Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
Every cultural revolution starts at year zero, whether explicitly or implicitly. The French Revolution recalibrated the calendar to begin anew, and the genocidal Pol Pot declared his own Cambodian revolutionary ascension as the beginning of time.
Somewhere after May 25, 2020, the death of George Floyd, while in police custody, sparked demonstrations, protests, and riots. And they in turn ushered in a new revolutionary moment. Or at least we were told that — in part by Black Lives Matter, in part by Antifa, in part by terrified enablers in the corporate world, the new Democratic Party, the military, the universities, and the media.
What was uniquely different about this cultural revolution was how willing and quickly the entire progressive establishment — elected officials, celebrities, media, universities, foundations, retired military — was either on the side of the revolution or saw it as useful in aborting the Trump presidency, or was terrified it would be targeted and so wished to appease the Jacobins.
This reborn America was to end all of the old that had come before and supposedly pay penance for George Floyd’s death and, by symbolic extension, America’s inherent evil since 1619. As in all cultural revolutions, the protestors claimed at first at that they wanted only to erase supposedly reactionary elements: Confederate statues, movies such as Gone with the Wind, some hurtful cartoons, and a few cranky conservative professors and what not.
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As an elderly man, a Korean Veteran, a patriot, and an entrepreneur, I'm part of the seething population as i see a sort of dark age of ignorance exploding all over this nation. But I urge others of similar feelings not to sit in silence. I won't be lectured to by a group of youngsters who not only have made no contribution to this nation but are ignorant of those that have. They are so self indulgent that they believe the world just began in the last few years along with Google, Twitter and Facebook. (I remember the hours and hours I spent digging through the stacks at the Hoover to write a paper on the Russian Revolution) Sadly with information at their fingertips they seem to reject anything that's older than "last month." The cancel culture seems to think they are owed some slice of the pie without providing any of the ingredients. It feels like a new dark ages is in the works, or maybe we will dissolve into the Planet of the Apes