Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.
These are the most radical first three months of a presidency since 1933, the most divisive—and certainly the most dangerous. And its catalyst is the myth of ol’ Joe from Scranton who has unleashed furies and hatreds never quite seen in modern American history.
“Woke” Joe Biden
At an age when most long ago embraced a consistent political belief, late septuagenarian Joe Biden suddenly reinvented himself as our first woke president. That is ironic in so many ways because Joe’s past is a wasteland of racialist condescension and prejudicial gaffes. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself as the workingman’s Democrat from Delaware (or, as Biden once beamed, “We [Delawareans] were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”). In truth, he exuded chauvinism well beyond that of his constituents.
Part 1: French Revolutionaries under the Guillotine
This week I offer a few historical hopeful examples of why and how mass hysterias arise, consume, and die off. And I think the same pattern will follow with the ‘Great Awokening/BLM/racialization of everything.’
As it cannibalizes its own, Woke LTD is exposed as a money-making machine for its elite BLM Marxist architects, and reveals the hypocrisies and careerist self-interests of its corporate and bicoastal elite tag-alongs.
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George Jacques Danton was guillotined April 5, 1974 during the Reign of Terror
Part 1: Wokeness Really Will End
What fueled—and what ended—the Jacobin beheadings, the Hollywood blacklistings, and #MeToo, these flights of collective madness and score-settling?
The more pessimistic the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the Biden Administration sound on the pandemic, the more cautiously optimistic I become, albeit as a non-medical observer of the pandemic .
I also do not mean that as a contrarian, but, after all, we are approaching a perfect storm of events that could threaten at last to blow out the virus.
We know from our 2020 experience that cases dip radically in the summer months, and it is now warming a bit every day, encouraging more to go outdoors, increasing natural Vitamin D levels, and reducing the lifespan of the virus in the open air. Yet we are not mired in the false hope of last April to July when the virus seemed at times to go dormant—given we have vaccinations this time around.
Wars often arise from uncertainty. When strong powers appear weak, truly weaker ones take risks they otherwise would not.
Sloppy braggadocio and serial promises of restraint alternatively trigger wars, too. Empty tough talk can needlessly egg on aggressors. But mouthing utopian bromides convinces bullies that their targets are too sophisticated to counter aggression.
VDH discusses the rationale behind the elites’ wokeness, the cannibalism of revolutions, how race trumps all, the mainstream media’s preference for the noble lie, and the value of the American iconoclast.
Americans are being saturated by a whirlwind of events never quite seen in recent memory. When a person with a gun or car now kills someone, the media—in anti-humanistic fashion, and quite callously— massages the story to fit deductive narratives. And they are based solely on the race of the victim and victimizer.
So a crazed, white-male sex deviant killer of six Asian and two white women in the Atlanta area is machined into proof of an epidemic of anti-Asian “hate crimes” committed by whites.
Who cares that all the data show African-Americans committing attacks on Asians at numbers far greater than their population percentages, while whites perpetrators are vastly “underrepresented”? (When Asian-Americans, now bombarded with such media certitude, walk out in the evening in big cities, do they feel terrified when a white male approaches and yet relieved when an African-American youth nears?
If the Colorado shooter kills 10, he is useful proof of “white supremacy” and “white terrorism”—until in a nano-second he is revealed as an Arab-American, Syrian-born immigrant with delusions of Islamic victimhood. When did a sick country so racialize death and destruction? In the Jim Crow days, whose values the Left are straining to return to?
If a car rams into a Capitol barrier, the crasher becomes representative of the January 6 “white armed insurrection”—until a media moment later when he is not really, but rather a wannabe Black Muslim unhinged follower of racist Louis Farrakhan?
When two teen African-Americans girls carjack a Pakistani immigrant’s Uber car, crash his vehicle and de facto kill him, and then worry only about retrieving an incriminating cell phone, we are told this is a “joy ride,” or we are advised by officials about securing our own cars so as not to “invite” crimes.
When an-ex NFL player shoots a doctor and his family of four, we sense the media is hoping at last they can run with “white nationalist murderer uses AR-15 to kill five people of color.” And then, the story suddenly mutes. And it is assumed but never spoken that the sick murderer is black, his victims all white.
Can a society long last when the population assumes that official reality is a lie, and the truth is thus opposite from what they are told by the state and its media?
