{"id":13831,"date":"2021-08-02T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-02T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=13831"},"modified":"2021-08-05T14:16:09","modified_gmt":"2021-08-05T21:16:09","slug":"optimism-inc-the-crushing-weight-of-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/optimism-inc-the-crushing-weight-of-lies\/","title":{"rendered":"Optimism, Inc.: The Crushing Weight of Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image by SomeMeans @ Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ VDH’s Blade of Perseus<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One reason why I remain optimistic about the impending end of wokism and the failure of the cultural revolution is that the dangers they pose are unsustainable. And by that I mean that they require such dissimulation, that the load of lies eventually will snap the spine of those asked to carry and disseminate them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Star Trek\u2019s John Gill<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Joe Biden last week gave a series of speeches, answers and riffs that were nonsensical. By that I don\u2019t just mean that he has no clue about how to arrest inflation, or the dangers of a spiraling violent crime rate or of an open border. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is that he increasingly cannot finish a sentence and at times seems entirely incoherent. And the media, the Left, and the Democratic party\u2014all once so eager to seek Trump\u2019s removal as unhinged, and all but forced to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or the target of a supposedly wired-up Rod Rosenstein, or diagnosed in absentia as nuts by Yale Professor Bandy Lee\u2014seem determined to hide, but cannot, the all too obvious truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Why? They know there is no comparable alternative media that can replace their celebratory lies by the reality of Biden\u2019s insidious dementia? The specter that Kamala Harris is unpalpable even to Democrats? The more Biden performs the role of an empty vessel, the more neo-Marxism can be poured into it? They are desperate and panicked at Biden\u2019s decline, but have no viable alternatives other than masking his cognitive challenges, and so will lie to the bitter end?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Biden\u2019s performance or lack of it is not sustainable. By 2022 his lack of cognitive ability won\u2019t be hidden. The public will know that it was lied to in the fashion of Edith Wilson assuring the country that a bedridden and near speechless Woodrow Wilson was completely fit to continue his duties as president. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Borderlash?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

An open border will take years to fix. We will suffer a trillion-dollars in entitlement costs, and legal, education, food, housing and transportation assistance to accommodate the 8-10 million who during this administration will cross illegally into the United States. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But an open border cannot be hidden by the media forever. The consequences of allowing those in whose first act is to break US law, second is to reside illegally in the US, and third is to fabricate identification to perpetuate their illegal residence will force Americans finally to close the border. If there is a fairness to impeachment, then Joe Biden certainly has by its standard violated his oath of office to \u201cfaithfully execute the Office of President of the United States\u201d by simply allowing or indeed encouraging law-breaking on a massive scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So far Biden has offered no defense of his open-border policy other than to blame Trump\u2019s closed-border policy and cry \u201cRacism!\u201d The Democratic Party is ever so slowly alienating tens of thousands of voters of all races, religions and ethnicities, and seems oblivious in their arrogance to the sort of comeuppance on the horizon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One reason why tribalism will cease is that it is unsustainable and that all other groups are starting to see where it leads and want no part of it. \u201cLa Raza\u201d seems to have lost much of its resonance, the more, in counter-intuitive fashion, Latinos enter the US illegally and alienate US citizens of Hispanic ancestry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? Three reasons. One, the wages of illegal immigration\u2014gangs, crime, overtaxed social services, poorer schools\u2014fall most heavily on Hispanic-American citizens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two, shouting about skin color or language or place of origin is not as common among the Latino middle classes as is now considering voting conservative for the first time in their lives\u2014a fact known to and feared by the Left. In California, oppressive income, sales, and gas taxes, terrible roads, water shortages, failed high-speed rail, unchecked fires, sky-high fuel and energy costs, and dismal schools are not conducive for welcoming in millions to further tax state social services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three, there is no such thing as an omnipotent, omnipresent nefarious \u201cwhiteness.\u201d In my seven-decade life in the Central Valley, most of the racism I saw and heard, at least after 1970, was among Mexican-Americans\u2014the majority of the population and of two types: one directed at darker, more indigenous immigrants from south of Mexico City, and in particular aimed at African-Americans. Implicit tribalism is now seen as ecumenical in getting an edge in admissions or hiring, but explicit tribalism in which tribes act out their violent chauvinism is quite another, and far more dangerous, phenomenon. If we are to self-select by superficial appearance, there will be no rainbow coalition of the nonwhite, but a bellum omnium contra omnes<\/em>. I think most accept that bleak trajectory if present trends don\u2019t cease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, if it remains acceptable to talk of intrinsic \u201cwhiteness\u201d that forever brands, in a near genetic sense, its accursed, then soon the tribal mentality will extend to everyone as it becomes permissible to talk of \u201cbrownness\u201d and \u201cblackness\u201d and Asian-ness\u201d\u2014as collective stereotypes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United States of Yugoslavia?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We new Yugoslavians will soon be assessed by not just our superficial appearances but the sum total of our resulting stereotyped good and bad victimization and victimizing. When Secretary of Defense Gen. Lloyd Austin defends his woke racial internal audits, and states that the US military should in all respects look like and mirror image US demography, does that extend to the battlefield? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By that I mean white males currently make up about 35 percent of the US population, at least to the degree in our multiracial society anyone is really white or black or brown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So in our multiracial, and male and female military, are we to expect that whites will be 35 percent of those to die in Afghanistan and Iraq, in proper proportional numbers? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will General Austin\u2019s mentality become so entrenched that at some point in such wars, he or his successor would say, \u201cI\u2019m pulling back racial group A, because it has met its quota of death on the battlefield.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated such a Woke Chair of the Joint Chiefs would say, \u201cWhoops, 82 percent of the combat deaths in Iraq were white males and that doesn\u2019t begin to look like America where they are only 35 percent.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or \u201cDammit, why was I not told that 85 percent of our combat dead in Afghanistan are white males. And that sure as hell does not look like America?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is that our collective future?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most Americans more or less support the idea of natural diversity; that is, within general parameters, professions, jobs, and down time reflect a multiracial society. They don\u2019t get worked up that Asians are overrepresented in many of the medical professions, or whites in Wall Street and Silicon Valley or blacks in the NBA, NFL and MLB. But once any one particular group insists that all <\/em>professions must be either proportionally represented or now disproportionally represented, without regard to demonstrable merit\u2014or else!\u2014as a way of providing reparatory action for supposed historical sins, watch tensions rise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professional sports are bleeding viewers not because whites are a majority in the country, but a distinct minority in professional sports. The culprit instead is the fact that athletes are becoming politically weaponized. Translated, I mean it is unprofitable and unsustainable for multimillion-dollar-a-year players, who do not \u201creflect\u201d percentage-wise the demography of America, to scream, demonstrate, or virtue signal their charges of racism against a largely middle class, less well-off viewership, on the sheer basis of their skin color, not on any demonstrable racist act. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we have almost reached peak wokism. To continue the arc leading to tribalism will unravel the county and I think the majority of all races will not tolerate that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have friends who are Latino or black, and when in the spirit of the times, a very few have interjected \u201cAs a Latina\u201d or as \u201ca black man,\u201d I sometimes answer, well \u201cas a white guy,\u201d and usually either laughter or anger or stupefaction follows, almost as in \u201cHow ridiculous you sound identifying by race.\u201d OK\u2014but it is either always or never stupid to virtue signal anyone\u2019s race, but not sometimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine after Barack Obama\u2019s dramatic victory in 2008\u2014with a greater tally of white voters than John Kerry earned in 2004\u2014if someone had emulated the now quite wealthy Van Jones\u2019s slur of \u201cwhite lash\u201d (or so he characterized the 2016 Trump victory), and thus had said that the 95 percent black vote for Obama was a \u201cblack lash.\u201d Would that inanity have been permissible?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The greatest fear of the race industry is the present, not of 1825 not 1861 not 1950, but the here and now\u2014and the growing anger they know they are sowing for the short-term careerist gain of a few pampered elites. So in this pessimistic rant, I am optimistic that woke comes to a close soon. You see its untruth and dangers are unsustainable and most Americans in the 233rd<\/sup> year of the best nation in history will not simply surrender and sigh, \u201cRIP.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ VDH’s Blade of Perseus One reason why I remain optimistic about the impending end of wokism and the failure of the cultural revolution is that the dangers they pose are unsustainable. And by that I mean that they require such dissimulation, that the load of lies eventually will snap the spine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-3B5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13555,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-traditionalist-all-the-lies-and-pretense\/","url_meta":{"origin":13831,"position":0},"title":"The Traditionalist: All the Lies and Pretense","author":"Jennifer Hanson","date":"June 16, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Art19 and Just the News Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler talk about Toobin's folly, Fauci's fraud, Biden-Harris diplomacy, and the price of Trump derangement syndrome. 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