From One Fake Left-wing Hysteria to the Next

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

The decade-old age of fables like Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, or the pangolin/bat cause of COVID is not over; it is just hitting midstream.

For much of April, amid stock downturns, in the classical paranoid style, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal news reporters and the liberal press that Trump had either a) guaranteed an inevitable recession, b) engineered a losing trade war he likely regretted, c) crashed the stock market, d) lost his once majority favorability ratings, e) mostly had a failed first 100 days, or f) all of the above.

Some of us thought these diagnoses and prognoses were absurd. How in mediis rebus, during a radical counterrevolution never quite seen before, could anyone issue such bleak predictions? Would these same observers have said the U.S. was doomed to lose World War II after the bleak first five months of mostly failure in the Pacific, or North Africa, after the utter U.S. army disaster at the Kasserine Pass?

When the Biden administration compiled two consecutive quarters of negative GDP—the supposedly classic definition of a recession—most of these same pundits assured us that the data was meaningless and irrelevant. The same left-wing media throng insisted Biden was in his cognitive prime until hours before he abdicated from the ticket under pressure. They swore to us that Robert Mueller’s “walls were closing in” on Donald Trump, who would legitimately go to jail, buried by 93 lawfare indictments.

As for their polls showing that Trump was all but through after three months in office, almost all of them were not just off in the 2016 presidential race, but again in 2020. And given the chronic temptation to warp polls to create Democratic momentum and fundraising, they rigged their polls yet again in 2024—even when they knew in disgrace that they were ruining their brand. A former Harris campaign official just admitted that internal polls never showed Harris ahead—even as the majority of polls predicted her victory.

So why would anyone believe any of these people? Take the now-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll assured us that 45 percent of the public gave Trump an F for his first 100 days, with only 42 percent expressing approval of his job so far.

But this is the same bunch that also assured us in its final authoritative 2024 election poll, on the very eve before the voting, that Kamala Harris would win the race by 4 points—a lead proverbially “outside the margin of error.” (The next day, she lost the popular vote by 1.5 percent or 2,284,952 votes and the Electoral College by 312-226). The public broadcasting polling partnership was off 5.5 points, perhaps suggesting that it wished to aid the Harris campaign more than either adhering to professional and ethical norms or fearing to lose what little was left of its reputation.

As soon as the Washington Post and the New York Times issued their dismal Trump bias polls, observers quickly pointed out they had, by intent, vastly underpolled those who voted for Trump in 2024. In contrast, the polls with the best 2024 records had Trump’s 100-day approval ratings near even or positive: Rasmussen was 50-49%, and the joint national surveys by Insider Advantage and Trafalgar Group had Trump up at 100 days, 46-44%.

As far as the supposed economic and stock meltdown, the March and April monthly economic reports showed that job growth was not only impressive but well above market expectations, with special emphasis on permanent rather than part-time jobs, even as the number of federal workers went down.

News of massive, multi-trillion-dollar investments and relocations to the U.S. continues. Far from having all the pressure levers in the tariff standoffs, China is starting to realize that the U.S. market is still the center of the world, while its own autocratic party dictatorship—again contrary to pundits’ warnings—is far more vulnerable to rising popular dissent than is a constitutional republic like the U.S.

Inflation in March and April either did not increase or, in fact, declined. Corporate profits were solid. Energy costs went down. Now that we have actually passed Trump’s first 100 days, where is the crashed stock market that supposedly signaled the recession on our doorstep?

The Standard & Poor 500 is back at the level of March 10, roughly where it was before the hysteria—and 12 percent up from a year ago. By May 2, both the Dow and S&P indices showed the longest continued gains in over 20 years. The Dow is now about where it was in September and October before the election—at levels that had not so long ago made investors giddy.

The media-academy nexus is also in hysterics over Trump’s threats of suspending federal funding to higher education unless it makes reforms consistent with Supreme Court decisions and Department of Education guidelines.

Many of us have warned campuses that it would be wiser to compromise, given the public would soon learn of what they had been doing for decades—and would be unpleasantly surprised. After all, private, multibillion-dollar endowed elite campuses took billions of dollars in easy federal money—despite endemic anti-Semitism, flagrant flaunting of U.S. civil rights laws and court decisions by continuing to use racial and gender biases, lucrative but unsavory financial partnerships with illiberal regimes of the Middle East and communist China, spiraling annual tuition costs exceeding the annual rate of inflation, 40-60 percent surcharges and overhead gouging of federal grants, and nonexistence of First Amendment protections for visiting speakers and lecturers, and on and on.

No matter. As soon as Harvard vowed that it would rally its elite brethren campuses against the administration, news predictably began to leak about the culpability and exposure of the real Harvard. Why did it only now and so suddenly rush to end its sister-campus relationship with the terrorist-supporting Birzeit University on the West Bank, or why now replace directors of its radical Center for Middle Eastern Studies program—in a fashion it never had previously dared even after the massacres of October 7?

Then, news of a joint China-Harvard program abroad suddenly surfaced. Allegedly, Harvard had aided members of what some have called a Chinese “paramilitary organization,” despite that group previously being sanctioned for its role in the Chinese state violence conducted against the Uyghurs—a fact that apparently did not surface publicly or perhaps even particularly bother any of the usually hypersensitive and quick-to-demonstrate Harvard students and faculty.

Shortly thereafter, a comprehensive Harvard in-house anti-Semitism report surfaced, documenting in detail the routine harassment of and threats to Harvard Jewish students. In truth, even if it wished to, Harvard now could not control its out-of-control and institutionalized anti-Semitism. It is a bane that Harvard has systematically ignored. It permeates the entire campus and is deeply embedded in the university’s Middle East Studies DEI architecture and recruitment of illiberal foreign students from dictatorial regimes.

The Harvard Law Review (currently being investigated by the Department of Education’s civil rights division) just bestowed a $65,000 fellowship to law student Ibrahim Bhramar. What did Bhramar do to earn such Harvard lucre?

Apparently, he was rewarded either for or despite attacking a Harvard Business School Jewish student during one of the recent anti-Israel campus protests, racking up misdemeanor criminal charges in the process. The prosecutor had noted that Bhramar had conducted “a hands-on assault and battery…and actual interpersonal violence” against the student. Rewarding an anti-Semitic attacker with $65,000 says it all. In 2024, hundreds of Harvard students and faculty disrupted their own graduation, commencing with walkouts and shouts of “free Palestine.”

In sum, despite the Harvard hysteria, it quietly knows what it has been doing, what the stakes are should it lose $2-9 billion in ongoing taxpayer support, and why it would not like full disclosure to the public of both its many excesses and lapses. So, if it is smart, Harvard will likely quietly seek a compromise with the Trump administration.

Finally, we are watching a full Democratic/left-wing meltdown.

Its puerile anti-Trump antics have gone from the clownish to the obscene and violent.

What is the point of disrupting a presidential congressional address by screaming and cane shaking, or of a silly 25-hour pseudo-filibuster? Who believes that smutty sh*t and f*ck congressional videos, or foul-mouthed threats to Trump and Elon Musk (e.g., “dipsh*t,” a**hole”) will win over Independents?

What is the strategic logic behind Democratic governors and senators threatening to cause havoc at Republican officials’ town halls, or to ignite “mass protests” and “disruptions,” so that “Republicans cannot know a moment of peace”?

Does anyone believe that yet a third impeachment of Trump will ensure a Democratic midterm victory?

Or is the correct left-wing playbook to champion a motley array of assassins, spousal abusers, and gang members? Is it wiser then to either laud or ignore attacks on Tesla dealers, owners, and chargers, or wink and nod at blatantly anti-Semitic demonstrations and protests?

Is there anything taboo for the hysterical left?

Yes—it cannot offer the country a simple “Democratic Contract for America”—listing its own solutions to the nation’s existential crises.

There is not a single Democratic blueprint of how to address a $2 trillion budget deficit, $3 billion in daily interest payments, $37 trillion of national debt, or a $1.2 trillion annual trade deficit.

There is no post-Biden corrective agenda to deal with his legacy of 12 million recent illegal aliens, added to the existing 20 million current unlawful immigrants.

Not a single Democratic senator, representative, or party official has put forth any plan to end the Biden-era conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Nor will they even discuss the challenge of biological males wrecking women’s sporting events, institutionalized campus anti-Semitism, or unlawful race-based chauvinism.

On all these matters, the Democrats and their leftist supporters have offered no counter-proposals, no alternate agendas, and no unique solutions to the nation’s problems—other than boring, profanity-ridden venom and tired performance-art buffoonery.

Reliance on warped polls, untrustworthy and biased reporting, and media sensationalism will not help such poverty of thought and character.

Obscene, hysterical, and clueless is no way to appeal to Americans, Democrats.