Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Americans are being saturated by a whirlwind of events never quite seen in recent memory. When a person with a gun or car now kills someone, the media—in anti-humanistic fashion, and quite callously— massages the story to fit deductive narratives. And they are based solely on the race of the victim and victimizer.
So a crazed, white-male sex deviant killer of six Asian and two white women in the Atlanta area is machined into proof of an epidemic of anti-Asian “hate crimes” committed by whites.
Who cares that all the data show African-Americans committing attacks on Asians at numbers far greater than their population percentages, while whites perpetrators are vastly “underrepresented”? (When Asian-Americans, now bombarded with such media certitude, walk out in the evening in big cities, do they feel terrified when a white male approaches and yet relieved when an African-American youth nears?
If the Colorado shooter kills 10, he is useful proof of “white supremacy” and “white terrorism”—until in a nano-second he is revealed as an Arab-American, Syrian-born immigrant with delusions of Islamic victimhood. When did a sick country so racialize death and destruction? In the Jim Crow days, whose values the Left are straining to return to?
If a car rams into a Capitol barrier, the crasher becomes representative of the January 6 “white armed insurrection”—until a media moment later when he is not really, but rather a wannabe Black Muslim unhinged follower of racist Louis Farrakhan?
When two teen African-Americans girls carjack a Pakistani immigrant’s Uber car, crash his vehicle and de facto kill him, and then worry only about retrieving an incriminating cell phone, we are told this is a “joy ride,” or we are advised by officials about securing our own cars so as not to “invite” crimes.
When an-ex NFL player shoots a doctor and his family of four, we sense the media is hoping at last they can run with “white nationalist murderer uses AR-15 to kill five people of color.” And then, the story suddenly mutes. And it is assumed but never spoken that the sick murderer is black, his victims all white.
Can a society long last when the population assumes that official reality is a lie, and the truth is thus opposite from what they are told by the state and its media?
The economist Herbert Stein observed “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Stein’s Law was initially coined to predict budget deficits, and he hasn’t been right yet (but soon may be). But if his prediction is applied to the American republic, I think he may already have been proven right. This can’t go on. Either the press reins in its reckless behavior, or the country dies. It’s like Oscar Wilde on his deathbed and the wallpaper: one of them has to go.
Try getting someone to describe a problem for which they are seeking a remedy without referring to race.
Mr Hanson, our country has been or is being turned upside down. When, or will it ever be, rightsided again?
This started with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; an act that was supposed to stop discrimination against Blacks, but simply inverted said discrimination; now Blacks are encouraged to discriminate against Whites. The circumstances of Blacks in the 40s and 50s was not good but not bad either. Then in 1964 that all began to change. Now, with reverse discrimination, the plight of Blacks is worse than ever; their crime rate for a 13%-of-the-population demographic sky-rocketed, as did their illegitimate birth rate. They lag in education worse than they did in the 40s and 50s. I usually blame Blacks for their plight, but today, I blame the no-good-Democrats.
Nice to see in your longer essay published on AG that you’ve finally said what all those farther to your right have long maintained, which is what the true meaning of “diversity” in the West really is:
“There’s too many white people here.”
But only in the West.
“Can a society long last when the population assumes that official reality is a lie, and the truth is thus opposite from what they are told by the state and its media?”
A great rhetorical question Dr. Hanson. We are I fear, on the precipice of a downward slide that will soon be, if not already, irreversible. This will be a society that has self-immolated to a degree that makes post imperial Britain look like a power to be reckoned with.
A always sir, thank you for your insights……
The narrative is more important than the truth. Or as Sophocles said and what Leftist know instinctively, “what people believe prevails over the truth.”
Has anyone seen the movie “Mr. Jones,” about a journalist discovering a divergence between the Stalinist party line and the reality of starvation? Nothing is new here, it’s propaganda that is repeated often enough that at least half the country is deceived that America is racist and requires total transformation of our system of government including a newly reconstituted Supreme Court.