Optimism, Inc.:Part 3: #MeToo Too?: More on What Ends Hysterias
There is no need to go over all the details of the recent #MeToo wave. Most supported the initial disclosures. Who could defend Weinstein, or the sexual narcissist Matt Lauer with his electric button-locked office, who parlayed his position into serial asymmetrical sexual trysts while he broadcast his progressive fides to the world?
Soon major (thus liberal and leftist) Hollywood stars and key politicians were under a cloud, from Garrison Keillor and Charlie Rose to Al Franken and Joe Biden. The nadir was the Kavanaugh hearings. The Left jumped the shark and tried to convince America that a long-ago, teen-aged Kavanaugh had been a veritable rapist because an unhinged witness lied serially (e.g., Christine Blasey Ford really was coached, she did routinely fly on airlines, etc.).
Decades after the supposed crime, with no proof and no corroboration, Ford became the godhead of a political smear campaign to stop a conservative from joining the Supreme Court.
The logical trajectory of mainstreaming the confused accuser Ford led to accepting the insanity of snake-oil peddler Michael Avenatti, the current felon, and former Trump-hating would-be Democratic nominee and CNN/MSNBC star.
And so #MeToo sputtered out—to the point that the leading women of the Democratic Party yawned when candidate Joe Biden was accused by Tara Reade of having crudely and brutally sexually assaulted her decades earlier.
Reade even produced some corroboration in contemporary communications about the assault, in a manner nonexistent with Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh. At one point in the primary, Kamala Harris vaguely announced “I believed them” in reference to the army of young women who had claimed candidate Old Joe had squeezed many, blew their hair, nuzzled and felt them. No matter. The Left soon killed off #MeToo that it had birthed—and began to lament their own prior demolishment of the buffoonish Senator Al Franken.
Biden’s exemptions were supposedly now based on principle, namely that being handsy or worse in one’s past cannot years later be redefined as non-consensual or worse (usually in asymmetrical fashion used against the partner who became the more famous or wealthy).
In truth, #MeToo could afford to lose the monstrous Weinstein, but not Joe Biden or a long ago apparently rehabilitated Bill Clinton, and not “our side” journalists like Glenn Thrush, Tavis Smiley, and Mark Halperin. And so #MeToo now is relegated to the partisan ash heap: it is still useful to go after Republicans or conservatives but makes no claims that women out of the past have any right to bring down progressives.
Optimism, Inc. Part 2: Will Wokeness Finally Cannibalize Itself?
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part 2: The First Russian-Under-Every-Bed Frenzy (prior to Adam Schiff)
The Depression and the January 1, 1942 alliance with the Soviet Union had peaked American communist membership at 75,000. The treasonous Alger Hiss mentality in the State Department—the Soviets would be progressive postwar partners while the British imperialists faded and were thankfully forced to relinquish their colonialist empire—occasionally led to outright espionage (the Rosenbergs really were guilty), leading to the loss of atomic secrets, a preference for Mao over Chang Kai-shek, and excusing the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
In the midst of the public confusions that we had won the war over Hitler but might have lost the peace to Stalin, Democrat Harry Truman ordered loyalty oaths and tried to root out from government communists “sympathizers” and party members.
By 1950, a less aristocratic Robespierre-like figure, Sen. Joe McCarthy began accusing hundreds of elites in government and entertainment of communist party membership and betrayal of their own country. He was occasionally not wrong, but never distinguished youthful naïveté from mature subversion of America, or whether it was or should be illegal to be a communist or express communist sympathies.
No matter. After some of Hollywood’s best were sidelined and blacklisted (not all of them sympathetic characters), McCarthy enjoyed overwhelming public support, including that of William F. Buckley, and from time to time an embarrassed but silent Dwight Eisenhower. The sweep of communism abroad into Asia, Africa and Latin America fueled McCarthy’s conspiracy charges.
Then bloated with his lists of “traitors,” McCarthy went after George Marshall, the U.S. Army, the CIA, and the likes of Lee Grant, Orson Welles, and Edward G. Robinson. His own drinking, bombast and sidekick Roy Cohn (a closet homosexual who hounded dozens of others on sensational charges of closet homosexuality) turned off the American middle: McCarthy’s accusations grew, but his proof thinned.
By 1954, Ike, the grandees of the Republican Party and the establishment had become fervent anti-communists and now found McCarthy a dangerous liability. Edward R. Murrow—with sometime TV audiences of 60 million—demolished McCarthy in a famous “See It Now” in-depth report: “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy.” While Murrow had his own demons, no one could deny his courage and resonance and he quickly turned public opinion against McCarthy.
Soon Joe met his own Waterloo in the 1954 Senate hearings when Army counsel Joseph Welch (who himself had no problem in making a homophobic slur/joke about Roy Cohn) destroyed McCarthy’s credibility as he finally famously uttered, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Applause followed.
And the Red Scare began to end.
The Joe Biden Who Never Was
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
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.
Optimism, Inc.: Will Wokeness Finally Cannibalize Itself?
Victor Davis Hanson // Private PapersO
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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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?
Continue reading “Optimism, Inc.: Will Wokeness Finally Cannibalize Itself?”The Border: “Well, Joe Biden promised me this.” @VDHanson @HoverInst
Victor Davis Hanson on Who Killed Homer
Will the Great Awokening Succeed?
Optimism, Inc.: COVID News
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
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.
Continue reading “Optimism, Inc.: COVID News”How to Start a War
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
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.