Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a euphemism for a rigid racialist theology.
It deductively postulates that a large percentage of the population is oppressed by racism and sexism, mostly by white males.
DEI makes no allowance for the class or wealth of the alleged victims or their supposed victimizers.
So once that rigid party line is set, it cannot account for tens of millions of affluent and privileged non-white Americans or like numbers of poor and non-privileged whites.
Absurdities and ridicule must then follow.
One example is the spectacle of former First Lady Michelle Obama on her current book tour.
Mrs. Obama cannot finish an interview without whining about the racism she allegedly encountered as the once most influential and powerful woman in the United States.
According to Michelle, she was not given the exemptions that other white first ladies received.
She did not get enough free stuff for the First Family.
She had to hire three stylists daily to straighten her hair to meet “white” expectations—as if also Asians and Hispanics do not have straight hair, or many whites do not have hard-to-comb curly hair.
Indeed, she now claims blacks cannot even swim because of white-induced pressures to maintain dry and straight hair.
Because her DEI creed ignores class and wealth, Michelle has no idea how absurd she sounds.
She and husband Barack Obama own three estates in addition to their former Chicago home, together valued somewhere around $40 million.
Their net worth is estimated at between $70 and $100 million. They fly private, surrounded by a throng of Secret Service guardians.
The more Michelle clings to the fossilized dogma of unchanging racial victimization, the more she becomes ridiculous or offensive.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is another rigid ideology that deductively mandates that Trump is evil and thus must be exposed as such by any means necessary.
Sometimes, such Pavlovian hatred so blinds the left to evidence that it becomes oblivious to its own suicidal choices.
Take the “Epstein files.”
For four years, the Biden administration had no desire to release any names that appeared in the thousands of the infamous Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and text messages under its control.
To the extent that Trump’s name leaked out of the files, most had agreed on the mostly innocuous circumstances of the references.
There was not just a lack of evidence that Trump was ever entrapped by the spider-like Epstein’s blackmail webs.
In fact, eventually, Trump ostracized Epstein well before he was convicted and jailed.
Had he been compromised, the Democrats—who raided the Trump home, tried to de-ballot him, and used lawfare to drag him into five different local, state, and federal courtrooms—would have released the files in a nanosecond.
So when Trump continued the prior Biden policy of keeping the files private, the left mindlessly shouted that the hated Trump must be hiding his own culpability.
They shrilly demanded that he release all the files—without a second thought about the reasons why their fellow Democrats had previously kept them private.
So a compliant but cagey Trump has begun releasing the trove of documents.
The evidence does not reveal any new Trump bombshells. Instead, there are lots of new references to the Democrats, like the former Harvard President Larry Summers.
A Democratic member of Congress, Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is exposed in the files as a partisan, compliant tool of the predator Epstein.
In her hatred of Trump, the files show Plaskett texting for live prompts from the odious Epstein as he tutors her on how best to coax a congressional witness to demonize none other than Donald Trump.
Was there not a single cool Democratic head who could have seen where the party’s obsessions with Trump were headed?
Similarly, Democrats embrace climate-change orthodoxy—regardless of the obvious contradictions and paradoxes that follow.
Climate change religion exposes Democratic grandees like the shore-residing Obamas, the jet-setting Al Gore and John Kerry, and the multi-estate-owning Nancy Pelosi.
All fly on private jets. They heat and cool with fossil fuels their various energy-guzzling huge homes—while demanding hoi polloi turn down their air conditioners or give up their diesel pickups.
But even green guru billionaire Bill Gates has become conflicted and a climate apostate. Why?
Wind and solar “renewables” will never supply left-wing techies like Gates the additional 100 gigawatts of electrical generation per year that they need to fulfill their lucrative artificial intelligence dreams.
Nor does climate orthodoxy make allowances for vastly more U.S. oil and gas production to supply a left-wing, but energy-short Europe, or to flood the world with cheap energy to bankrupt Putin’s oil and gas exporting Russia.
The problem with a party line is that it is deductive, not inductive.
Ideology makes facts fit dogmas, rather than evidence leading empirically to conclusions.
So inflexible cults like climate-change orthodoxy, DEI, and Trump Derangement Syndrome make their adherents look utterly ridiculous.
Thank you VDH, sometimes when the current media narritive makes me want to scream at my phone your calm , cool explanations with more facts in one sentence than in their entire story bring me Back to reality where dialog is the tool of choice and not the violence they insist on starting with us.
You can’t write enough about this topic, the absurdity of leftist ideology. We should also take note of the dystopian world we would face if they are successful at obtaining power and secure their dream of one party rule for eternity. We the people must continue the fight to save our constitutional republic in the mid-terms by giving President Trump the majority he needs to continue his quest for an American “Golden Age” to add to our rich history of success.
Dear Victor, Sami and Jack: First, best wishes to you and your families for a very blessed Thanksgiving holiday. Frozen turkeys are on sale for only $.47/lb. in my neck of the woods and I personally love a good turkey wing! I have commented in the past my thoughts on how all these left wing ‘Benedict Arnold’ lemmings conduct themselves. It appears as though sound reasoning coupled with a modicum of incorruptibility no longer exists on that side of the aisle (some on the other side also!). A larger concern for me personally is the growing number of Americans that have a complete an utter lack of mental acuity to discern right from wrong and good from evil. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones having been raised by parents who were educators and taught me the importance of never taking anything/anyone at face value. High SAT score or common sense! In most cases from my many years in the world of business, I’ll take common sense every time.
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Waste of time!!!
This article so wonderfully demonstrates the level of dumbness that inhabits the minds of the Democrat leadership.
Love the article, Victor! You’re always the voice of reason.
One thing I would love to know, is who gives the left their orders. It seems they are always coordinated in their diatribes of the day. You’ll have to address that in a future article. Who thinks all this nonsense up that they seem to adhere to flawlessly?!?
At 73 years of age, I perceive that there are far less US citizenry who would read or listen to what a VDH would convey because they have been so indoctrinated into accepting the ideal of victimization from the nations educational system. I am not confident that the Trump era will last beyond his presidency and the nation will actually move back to its founders ideals.
“Ideology makes facts fit dogmas, rather than evidence leading empirically to conclusions“
This is exactly how journalism lost all credibility. Instead of letting the facts get in the way of a story, they make the facts fit their preconceived narrative.
What are these people thinking?
Eight score and two years ago … Abraham Lincoln penned words which I picked up and re-read yesterday: “… now we (that new nation based upon the proposition that all men are created equal) are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived … can long endure.” We live in a time of testing. What a shame if we collectively fail.
The only addition I can make to another excellent VDH piece, is that the “leftist ideology” is only for their foot soldiers. The leftist leadership knows it’s all utter nonsense because they made it up and promoted through their compliant media.
Leftist leadership has a playbook full of destructive ideologies to rollout when the current one is debunked. It’s a game of wack-a-mole leftist use to keep their opponents so unfocused they can’t be defeat while pursuing their ultimate objective; to take America down.
Nicely done, VDH!