Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
BLM and the Great Awokening will follow the same pattern as the Jacobins and McCarthyites. The Left quickly made its points that occasionally and wrongly police use undue force against black suspects. But it then simply went mute when it was a matter of ascertaining whether unarmed apprehended blacks are systematically dying in greater numbers in police custody than are unarmed whites, or at least disproportionally so given the relative number of blacks and whites respectively arrested each year. They are not.
The greatest killer of unarmed African-American men remains tragically other armed African-American males, often in a gang or during the commission of another crime.
Now Leftists are going after milk-toast Leftwing mayors and governors for even mentioning arrests or use of the National Guard, even those who have previously excused street violence and forbid arrests and indictments of looters and rioters. These appeasers hoped that the BLM/Antifa violence would pass them by, or the evil Trump’s departure would usher in the healing days of “You ain’t black” Joe Biden.
No such luck. Arson, looting, and riots are going on now, even well before the Officer Derek Chauvin’s trial ends.
The leaders of BLM? For avowed Marxists they seem mute when asked where did the tens of millions of dollars of corporate protection money go? Do Marxists really like to own four houses, or to become the elite whom they wanted us to hate?
So, the BLM movement is getting close to peak wokeness … It is too volatile, too spontaneous, too liable to consume those who created it.
Do white liberals really believe that their woke credentials, like a Danton’s, will spare them from the reign-of-terror mob? Will their children really still get into Princeton, when white males were limited to 16 percent of this fall’s entering class? Will the ethnic, racial, and gender profiles of their Gulfstream pilots not have to reflect “who we are?” Will their Portland, Seattle or Minneapolis suburban homes really be passed over by this coming summer’s violence?
So the BLM movement is getting close to peak wokeness. Once the public believes no country can continue with wide-open borders in a time of a pandemic, or with CEOs who order baseball games to be moved on no apparent logic, or with cartoons and movies banned by twitter mobs, or a fake white terror campaign against Asian-Americans constructed to hide a real epidemic of African-American violence against Asians, then the madness fades. It is too volatile, too spontaneous, too liable to consume those who created it.
Discussion (7)
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I'm afraid. Not because of what they are doing and not doing but, what others like me will do when the pushing continues and gets worse before subsiding, as it must do. I pray to my savior Jesus Christ to guide our leaders and to mend the minds of those seemingly out to make my country less free. If Shamgar can defeat 600 Philistines with an ox goad, we can and will defeat this scourge! Please pray with me.
So you think, but you are not taking black people into account. No analysis, explanation or prediction about current developments in the West is valid which does not take the novel presence of tens of millions of blacks inside the West into its formulation. They are not going to stop agitating and intimidating unmanly liberals and pink-cheeked corporate board members into acquiesce. It’s worked since Jesse Jackson shook down Toyota and GM in the 1980s. Now BLM has made Mau-Mau-ing ideological. They hate you and want what you have. Which you stole from them. So blacks will keep demanding and Democrats will keep echoing those demands. The Democrats have to: the blacks are their most trustworthy voting bloc. The blacks have to: they did not create and cannot maintain Western Civilization. It must support them. And America has to give in. It has Original Sin, the sin which cannot be removed by confession, but only expiated by a Redeemer. That’s in our history books. Peak Wokeness is not here, Professor, any more than Peak Barbarian was reached when the Romans allowed the Goths to cross the Danube.
If 16% of the Princeton freshman class are white males, how many of those were not the first in their family to attend college (17% of the entire entering class), how many were not international students (10%), and how many were not legacy students (10%)? That leaves the smart, American white male born of college-graduate parents from the new non-privileged class with the same chance of attending Princeton as the proverbial snowball, in a college climate classroom, maybe less. I wonder how that metric stacks up against the cohort of the school's Nobel Prize winners.
The elephant in the room: 39% of our population is “people of color”. It is the problem. It will worsen as the border crisis continues and our demographic imbalance worsens. The inmates will be running the asylum. Good bye America.
I value your wisdom, but do you honestly believe that anything like a majority of the American public retains the capacity for thoughtful analysis, or even coherent thought? The abuses perpetrated by the Big Education cabal at all levels, from Kindergarten through postgraduate departments at universities, have gone on for at least forty years, and have disgorged two generations of heavily-indoctrinated social, political and historical illiterates. Those people -- Zuckerberg and Dorsey only the most obvious of them -- are now inheriting control of all of the means by which the public gets information, and of the public receiving that information. Your predictions make perfect sense in a world where the public is rational. Do you truly still have confidence that the public, aside from a small and angry segment of it, is still rational. Sadly, I do not.
Dr. Hanson, we are very fortunate to have your wise, clear analyses sent on a daily basis. I agree that we white folk should do more to stop BLM and Antifa. It seems to me we may be headed for armed conflict if the violence cannot be stopped by police, National Guard, and while I hate to think of it, our Military forces. Bottom line, where do you think we are headed in efforts to stop the violence? Respectfully, Robert "Pete" Seale, Houston
American stellar most educated BLM workforce started it glorious descent in global economic competition since 1970. America has to restore mass European immigration or complete with South Africa!