Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Donald Trump just visited the United Nations to offer a customary annual presidential address.
Before he arrived, there were reports that UN staffers had joked about shutting down the escalator to chastise Trump for cutting out aid to some UN programs.
Upon arrival, as if on cue, Trump was met by a series of mysterious coincidences.
As soon as he and First Lady Melania mounted the escalator, it suddenly froze—forcing them to walk up.
Other escalators worked fine. Shortly afterward, the supposedly broken escalator was just as mysteriously running again.
When Trump went to the podium, his teleprompter mysteriously quit—and his alone.
As he delivered his speech from a text, the amplification in parts of the assembly was mysteriously lowered to near imperceptible levels.
Despite UN denials, all three “accidents” were too closely tied to Trump to be coincidences.
But they remind us that the left-wing hatred of the president has gone global—even after two near-successful assassination attempts.
The House of Representatives recently offered a resolution honoring the life and legacy of the conservative organizer Charlie Kirk, murdered by a leftist assassin.
The left both feared and hated Kirk. Why?
He had been singularly successful in redirecting youth’s natural rebelliousness against the status quo onto the ruling, ossified liberal establishment.
Kirk was winning over a new generation of young Americans to be counter-culturalists and counter-revolutionaries.
He urged them to question the entire left-wing orthodoxy of higher education, the corporate media, and popular culture—the ruling institutions that the baby boomers had enshrined as the current establishment.
His singular success may be why the terrified left attacked him as much after death as they had while he was alive.
The House effort had followed an earlier bipartisan unanimous resolution honoring a Democratic Minnesota state legislator and her husband, recently murdered by an anti-abortionist assassin.
But unlike that earlier commemoration unanimously passed by all Democrats and Republicans, Kirk’s resolution was variously opposed by over 118 Democrat House members.
The new radical Democrats who increasingly control the party, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Jasmine Crockett, were vocal in smearing the resolution.
But they went well beyond voting no by gratuitously slandering the late Charlie Kirk as an inveterate racist and all-around toxic person not worthy of any commemoration.
The common denominator to all their hateful outbursts was their venomous ignorance, given that they either never referenced anything Kirk actually said and wrote or quoted him inaccurately.
The race-obsessed Crockett whined that “only two Caucasians” had opposed the resolution commemorating Kirk’s life.
But this was another lie, since the majority of Democrats expressed their opposition either by voting no (58), abstaining by voting present (38), or by not voting at all (22).
Thus, contrary to Crockett’s trademark racist ranting, the majority of Democratic House members who opposed the resolution included far more than “two Caucasians.”
And even if she were honest, in her racialized world of hatred, would it have been more racist if only “two Caucasians” had opposed the resolution or if the vast majority of the Hispanic and Black caucuses in bloc fashion had overwhelmingly and disproportionately condemned and denigrated Kirk and the resolution?
This increasing coarseness of the left follows its recent canonization of the murderer Luigi Mangione.
The left-wing media also suffocated news stories about the horrific, lethal throat-slitting of immigrant Iryna Zarutska by 14-time felon Decarlos Brown.
Violent attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement centers and individual officers are now routine and more praised than condemned by the left.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is emblematic of this fury and frustration of the new, obsessive-compulsive left.
His state is in free-fall.
Huge deficits, unfunded mandates, and the highest housing costs, gas prices, and income taxes in the nation force hundreds of thousands of residents yearly to leave.
California’s electricity and gas are likewise the costliest in the U.S.
The poverty rate is over 20% of the population.
A third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Nearly half of its homeless do too.
Newsom neglects all these existential challenges and instead seeks to outdo his leftist wannabe presidential rivals.
Shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Newsom tweeted an implied threat last Saturday to Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, warning her that she was “going to have a bad day today. You’re welcome, America.”
He had also earlier threatened the president with violence, “We are going to fight back and we’re going to punch this bully in the mouth.”
And Newsom had earlier extended that warning to half the nation of Trump supporters: “I’m gonna punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.”
The only mystery about the new obsessive-compulsive left is whether their vulgarity, violence, and crudity trickle top-down from the uncouth Democrat elite—or rise bottom-up from thuggish Antifa, BLM, and the rioters who attack ICE and Tesla dealerships, and disrupt Charlie Kirk’s funeral services.
The young Leftist voters are the sheltered offspring of Suburban elites. They gravitate to the cities with pockets full of daddy’s money to be with their tribe and marinate in concentrated leftism. Thus they continue their sheltered infancy from university to “young professionals”.
Charlie Kirk was dangerous to the hardened Leftists because he didn’t just challenge the Leftist lies, but also opened the eyes of their acolytes to their own sheltered views. Once open, they could see the tortured logic of the left. So Kirk created not only a debate between views, but also an awakening to reality. In some of the video recordings, you could almost see this happening in realtime as Kirk’s honesty and logic overcame the leftist group thought.
As for California, Gavin Newsome has been consuming the surplus from that state’s incredible riches. These riches include its monetary wealth, talents, culture, energy, environment, etc. Although these are being depleted, they have allowed Newsome the luxury of abusing California’s economy and citizens. Americans know their own states would never survive Newsome’s abuse and so he can forget the presidency. Newsome is nationally unelectable.
I thought I voted in a strong man but I got a guy who complains about escalators not working. This is so far beneath the president and I wish Trump would stop with these pathetic antics.
Democrats communicate in vile, ignorant gutter-speak, so that their target demographic gets the message. Legions of young people who have passed through our laughingly titled Education system. Scores of kids denied any semblance of logic or critical thinking. Much of the younger generation suffers from brain atrophy (by design) leading them to only comprehend the disturbing low-brow filth coming from their leaders.
Thanks Victor for staying on this topic of the insidious left. There should be a lot written on this, reported on this, and investigated until this treat to our republic is resolved. The American people did a great service to our nation by the reelection of President Trump and they must continue supporting those ideas championed by Trump for some time until the Democratic Party can rid itself of the likes you highlighted in your article.
For sure, it’s juvenile behavior by the leftists, but there’s also a highly destructive element to it. The solution is zero tolerance. We need to vote them out of office.
Thank you Victor! The dems are not stupid even as they unrelentingly try to convince us that they are! Why would a political group as marginalized as the progressive Marxists double down on failed polices that are despised by the majority of Americans? My take is that they are forcing an escalation of violence hoping that conservatives will get so frustrated and angry that they will respond in kind. They then hope that their numbers of traitors will somehow miraculously swell resulting in a highly polarized civil war. They then hope, after the anticipated injuries and deaths, for concessions from conservatives that will gut the United States Constitution. Obviously, this is my attempt to make sense out of the senseless aggression of the left.
I fear that the strength and allure of Charlie Kirk and the message he presented, especially to the younger generation, was, Charlie Kirk.
I don’t see anyone in his organization capable of replacing him and sustaining the current momentum of TPUSA.
I hope I’m wrong.
The most damning indictment against these mendacious Democrat House members is that, my opinion, they have not watched any of Kirk’s shows or videos of his many college campus meetings.
Shame on them and the voters who put them in office.
Those “accidents” at the UN just cement my opinion that progressivism is immaturity expressed as a political philosophy. And Leftists/progressives are emotionally immature. The emotional state of 13-year-olds, in adult bodies.
Remember when the Clinton staff stole the W’s from keyboards when they vacated the White House in advance of Bush taking office?
The summer of 2020? One giant tantrum by millions of overgrown adolescents because the world doesn’t fit their fantasy.
Childish.
One gets the impression that the Democrats never quite absorbed the lessons most children learn while playing in the sandbox. How to share, play together, use polite language, take turns, be good sports when winning or losing, and heed the calls for lunch or dinner. Their foul language and lack of decorum are infantile and betray a lack of self-awareness, sense of occasion, or even humanity. Defaming the dead, picking right up again on their menacing language and moral equivocation without even a decent interval — when did all this become qualifications for office? Go read a biography of Lincoln (or have someone read and explain the big words to them) and get a sense of an example to live up to, even if he was a Republican, the party that opposed slavery, Jasmine.
Professor Hanson, as usual, is correct about everything. Except that higher education and the corporate media were already long gone anti-American institutions well before the baby boomers came along.