Thoughts on the Cultural Revolution in Our Midst. Part Two

Victor Davis Hanson

Since the Left cannot win over 51 percent of the population to its border, energy, crime, economic, social, foreign, and race-based policies, it turns to its near monopoly over institutions—academia, the media, Big Tech, the administrative state, the corporate boardroom, K-12, entertainment and sports and the foundations—to wage a propaganda and cultural war against the middle class.

The latter has strange, bizarre ideas that must be ridiculed, mocked, and destroyed—such as there are two sexes, not three; that clean-burning natural gas and gasoline alone will keep civilization viable until efficient and affordable alternative fuels emerge; that late-term abortions are tantamount to legalized killing; that race is incidental not essential to who we are; that free-market capitalism and private property fuel prosperity and that their opposites fuel poverty; and that deterrence makes the world go around—whether defined abroad as a strong United States that frightens enemies, reassures friends, and convinces neutrals to ally with it, or at home that only the surety of punishment deters the criminal from preying on the weak and innocent.

So, it is clear why the media is so biased. The Left has lost the American people and has no other choice but to filter and censor the news. Who in their right mind votes for three million swarming the border and invited in by Joe Biden? Who votes for the Soros district attorney paradigm? Who votes for $7 a gallon diesel fuel?

The issues dearest to the Left—transgenderism, abortion on demand to the moment before birth, the end of all fossil fuels in a decade, redistributive printing of money, the end of deterrent policing, sentencing, and punishment, critical race theory, open borders—were ignored by the loyal Democrat, illegal immigrant resident for a decade or so. Perhaps the ingrained fealty to the Left absorbs still the immigrant’s second-generation children.

But by the third generation, the now successful contractor or high-school principal has had it with the new Left. He knows the latter hates him as too religious, too traditional, and too money-grubbing. In other words, the cultural revolution in our midst is mostly the domain of wealthy whites and minorities, who are rich and privileged enough not to worry about rent, food, and gas, and so can obsess about males in women’s sports or whether Thomas Jefferson was a racist.

Again, why does the Left hate the middle class? It too unapologetically strives to be upwardly mobile, to burst through the attic trapdoor upon which is the foot of the top-story wealthy.

The middle-class ability to buy snow mobiles and jet skis and Ram trucks turn off the elite. Middle-class America also lacks the romance of the distant poor.

As a result, upwardly mobile minorities are starting to push back against white leftwing hostility to them, given they are no longer dependent on the leftwing use of the government for benefaction and need no one to instruct them how to be moral other than their priests.

To pursue relentlessly the socialist agenda, the Left’s political strategies and tactics are precisely those they once used to deplore and attribute to extreme right-wingers: mostly to weaponize government to destroy their enemies and to send a signal to the nation that Leftism provides indemnity, while conservativism ensures exposure and liability.

Translated that means, Hillary can destroy her subpoenaed emails and her devices in defiance, and Trump may go to jail for not securing some boxes in his closet that are not on the Internet and far more secure than her emails once were. The FBI is interested in you if you object to indoctrinated racism in the schools, not those who order it.

The message is clear to the teacher, the bureaucrat, and the mid-level manager: sound and act leftwing and there are plenty of contextualizations and exemptions for you that may save you from career destruction following an illiberal quip, an alleged sexual advance, a stereotyped slip. Sound leftwing and you become a Hunter Biden or even a Joe Biden, whose hair-blowing, neck squeezing, past sexual assault, endless racist nuttery, senility, and multimillion-dollar grifting are ignored given his progressivism.

The Party that rightly once warned us about the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI has now weaponized the agency to ferret out unorthodox parents at school meetings, forge FISA affidavits, wipe clean subpoenaed phone records, work with the Democratic Party to defame and smear its opposition, set perjury traps, go after political enemies, and retrieve lost embarrassing property of the president’s wayward family.