Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,
In the #MeToo years, the Left’s signature slogan was “Believe All Women!”
That directive was used to bolster Christine Blasey Ford’s preposterous and easily refuted 2018 allegations that some 35 years earlier she had been sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, when both were teenagers.
Two years later, the Left quietly junked that “Believe Women!” credo when Tara Reade came forward and lodged a far more credible charge that 2020 Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden had sexually assaulted her when she was a Biden senatorial staffer.
Seven other women alleged that Biden acted toward them in sexually inappropriate ways. The Left more or less ignored these serial charges, and in Reade’s case, demonized her. Suddenly, the new mantra was “Believe women only if they prove useful to the Left.”
Since then, the grotesque sexual misconduct involving Democratic politicians—from New York governor Andrew Cuomo to California Congressman Eric Swalwell—has finally put #MeToo to rest. We were reminded of its demise when it was revealed that Maine senatorial candidate and socialist heartthrob Graham Platner had been discovered to possess a long social media history of crude and pornographic put-downs of women.
Indeed, an entire gaggle of former girlfriends has attested to his Nazi fascinations, his contempt for women, and his occasional physical violence against them.
So what?
Or as feminist icon and former #MeToo-er Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, speaking at a Platner campaign rally in Portland, Maine, “I’m here because Washington needs fighters, and Graham Platner is the fighter we need.”
But a fighter for what cause—and on whose behalf?
The demise of Black Lives Matter (BLM) offers another example of a recurring left-wing phenomenon: movements that begin as moral crusades and end as self-parodies. Almost every BLM cause célèbre has proved fraudulent, following a long tradition that stretches from Al Sharpton’s Tawana Brawley myth to the Duke lacrosse scandal.
The ginned-up BLM riots that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were all based on an abject lie. Brown never said, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” In fact, he attacked a police officer repeatedly and was lethally shot as he charged toward the officer.
Failing actor Jussie Smollett was never attacked by white MAGA thugs in the wee hours of a cold Chicago night. Instead, the faker Smollett hired two Nigerian-Americans, decked out in MAGA hats, to stage a mock attack. Only by staging such an attack could Smollett claim victim status, attract national sympathy as a target of white hatred, and attempt to revive his fading career.
Yet, for a while, the con worked. Soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris, who would go on to praise the often-violent mass George Floyd demonstrations of 2020, raged that the attack by anonymous white “racists” was an “attempted modern-day lynching.” Right—and she never apologized for spreading that lie.
The aftermath of the death of George Floyd did lasting damage to the country that still reverberates. Floyd was a career criminal. He had been imprisoned for participating in a home invasion where he pressed a gun into the stomach of a terrified young woman, who was beaten by one of his fellow criminals.
At the time of his arrest, Floyd was in poor condition both physically and legally—attempting to pass counterfeit currency, high on drugs, recovering from COVID, and resisting arrest.
He died after a police officer restrained him using an authorized but controversial protocol that involved placing a knee on the prostrate suspect’s neck—and did not heed in time Floyd’s call that he could not breathe.
What followed was the high-water mark of BLM. Four months of nightly riots led to some 35 deaths; 1,500 injured law enforcement officers; $2 billion in property damage; 14,000 arrests; and the torching of a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C., church. The current leftist habit of urban intersection takeovers, statue-toppling, name-changing, and violent demonstrations is a legacy of that summer of lawlessness.
So we still live with the toxic ripples from the aftermath and the canonization of Floyd.
Thousands of police officers nationwide were laid off in “defund the police” madness. Faddish “critical race” and “critical legal” theories led to no cash bail and the near-immediate release of hundreds of thousands of arrested violent criminals.
Our supposedly best universities, in Pavlovian fashion, dropped the SAT admission requirement and upped race-based admissions.
Racially segregated graduation ceremonies, dorms, and “safe spaces” proliferated—along with newly introduced remedial math courses at our top campuses. Indeed, professors began handing out A’s to 80 percent of the student body, as Ivy League schools now inflated grades far more than did community colleges.
Administrators and bureaucrats soon created thousands of DEI positions across universities and corporations.
This craze led to McCarthyite “diversity statements,” an epidemic of alleged victimhood, untold billions of dollars squandered, and workplace productivity diminished. And the result was certainly not better race relations.
We were just reminded again of the absurdity of the immediate post-Floyd years, after learning that the inverse of Floyd’s death had recently transpired in the United Kingdom.
Eighteen-year-old Henry Nowak, a white male student, was fatally stabbed by a Sikh immigrant with his “ceremonial” sword. In truth, the weapon was an eight-inch knife mysteriously exempted from Britain’s otherwise tough laws against possession of knives.
According to reports, Vickrum Digwa called police and falsely claimed that the dying Nowak had initiated the confrontation with racial slurs, while family members attempted to conceal the weapon. (Would a Scottish highlander claim that he too had the right to carry an eight-inch broadsword as integral to his race, religion, and indigenous traditions?)
No matter—the police arrived hungry to deal with a sensational case of George Floyd-style, white-on-non-white racial violence.
Instead, they reportedly treated Digwa as the victim and handcuffed the mortally wounded and bleeding Nowak as he pleaded—nine times in total—that he could not breathe and was dying. They therefore almost certainly ensured his death. The national reaction?
No British politician went into full George Floyd take-a-knee mode—as they had in 2020, even across the Atlantic, for the felon George Floyd. The ensuing unrest, so far, seems mainly to have been limited to Southampton; there has been no mass destruction of property; there have been no mass assaults. Nowak was on the wrong side of the left-wing race-based binary of victim/victimizer and thus offered no fuel for virtue-signaling by hollow politicians. Such racial reductionism always trumps matters of class, evidence—and the truth.
As for the fate of the BLM architects? The founders never accounted for how their $90 million in donations was actually spent, but they did disappear into their newly purchased multi-million-dollar homes and have hardly been heard from since.
The episodes of existential psychodramas that come and go—after doing enormous damage to the nation—are nearly endless.
A number of American and international agencies and “experts” have now, mostly quietly, sighed that global warming was never really the existential danger that the Left swore would put “Earth in the balance” in a mere decade.
Nonetheless, once again, the toll has been enormous. Germany wrecked its economy to seek mythical “net zero” carbon emissions—by dismantling natural gas, oil, and nuclear power plants and turning to costly, inefficient, and unreliable solar and wind power.
This green mania swept the Western world—as China built two to three coal-fired power plants a month.
The left-wing, postmodern, globalist notion of a borderless utopian world that would fuel endless “diversity” has done so much damage to Western nations that even the European Left now fears its own political suicide from the vast influxes of often hostile illegal aliens.
Millions of unlawful and unvetted entrants crashed the borders, with no desire to integrate, assimilate, or acculturate to their Western hosts. They have spiked crime, fueled anti-Semitism, and ensured unsustainable social welfare costs.
The transgender frenzy was to be the Left’s next civil rights crusade, as it constructed a new victimized class with reparatory claims against the guilty traditionalist majority.
It mattered little that gender dysphoria was an ancient phenomenon, documented even in classical literature as a rare and aberrant syndrome where physical sex was at odds with psychological sexual identification. That malady had also been well known to modern sexologists since the 19th century, who had documented it as rare, involving far less than 0.01 percent of the population.
Nevertheless, the Left invented the unnecessary Orwellian term “transphobe,” and suddenly we were off to the races with transgender biological men nude in gym showers with teen girls and transgender “women” with male musculoskeletal bodies dominating female sports.
Soon, an epidemic of teens began wondering whether they were in fact “trans” and pondering whether to undergo a battery of dangerous hormonal and chemical drug regimens—or calling themselves nonbinary, to the point where the new third sex sometimes seemed almost as numerous as the old two genders.
What accounts for these bouts of periodic, collective, and suicidal madness?
First, the craziness is almost always birthed in the contemporary, affluent, and leisured West, which alone has the capital and resources to afford such freakish sideshows.
Second, the frenzies are usually the creation of the Left, predictably birthed in universities, the media, and the bureaucracies. They appear with familiar symptoms. The irredeemable, deplorable, and “garbage” hoi polloi are supposedly too dense to be properly schooled and thus must be frightened to death in order to adopt agendas that otherwise appear to them as utterly insane.
Junk your natural-gas dryer and grill, or face massive floods on your coasts. Drop the SAT and defund the police or face endless race riots.
Hire thousands of race and gender commissars or be forever tagged as racists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes. Open the border and let illegal aliens enter by the millions, and thus pay partial penance for “whiteness” as the nation “checks its privilege.”
The Left is correct that few Western voters will openly embrace the unpopular elite agenda of racial fixations, globalism, laxity on crime, and degrowth environmentalism.
So, their long-term solutions have four predictable aspects:
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Open the borders to create a more diverse, impoverished, and needy constituency.
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Create fake “working-class” pseudo-populist candidates like the pampered Graham Platner, the God-is-nonbinary “new Christian” Talarico, and, of course, the waxen effigy of “good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.”
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Destroy time-tested systems by seeking to demolish the Electoral College, the 50-state union, the Senate filibuster, and the nine-justice Supreme Court.
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Gin up these end-of-days, pseudo-existential crises whose solutions require massive new taxes, bigger government, and more dictatorial elite managers.
One good sign of growing antidotes is that increasingly Americans, and indeed all Westerners, are saying no to green haranguers, no to the gender and sex demagogues, no to the race-baiting industry, no to the open-borders conglomerate, and no to ungrateful immigrants.
Their pushback might be summed up as follows: “We are no longer going to allow you to destroy ancient traditions that ensured our prosperity, security, and liberty, and which were handed down to us by generations far better than your own.”
