By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness
What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the
Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent
chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?
Then
No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of
House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes
that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.
Foreign Policy published
an article by a liberal Obama Administration lawyer outlining all the ways to
remove an elected president as soon as possible—including consideration of a
military coup.
The FBI and the entrenched bureaucrats at the Justice
Department continued their prior failed efforts during the campaign to seed the
lies of the fabricated Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. A 22-month-long and $40
million hoax ended with the special counsel himself, a doddering Robert
Mueller, swearing under oath that he essentially knew nothing about the dossier
or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts that had prompted his very own
investigation.
Fired FBI Director James Comey—a lion on Twitter, and a
lamb when under oath—on over 240 occasions testified to the Congress that he
either did not know or could not remember, when asked details about the
collusion fraud that the philosopher G-man had helped perpetuate.
No one worried about the weaponization of government. So,
we went right from the nefarious legacy of John Brennan (who lied under oath to
Congress twice), James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress once), James
Comey (who leaked confidential presidential memos), Andrew McCabe (who gave
false testimony to federal investigators), Lisa Page (who was fired from the
special counsel’s legal team for various unprofessional conduct), Peter Strzok
(about whom there is not enough space to detail his transgressions), and the
now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith onto the next round of impeachments.
Two of them followed. Neither was conducted by a special
counsel. There was no array of witnesses, no prosecutorial report. Much less
were there formal charges of a specific high crime or misdemeanor, or bribery
or treason, as specified by the Constitution.
In the end, both farces ended in trials—but not before
the Left had established lots of baleful precedents. Impeachment is now simply
a tool to embarrass a president in his first term when he has lost the House. A
Senate trial could hound an innocent president, even as a private citizen out of
office. And a chief justice need not preside over the Senate trial. If and when
Joe Biden loses the House, the Left should applaud any attempt to impeach
him—given it established the new model of opposition.
Of the January 6 debacle, we were not told that it was a
riot involving lawbreakers who would be punished. Instead, we were lied to that
it was an “armed insurrection,” a “coup,” and “a rebellion” of massive
proportions.
Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who
had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four
summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal
soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists.
In Animal Farm fashion, there were now to be good federal
troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops
who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.
It mattered nothing that “armed” in the case of January 6
meant that no firearms were used or even found among the
protestors. No one was charged with conspiracy, insurrection, or racketeering.
But many were placed in solitary confinement without specific charges being
filed—to the utter delight of liberal groups like the ACLU and human rights
organizations.
The FBI—recently known mostly for spreading Hillary Clinton’s campaign collusion hoax—found no premeditated grand plot.
The
remaining media narratives were also untrue: Capitol police officer Brian
Sicknick was not murdered, but died tragically of a stroke the
next day. Five persons were not “killed.” Four who died were Trump supporters.
Only one of the five deaths occurred at the hand of a known other—a 14-year
military veteran, unarmed, 110-pound female Ashli Babbitt. She was fatally shot
while attempting to enter through a window of the Capitol by a law-enforcement
officer—to the frequent approbation of the left-wing commentariat. The
officer’s name was hidden for months from the public—something conspicuously
uncharacteristic in other cases where law enforcement officers are involved in
shooting unarmed suspects.
Videos surrounding the entire melee still have been
repressed. They likely will never be released. That infamous day remains in
dire contrast to the prior 120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson.
In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were
torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were
killed.
Yet current Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the
public to help bail out the arrested. And the architect of the “1619
Project” reassured
Americans that crimes against property like arson and looting are not
really violence per se. The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically
vanished after November 3, 2020. Note that esteemed medical professionals
argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine,
social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality. There
are now good riots and bad ones, and noble sustained silence about a noble
officer who lethally shoots an unarmed suspect, and noble immediate
outing of an ignoble officer who lethally shoots an unarmed suspect.
These were merely the main media distortions and
fixations over the last four years. We forget the daily craziness such as a
president’s calls to foreign heads of state routinely leaked or the FBI
director passing on confidential memos of private presidential conversations to
the liberal press, or the “whistleblower” who was not a whistleblower as much
as a Democratic operative. The media nadir came when the press bellowed that
Trump had overfed a fish.
An array of retired four-stars damned their president as
Hitlerian, Mussolini-like, and deserving an early exit from office. Their
superior morality naturally excused them from abiding by the Uniform Code of
Military Justice.
The New York Times falsely identified a
minor Trump Administration bureaucrat (“anonymous”) as a major conservative
truth-teller—once he thrilled the media by lying that a large, morally
superior, inside cabal was devoted to obstructing the implementation of a
president’s orders. Everyone from Hillary Clinton to an active FBI lawyer
bragged of joining the “Resistance,” with plenty of conspiratorial
retro-accusations that the 2016 election was “rigged.”
All that was a warm-up for the plague year in which
Donald Trump was blamed for every COVID death. His medical advisor Dr. Anthony
Fauci was deified, due largely to his coy opposition to the president he was
supposed to serve.
Both the current president and vice president had, less
than a year ago, urged Americans not to be vaccinated, given
their own reluctance to take a “Trump” vaccine. At least the anti-vaxxers had
consistent opposition to the experimental inoculations; in contrast, the
anti-Trumper anti-vaxxers merely saw sabotaging the 2020 vaccination program as
necessary to be in a position to claim it as their own in 2021.
Now
What did all that madness achieve? Mostly, the first
election in U.S. history in which over 100 million ballots were not cast on
Election Day. Strangely, with such an avalanche of ballots, the usual error
rate of absentee balloting dived from around 2-4 percent to 0.2-0.4 percent.
You see, when we suddenly must count tens of millions more paper ballots then
it becomes easier, not harder, to spot errors.
So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory.
The nation was done with the demonized Trump and now the
Left controlled the presidency, and both houses of Congress. Somnolent Ol’ Joe
Biden from Scranton pledged to heal the nation as he overturned his
predecessor’s supposedly disastrous policies and went on a rampage of
slandering his opponents. If Donald Trump was once damned as non compos
mentis, the same media and academic accusers kept mum as Biden shuffled,
fell, went mute, slurred words, and went off on angry, disjointed, and
incoherent riffs.
What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump
record: the greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in
any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record
peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration
finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab
enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past
mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was
still a rarely remembered word from the past.
And again, what was all that Pavlovian nihilism to achieve?
Within eight months the following was finalized: Joe
Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to
cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable
conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in
fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama.
A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East,
once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical
Palestinian cause.
The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United
States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American
military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military
equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms
mart for terrorists. Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation
efforts. China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will
not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular.
At home, gas prices have soared. Prior trillion-dollar
deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red
ink. The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last
half-century. A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of
the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various
thought crimes and the incorrect idea that the United States was, is, and
always will be a kind and humane place.
More will likely have died each day from COVID by year’s
end during the Biden first 12 months than during Trump’s last 12 months. That
statistic perhaps might have been meaningless had Biden himself not demagogued
the idea that a president is strangely responsible for all pandemic deaths on
his watch.
But then again, Biden had warped the pandemic narrative
only after he had inherited the Trump vaccination program (17 million
vaccinated by Inauguration Day). Biden was wrongly and prematurely convinced
that vaxxes were a permanent prophylaxis to any sort of COVID variants that would
simply disappear once he took office. Depending on the occasion, Biden claims
none, or just 4 million, were vaxxed until he took office, as truth and
fantasies waft through his cloudy cognition.
With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation,
a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective nonenforcement of
existing laws: Worse, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these
insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary
theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism.
Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist
hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists,” or interrupt
the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the
Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White
House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action
against Beijing deemed offensive? Was General Milley suffering from the very
“white rage” he sought to ferret out?
With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of
power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny
repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan
virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of
a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot
even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ
that has wrought such havoc upon them.
Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut
in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due
to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still
insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” while his
paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return
of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do
their bidding.
What did the Left leave as the proper model for
conservatives now to deal with Biden?
Impeach him when he loses the House? Get a special
counsel, lavish said counsel with $40 million, a dream team of right-wing
lawyers, and 22 months to find real Chinese collusion?
Start seeding a conservative version of Lt. Colonel
Alexander Vindman and an “anonymous” whistleblower inside the Biden
octopus?
Get retired four-star generals on TV to swear Biden is a
Chinese “asset,” or have them retweet the idea of sending Biden supporters to
China, or swear that he is a fascist? Bring back Woodward and Bernstein to find
out whether Biden, Inc. ever paid taxes on all that Chinese and Ukrainian
cash?
Call in the ubiquitous Dr. Bandy X. Lee from Yale to
administer the Montreal Cognitive Assessment to prove that Biden can
distinguish a camel from an elephant or a train from a bike or count backwards
from five?
Will the Right prod General Mark Milley’s replacement to
collude with soon-to-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy and call the Russians to warn
them that Biden is demented, democracy is “messy,” Kamala Harris is crazy, and
thus Moscow might need a warning from us about any Biden preemptive aggression?
And what of the people who voted for this change and the
media that empowered it? In the latest Quinnipiac poll, known for its liberal
affinities, Biden now earns a 38 percent approval rating. We should add a few
extra negative points given media bias. Do they suffer buyer’s remorse or angst
that they were lied to by the hard Left that Joe Biden was cognizant and not a
mere vessel for a two-year push for overt socialism?
Meanwhile the media is reduced to explaining why an undocumented activist has an understandable right to chase a liberal Democratic senator into a public restroom and hector her.
Then video her as she enters a stall to relieve herself.
Then post the grotesqueness on the internet—a
felony in the state of the Arizona, though just part of the “process” for the
president of the United States.
We could call the above insanity nemesis for woke hubris.
Or maybe it is karma, “payback’s a bitch,” or “what goes around comes around.”
But there is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it
touches—because its claws tear all of us as well.
_______________
About
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the
Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow
at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military
historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient
warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W.
Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma,
California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism.
He is the author most recently of The
Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The
Case for Trump.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/10/the-left-got-what-it-wanted-so-now-what/
