by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n The Improbables<\/strong><\/p>\n There are a number of improbables, anomalies, paradoxes, ironies, absurdities \u2014 call them what you wish \u2014 on the national scene that simply defy reason. We usually fault an ignorant media as culpable for creating narratives that have no basis in fact and yet are rarely questioned. Here are some of the glaring examples and you decide how the unlikely became the gospel.<\/p>\n 1. How did 20-minutes-of-fame Julian Assange construct the fa\u00e7ade of an idealistic crusading electronic muckraker?<\/p>\n He seems much more like a part P.T. Barnum showman\/part celebrity narcissist. While promising to embarrass a number of banks and capitalist CEOs, he just contracted for $1.7 million in book deal advances \u2014 after enjoying his house \u201carrest\u201d at the mansion of a supportive aristocrat, and after protesting the unwanted fame that has come his way rather than to be shared among the WikiLeaks board.<\/p>\n Assange talks of absolute transparency as an\u00a0ipso facto<\/em>\u00a0virtue, but is shocked that his own protocols of leaking now are turned on himself \u2014 as we learn from preliminary legal leaks that he is a sexual cad at best, and more likely a creepy sort of honey-tongued predator. Amid his jet-set Westernized odysseys \u2014 predicated on the bounty and security of US-European culture \u2014 Assange was certainly not too eager to root out and leak to us many state secrets from Russia, China, or Iran. What would we think of Assange had he given credit to his team at WikiLeaks; globe-trotted in Africa, the Middle East, China, and Russia to inform the world about Mugabe, Chinese plans toward Tibet, Ahmadinejad\u2019s nuke project, or Putin\u2019s attack on dissidents; or donated his profits to dissidents?<\/p>\n 2. When did global warming so easily get away with becoming \u201cclimate change\u201d? With record winter low temperatures again this year in Europe, and similar freezing weather in the US, we are given a number of contorted exegeses from climatologists and green activists that, in fact, argue terrible cold is proof of global warming. One wonders: if it were now 80 degrees in New York or dry and 70 degrees in London, would we be told such unseasonable heat was not an artifact, but likewise real proof of climate change?<\/p>\n Philology usually is a good barometer of ideology: when global warming became climate change and now is evolving to \u201cclimate chaos,\u201d you can see a case study in deductive thinking, as symptoms are fudged to conform to a preexisting diagnosis. Circular reasoning also is characteristic: we convince the coal-devouring and nuclear-producing Chinese that there is a soon to be big (Western-subsidized) global market for wind turbines and solar panels, given the spread of Gorism among Western elites and grandees, then we frighten Americans that the Chinese will soon capture the entire \u201cgreen\u201d market that we fostered unless we \u2026 (fill in the cap and trade\/green subsidy-grant blanks).<\/p>\n 3. How did authoritarian and Islamist Palestinian groups become reinvented into traditional Western victimized minorities \u2014 analogous to women, gays, and minorities? Hamas, for example, is not known for free speech, gender equity, tolerance of homosexuality, or equality of the races (cf. the past West Bank newspaper cartoons of Sec. Condoleezza Rice). Visit any campus free speech area, and the PA or pro-Hamas literature is handed out right next to the Latino, black, gay, Native American, or feminist booths. Go to the\u00a0Voice of Aztlan<\/em>\u00a0website, and the pro-Palestinian anti-Semitic rants appear cheek by jowl with Alta California chauvinism. How did such an intolerant illiberal movement piggy-back onto self-proclaimed progressive agendas? Multiculturalism? Anti-Semitism? Oil interests? Fear of terror? I suppose the transmogrification of a tiny outnumbered Israel of 1966 into a surrogate United States \u2014 its seven-million population now supposedly lording its \u201cexcessive\u201d power over 400 million Arabs in the Middle East \u2014 explains a lot too.<\/p>\n 4. How did professors convince us that their universities are progressive, anti-capitalist, and against the grain institutions? Private elite schools \u2014 a Yale, a Stanford, a Princeton, a\u00a0Vassar \u2014 exist by reason of their endowments, gifts that in large part come from the very wealthy who excelled under the capitalist system. Part-time lecturers and temporary faculty usually teach classes for pennies on the university dollar. The difference between a Wal-Mart greeter and a Wal-Mart check-out clerk is far less than the pay differential for the same class taught by a part-timer versus a full professor.<\/p>\n Few institutions have created such an elite aristocratic hierarchy \u2014 tenure, vast pay discrepancies for classes, annual salary based on 3\/5s of the year in the classroom, peer reviews in lieu of quantifiable data on performance, lack of oversight \u2014 as the reactionary university.<\/p>\n 5. How did Barack Obama invent himself into a bi-partisan, working across the aisle, no-more-red-state\/blue-state unifying figure? Mellifluous rhetoric and a partisan myth helped to promulgate that myth, I grant. But still, how did the U.S senator with the most partisan voting record in the Senate (to the left of the socialist Bernie Sanders from Vermont) and a devout attendee of one of the most divisive and racist preachers imaginable refashion himself so successfully? Was it the simple declarations \u2014 as in something like \u201cI say I am bipartisan, therefore I am bipartisan\u201d? Did all forget that our pre-mid-term election president evoked phrases such as \u201cenemies,\u201d \u201csit in the back of the car,\u201d and \u201chand to hand\u201d?<\/p>\n No matter \u2014 as soon as Obama was \u201cshellacked\u201d with a 63 seat loss in the House, and his polls hit 42 percent approval, he dropped all the prior rhetoric about \u201cI won and you lost\u201d or \u201celections matter\u201d \u2014 and now announced to his \u201cenemies\u201d that he could \u201cwork together\u201d to get things done. Had Obama increased the House Democratic majority by 30 more seats in November, would he now be praising the virtues of bipartisanship? Had the vanity of Rev Wright not convinced the huckster preacher to hawk his Trinity racist rants on incriminating DVDs, would he now be a frequent \u201chealing\u201d presence at the White House?<\/p>\n Lurking somewhere behind all these improbables is a rather small Western elite that is enormously influential in the media, government, the arts, universities, and Hollywood. And what it would like to believe, often simply must be believed \u2014 and so it usually is.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Improbables There are a number of improbables, anomalies, paradoxes, ironies, absurdities \u2014 call them what you wish \u2014 on the national scene that simply defy reason. We usually fault an ignorant media as culpable for creating narratives that have no basis in fact and yet are rarely questioned. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[470],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-g7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4329,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/elegant-nonsense\/","url_meta":{"origin":999,"position":0},"title":"Elegant Nonsense","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 18, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Nearly 24 centuries ago, Plato warned not to confuse innate artistic skill with either education or intelligence. The philosopher worried that the emotional bond we can forge with good actors might also allow these manipulative mimics too much influence in matters in which\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2005"","block_context":{"text":"July 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/july-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1482,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/pampered-populists\/","url_meta":{"origin":999,"position":1},"title":"Pampered Populists","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner It's surreal to see President Obama play the class-warfare card against the Republicans while on his way to vacation on the tony Maine coast, and even more interesting to note that now gone are the days when the media used to caricature Bush I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2010"","block_context":{"text":"July 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/july-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11629,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/attack-of-the-techno-lynch-mob\/","url_meta":{"origin":999,"position":2},"title":"Attack of the Techno-Lynch Mob","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 29, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The Covington Lie offered the perfect occasion for the electronic mob to pounce\u2014after temporarily licking its wounds following the\u00a0BuzzFeed\u00a0fake news hysteria. And it did so without shame or even much regret after the fact, as Jason Leopold, the\u00a0BuzzFeed\u00a0fabulist, ceded center stage to a kindred\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8625,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-does-the-modern-malleability-of-gender-and-race-mean-for-the-future-of-affirmative-action\/","url_meta":{"origin":999,"position":3},"title":"What Does the Modern Malleability of Gender and Race Mean for the Future of Affirmative Action?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online In the present postmodern world, we are told that there is no such thing as a biologically distinct gender. Instead, gender is now socially constructed. It can be defined by the individual in almost any way he or she sees fit. In the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Caitlyn Jenner at the Espy Awards, July 15, 2015. (Kevin Winter\/Getty)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/download-31.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":12090,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dream-team-redux\/","url_meta":{"origin":999,"position":4},"title":"\u2018Dream-Team\u2019 Redux?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 10, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review There was a lot of pre-hearing hype about the Democrats\u2019 supposedly stellar academic experts, sort of analogous to the giddiness about the \u201cdream team,\u201d \u201call-stars,\u201d and \u201chunter-killer\u201d legal eagles that Robert Mueller supposedly had assembled to pick apart the Trump carrion \u2014 and they\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12396,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-doctrine-of-media-untruth\/","url_meta":{"origin":999,"position":5},"title":"The Doctrine of Media Untruth","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 27, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness As a general rule, when the\u00a0New York Times, the\u00a0Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite. Put another way, the media\u2019s \u201ctruth\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5659,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions\/5659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}