staying home after the lockdowns, fear of COVID, and millions of workers with long COVID.

The post-Kabul Pentagon is quiet about the depletion of its critical stocks of weaponry. We have sent billions of dollars’ worth in howitzer shells, javelin missiles, and Hilmar rocket launchers to Ukraine without replenishing our own arsenals. The Army’s recruitment rate is off 50 percent this year....

Read the whole thing.

Believing the impossible - Jussie Smollett

Amazing https://t.co/NACuO4xm0K

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 1, 2022

Victor Davis Hansen: Disband the FBI

#FBI: "They tried to spread a dossier. They ruined the life of Carter Page…Andrew McCabe lied to federal investigators. James Comey pled amnesia…You have an agency that has gone rogue."

"Why not break it up?"—@VDHanson

🔴PREMIERE 8/16 @ 7:30pm ET: https://t.co/DYFTutpde4 pic.twitter.com/qvbM2LU5GW

— Jan Jekielek (@JanJekielek) August 16, 2022

Trickle-Down Racist Antiracism

 This reactionary and neo-Confederate return to racial stigmatization and hatred is not going to end well. 

 Regressing to the Color of Our Skin

Until about 2008, it was generally believed America had made great strides in rendering race incidental rather than essential to our characters. We were moving away from the racial collective of our past to the individual. That was the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., who emphasized content of character over color of skin.

Barack Obama’s presidency, however, resurrected tribal identity politics. He rebooted the banal word “diversity” and made it synonymous with anyone and anything “nonwhite.” ...

As a result, rich Punjabi immigrants, Korean-American orthodontists, Obama himself, or Oprah Winfrey (the victim, supposedly, of being denied a look at a $38,000 crocodile skin bag) all supposedly shared some sort of oppressed solidarity by virtue of not being completely white. 

But if the well-off mysteriously could become victims, stranger still, millions of the poor could be reinvented as white victimizers.

In this new fixation on “white rage,” “white supremacy,” and “white privilege,” a white Mark Zuckerberg, Jane Fonda, a long-haul truck-driver, or an Alabama janitor all can be jumbled together as the oppressors of the likes of Jussie Smollett, LeBron James, Sonya Sotomayor, or Elizabeth Warren—whose power, money, or influence did not negate their claims of being not fully white.

And:

So why wouldn’t a known racist firebrand like Brooks or Frank James, the racist subway shooter, believe that he was only acting out the thoughts of elites who were bragging about either shunning non-improved whites or playing at beheading them?

Read the whole thing.

What Makes Riots, Conspiracies, Cabals, and Insurrections ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’?

 Victor Davis Hanson explains.

If the Republicans take the House or perhaps even the Senate, what new norms will they inherit from the Democratic majority of 2019-2021? 

Will Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on national television ritually tear up the text of Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address and grimace while he speaks? Was that Speaker Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) intended vision of her new “narrative” for the 21st-century Congress?

Will the new majority, calling back to 2018, almost immediately begin impeaching an unpopular Biden? And will Republicans likewise dispense with a special counsel’s report, or with formal hearings with an array of witnesses with spirited cross-examinations? 

Will they establish a special committee to investigate the rioting of summer 2020? Perhaps, in the new cannibalistic spirit of the age, will they dig into which national political figures—or colleagues—communicated with the Antifa or Black Lives Matter riot leaders, or offered them bail?...

Will Republicans claim as reason to impeach Joe Biden that he failed to execute the laws as he swore to, by nullifying U.S immigration law? Was he not also guilty of an “abuse of power” and “obstructing Congress,” as he allowed 2 million aliens unlawfully to cross the southern border, during a pandemic without either testing or vaccinations, helping to spread the disease with reckless disregard? Will the new Congress subpoena generals to investigate the surrender and flight from Afghanistan, and especially who ordered it and why?

Would the Republicans follow the new norms and thus impeach a once-impeached and acquitted Biden a second time as he leaves office, and have the Senate try Biden in 2025 as a private citizen—again with neither a special counsel nor formal report—nor with the chief justice presiding over the trial, as the Constitution demands?

Will they appoint a special counsel to appoint a dream team of conservative lawyers? And would they allot a budget of $40 million and a lifespan of 22 months to get to the bottom of the Biden family pay-for-play syndicate, as federal investigators try to square Biden family expenditures and lifestyles with reported incomes? 

Why Is the Left Worried Suddenly About the End of Democracy?

 

What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy’s future, from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the Left? Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024. Others predict the democracy downturn as early 2022, with scary scenarios of “autocracy” and Trump “coups.” ... [snip]

They are fearful and angry not because democracy does not work, but because it does despite their own media and political efforts to warp it.  

When a party becomes hijacked by radicals and uses almost any means necessary to gain and use power for agendas that few Americans support, then average voters express their disapproval. 

That reality apparently terrifies an elite—which then claims any system that allows the people to vote against the Left is not people power at all.

A Tale of Two Cities: Kenosha vs. Waukesha

 From Victor Davis Hanson

For some time, media demand has exceeded the available supply of clear-cut cases of white oppressors and black victims, at least if the Jussie Smollett hoax, the “hands up don’t shoot” lie, and the photoshopped pictures and edited tapes of George Zimmerman are any indication.  

Yet the real reason the Left strained to gin up the theme of white-on-white violence as an example of racism was their larger agenda of sending a message to middle America: no American, in times of riot, arson, and looting, should have the right to use firearms to protect property. And under no circumstances could a citizen use a gun to ward off those intending to maim or kill him. Had Rittenhouse been found guilty, there no longer would be recourse for citizens living in cities where criminals were freely given the streets. 

In other words, had such a clear-cut case of self-defense morphed into a successful murder conviction, then the most powerful figure in the nation would become the local district attorney. De facto, a DA could empower a mob to loot, burn, steal, and injure by refusing to indict those arrested—even if an increasingly politicized mayor and police chief chose to allow their officers to keep the public safe. We would then assume that in this state of nature anyone protecting property during a riot would be fair game for the mob, given the target would know he could become a convicted felon by defending himself from attack. 

So, the Left understood well the messaging of attacking the open city and undefended town of Kenosha and the conviction of a “murderer” Rittenhouse: accept our political agendas and premises or otherwise your culpable community will be torn apart with impunity, and any who chose to combat the violence with violence will be charged with capital crimes. 

Not long after one Rittenhouse was acquitted, one Darrell Brooks, Jr., an African-American with a 20-year record of serious felonies, allegedly drove his car deliberately into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, killing 6 innocents and injuring over 60. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Democrats No More

 So what happened to turn the party of Harry Truman, JFK, and even Bill Clinton into a woke neo-Maoist movement? 

Globalization created a new $8 billion consumer market for American media, universities, law firms, insurance groups, investment houses, sports and entertainment, and the Internet, social media, and online gadgetry. 

In contrast, work with arms and hands was passé, the supposed stuff of meth heads, deplorables and clingers—and so better outsourced and offshored. 

Traditional Democrats were seen increasingly as namby-pamby naïfs, who rotated power with establishment Republicans. 

Now with money, institutions in their hip pocket, and cool popular culture, the Left would not just damn American institutions, but infect them: alter their DNA, and reengineer them into revolutionary agencies. 

So here we are with a near one-party system of a weaponized fused media, popular culture, and the administrative state—confident that all Americans will soon agree to love Big Sibling. 

Victor Davis Hanson Discusses Impeachment and Leftist Goals During Biden Administration

“It’s like a public-shaming like the Communist Party used to make people wear dunce caps,” Hanson says.

Trumpism—A Look Backward and Forward to November

 

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Trumpist conservatism is usually defined as not free, but fair trade, strict enforcement of immigration laws, an end to optional interventions that will not likely, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, result in U.S. interests or strategic calm for a purported troubled region, and a belief that industry and manufacturing are not brick-and-mortar anachronisms, but the creators of what we cook on, sit on, live in, drive, and work in; our non-virtual world that everyone relies on and yet takes for granted as so passé. 

The Doctrine of Media Untruth

Victor Davis Hanson ... read the whole thing.

Nowhere has the Doctrine of Media Untruth been more helpful than in following Trump during the coronavirus epidemic. The media fixated on hydroxychloroquine because Trump said it might be a game-changer and he took it himself as a prophylactic. That ensured that the ubiquitous, long-tested, mostly safe, and cheap anti-malarial, anti-lupus household drug would suddenly be declared useless and deadly.

Would the media ever repent and empirically report that in some cases hydroxychloroquine is considered to be efficacious in treating the early symptoms of the disease by front-line doctors, in line with a series of pre-COVID-19 studies that it could be helpful against SARs-like viruses?

If tomorrow Barack Obama gave a press conference, and should confess that when he travels he takes the drug, given its general safety and scattered reports it might have prophylactic value against COVID-19, we would soon read headlines of a “miracle drug”

The Remains of an Administration

Each day that the Obama administration fades into the past, its wrongdoings manage to wander back into the present.

After years of suppression, all sorts of strange events keep popping up to remind us of what little is left of the Obama years — the Susan Rice memo, Christopher Steele deleting his computer records, FBI-doctored and lost 302s, text messages wiped clean, the bizarre Obama January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, the ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the unmasking and leaking of redacted names swept up in reverse-targeting surveillance operations, the administration fraud perpetrated on the FISA courts. The list is so overwhelming and bizarre that it ensures that anything at any time can now appear. And the result keeps reminding Americans of how corrupt were the years between 2009 and 2017 and how untruthful was the coverage of such institutionalized wrongdoing....

Emeritus Barack Obama now and then ventures out to go through the motions of an enfeebled defense for what is becoming an increasingly discredited administration. But his heart is not in it. His mind is elsewhere. His cause is no longer social activism and community organizing, if it ever was, but lucre and the perceived well-earned good life. The arc of his moralizing universe is long, but for the anointed like him, it apparently bends toward the just deserts of riches and material bounty.

The scab & the wound beneath

Victor Davis Hanson on the Wuhan flu epidemic. It's really all about Trump.

Pre-virus, some suspected that the entire agenda and energy of the American Left was focused on destroying the Trump presidency at any cost and by any means necessary. During the epidemic this was confirmed, and this hatred was shown to have national consequences. When evidence prompted Trump to let the public know that old drugs like hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were often efficacious in treating particular patients infected with coronavirus, reporters sought to persuade Americans that such off-label uses had no utility and were dangerous—even if they had to stoop to find someone unhinged who drank fish-tank cleaner, clearly marked unfit for human consumption, to prove that a non-potable chloroquine derivative cleaning agent provided confirmation of “Dr.” Trump’s malpractice.

Remember when the Democrats were all about open borders?

Almost daily, the reactions to the virus revealed how surreal pre-virus America had insidiously become. On March 28, the governor of Rhode Island announced that the state’s law enforcement officers would stop cars, check license plates, and knock on doors to ferret out citizens who had come from New York State—a type of surveillance of U.S. citizens that has rarely been applicable to millions of aliens who have entered and resided illegally in the United States.

Trump the dictator? How quickly local officials became little Nazis.

Because of worry about overcrowded jails and infectious prisons, some criminals throughout the nation were given early parole—even as our elite erupted in a fight over whether to allow gun stores to remain open. Rumors abounded that those without any prior firearm experience were among those inquiring how to buy handguns. Despite claiming to be the watchdog of American civil liberties, it was the Left that hammered Trump to employ the Defense Production Act to nationalize American companies by fiat. Mostly Democratic mayors urged strict surveillance of shelter-in-place compliance and threatened stiff fines for offenders, sometimes to be ratted out by snitches.

Those awful, bad, rotten models ...

So there was also initially not just little data about the infection, but awful data. Modelers worked only from known cases and supposedly known deaths to terrify the world with projections of 3 percent death rates of the infected and predictions of two million Americans and a half-million Britons to die. In truth, those already recovered from the virus, or carrying it without symptoms, were likely much more numerous than those who felt ill or were exposed enough to request testing and had proved positive.

Without Trump as the Left's existential threat things would have been different.

Then there was the elephant in the room of Donald J. Trump and the 2020 election. In America and the world at large, the media has reported on the spread of the virus in terms of Trump’s own reaction to it. Various internet global clocks of infections and deaths by country and state ticked hourly, as if scorecards to assess relative efficacies. For a cynic, the subtext of the entire reportage, here and abroad, was that the more America might become terrified of a Spanish flu–style wipe-out, the longer the shutdown was required, the more the economy sank into recession, and the more it was unlikely to recover its lost robustness before the November election, and thus the more likely the coronavirus would at last appear as the coup de grace where all other blows to Trump had failed. The co-generators of international news, Europe and China, were both invested in seeing Trump discredited and defeated, and the result was the strange collusionary effect of American media progressives quoting chapter and verse both Chinese communist propaganda and European Union pontifications.

Had Trump not been president, had he not just been impeached, had he not previously galvanized resistance to Chinese mercantile piracy, had China not lied about the virus, had it not originated in Wuhan, had it not been a new sort of virus, had we not yet been in a globalized world of instant communications and cheap and easy intercontinental travel, had the media not been 90 percent negative in its prior reporting on Trump, had it not been an election year in 2020, and had Trump’s popularity not spiked but crashed during the epidemic—then the hysteria might have been prevented, and the United States might have reacted with care and concern but without the veritable destruction of its economy and the human damage that it entailed.

But those were too many “had nots.” Epidemics and the reactions to them, ancient and modern, do not allow much margin of error. And so it has been too in our time of plague

Trumped Out?

After nearly four years of ceaseless attacks by Democrats and the press, the strange thing is not that Trump can be occasionally wearisome, but that he is even still breathing.

Clinton Projection Syndrome

The reason that foreign oligarchs are no longer donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and that Bill Clinton is not being offered $500,000 for speaking appearances in Moscow, is simply because Hillary Clinton is not secretary of state. She is no longer in a public position to hector her colleagues into approving pro-Russian commercial deals, such as the one that gave Russian interests access to North American uranium....

For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.

For Clinton now to project that the president should be indicted suggests she is worried about her own potential indictment. And she is rightly concerned that for the first time in 40 years, neither she nor her husband is serving in government or running for some office, and therefore could be held accountable.

Peggy Noonan, apparently like many, believes that Trump’s occasional callousness and crassness are unprecedented.

As Victor Davis Hanson shows, she's dead wrong.

With all due respect, I don’t think we “all” know that this started with Trump, however crass he can be. Rather, we know all too well the political landscape a decade before Trump.

Do we recall the recent deranged talk of 2004-8 from the Democratic Party, the popular culture, and the media—or the relative passivity of the wounded Bush administration in response to such venom?

Why, after all, did Alfred A. Knopf publish the novel Checkpoint, a boring and tired rant about fantasizing the assassination of then-President Bush? Who created the particular landscape that encouraged filmmaker Gabriel Range to offer up “Death of a President”that trafficked in the same fantasies of a Bush assassination?

Why would the Guardian publish an op-ed by “satirist” Charles Brooker’s dreaming of the need for another John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald to repeat their needed work—a theme in part that actor Johnny Depp has recently channeled against Trump.

Were premonitions of Trump in 2004 befouling our political discourse?

What were the “origin and rationale” of the Jonathan Chait’s 2003 New Republic screed, “Why I Hate George W. Bush” in which he began: “I hate President George W. Bush There, I said it . . . I hate the way he walks—shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks—blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him.”

Had Chait become unhinged by reading The Art of the Deal?

Peggy has been coasting for most of her life on her role as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. In her old age, she has become a sad spectacle.