A Few Cracks in the Progressive Wall
When the Ministry of Truth overreaches so blatantly — all hands on deck to suppress all bad news for Biden — it begins to look ridiculous.
by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson: The contemporary progressive agenda — of, say, an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren — has rarely appealed to 51 percent of the American electorate. Most polls show opposition to Court packing and the abolition of the Electoral College.
Voters don’t seem to like the Green New Deal. They oppose fracking bans, late-term abortions, open borders, and illegal immigration. Medicare for all and health care for illegal aliens aren’t winning issues. Usually the Left hammers these causes in primaries and then for six months denies their earlier support during the general-election campaign.
Still, these agendas endure because the Left has been as adroit in operating the levers of American cultural, economic, and social influence and power as it has been unsuccessful in obtaining popular political support for its elite-driven policies.
The media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, corporate boardrooms, the arts, public schools, higher education, the entertainment industries, Hollywood, the foundations, and professional sports exercise clout unseen at any time in American history.
In other words, the proverbial people daily accept that they will have their social media and Internet usage massaged by the Left. Movies and TV shows will propagandize progressive rather than reflect traditional or conservative themes.
The nation’s billionaires are largely progressives. They will use their suddenly non-dark money and heft to advance their pet left-wing projects. Corporate advertising will reflect woke messaging.
Government will be staffed by tens of thousands of partisan activist regulators and deep-state bureaucrats who, if for nothing other than self-interest, will lobby for larger and ever more activist government.
There will be no escape from the progressive panopticon when one flips on an NBA game, or watches the Super Bowl halftime show. The nation’s newspapers, online media, and public networks are force multipliers of this largely elite effort to transform America into something never envisioned by its Founders.
Hunter Becomes the Hunted
But every now and then, a few fissures appear in the massive ideological wall that reflect its structural weaknesses and provide peepholes to the truth.
Such were the past two weeks.
We just learned that one idiosyncratic computer repair operator had months ago handed over to the FBI — but kept copies in reserve — the hard drive of a Hunter Biden laptop. (Why would anyone these days not entirely trust the FBI?)
Does Joe Biden’s carefully orchestrated and scripted campaign now hang on the thread of Hunter abandoning his laptop for want of a less-than-$90 fix-it bill, just as he once left his drug paraphernalia in a rented car? And why wouldn’t the Biden campaign simply deny the authenticity of the computer hard drives, show proof that Biden on key dates was nowhere in the vicinity of the alleged meetings, and hunt down the recipients and senders of the emails to show that they are fake or to prove the supposedly embarrassing pictures were photoshopped?
If not, we are back to Hillary’s brilliant high-tech 2016 campaign machine being betrayed by the texted libido of Carlos Danger.
Hunter’s correspondence may become the most incriminating corpus of emails and photos in modern political history, far more damning than even Hillary’s private-server scandal — given that the Biden family was apparently receiving money to massage U.S. foreign policy in ways that were in its, not America’s, interests. In place of the email ruse of Hillary’s yoga and wedding planning, we have Hunter’s crack pipe and escorts. Whereas the former could falsely claim her deleted emails were all about such private business, Hunter could only too accurately confess that many of his were likewise very private.
In response, the Wall started to crack. Twitter and Facebook ad hoc started making up or, rather incoherently, rewriting existing protocols to ban the transmission of evidence. That had all the effect of wearing a mask to stop a pesky SARS-CoV-2 invader.
Big Tech’s paranoias ipso facto likely proved that Joe Biden was lying when he denied knowledge of his son’s Ukrainian, Russian, and Chinese influence-peddling and profiteering. How odd that, to the tech barons, it was an easy call to aid and abet his untruth, just weeks before an anticipated progressive return to power.
Indeed, unless the Bidens successfully challenge the authenticity of the emails, any reader will learn that Joe Biden, at least in his son Hunter’s indignant view, may well have presided over a vast tribal scheme to leverage his own office for family profiteering — with a much-resented greedy 50 percent rake-off for dear old “Pop.” Did Joe Biden charge his own ethically challenged family a greater finder’s fee than most agents charge?
The brazenness of such shake-downing and the magnitude of such grifting appear staggering. Was all of the above known to the FBI at the very time the U.S. House of Representatives was impeaching the president for a phone call in which he expressed outrage that the Ukrainians in the past had so shamelessly colluded with the Bidens at the expense of U.S. interests? Hunter’s emails read almost like a de facto script of what Trump lectured the Ukrainians about.
In other words, if authenticated, the trove more or less repudiates all the denials of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, the DNC and the media about the Bidens’ quid pro quoing. And it post facto confirms that the impeachment of Donald Trump was an utter farce, another case of progressive projection, the same way that Hillary’s collusion ruse hid her own email embarrassments.
The Media Monster
More stunning was the cohesive effort of the media — online, social, and Internet — to squash the story and excommunicate any who dared to investigate or promulgate it. The public could only conclude that Donald Trump’s harangues about a deeply conflicted FBI and a fused Democratic-Media Party were, if anything, understated.
Who in the world would ever again trust a media account of a Democratic politician caught in scandal? And how could such a walls-are-closing-in bombshell be quashed? Only by huge tech monopolies, exempt from antitrust laws, and operating as public Internet utilities without oversight of the sort applied to power companies, interstate commerce, or communication corporations.
In other words, Hunter’s emails were a test case. Would a trillion-dollar Facebook or Twitter dare to censor a story on purely political grounds to protect its own candidate, without fear of provoking a backlash that might lead to its own regulation and fragmentation?
Yes, of course, given the arrogance of Silicon Valley billionaires. Apparently, they had not a care that silencing, or radically censoring, the public communications of one candidate’s allies to aid his rival would constitute the largest unreported campaign contribution in U.S. election history — the private equivalent of a public FCC shutting down before Election Day Rush Limbaugh’s privately owned broadcasts or bleeping out parts of Sean Hannity’s show.
Almost at the same time, Amazon Streaming deplatformed Shelby and Eli Steele’s documentary on Ferguson (What Killed Michael Brown?) — but not on grounds that it was factually incorrect. The implicit default reason was that the documentary film was only too convincing and might embarrass the rich, elite, establishment leftists who entirely embraced BLM mythography.
The soft-spoken Shelby Steele was no obscure documentarian, no wild-eyed partisan, but one of the most prominent intellectuals and writers in America, with a maverick reputation of speaking and writing inconvenient truths about race relations, past and present.
Note that at the same time the Steeles were censored, the progressive octopus was doing its best at damage control, as the 1619 Project and its Pulitzer Prize–winning author were imploding from the increasing weight of their own untruth. In the end, the New York Times had to quietly Trotskyize its own website. Nikole Hannah-Jones had to lie, insisting that she had never claimed 1619 was the foundational date of America — even though she herself had made this ludicrous assertion the centerpiece of her entire mythology. In the end, she was reduced to a Jussie Smollett–style narcissistic defense that those who exposed her hoax were, of course, racists, scared of powerful, historical figures — such as herself — no doubt “speaking truth to power.”
We accept that the media feel that their duty — often explicitly outlined by reporters such as Jim Rutenberg, Christiane Amanpour, Jorge Ramos, and Jim Acosta — is now rank activism. Reporters proclaim that they can no longer be neutral in the age of Donald Trump but must be partisan volunteers in league with the Left to save the country from the supposedly various conspiracies posed by the demonic Trump.
Note in this context that Steve Scully, the moderator of the second debate, which Trump sensed in advance was loaded, was shocked at any hint that he was biased. What did it matter that he had interned for Joe Biden? Who cared that he kept up his close friendship with the Bidenites?
When it was revealed that he had texted arch-Trump-hater Anthony Scaramucci for advice about handling Trump’s boisterous accusations of bias, Scully went with the full leftist defense of “I was hacked!” He guessed rightly that, as happened with Joy Reid’s homophobic tweets, plenty of “journalists” and “institutions” would snap to his defense. And so C-SPAN and the Debate Commission, on the word of Scully alone, did just that — at least until his transparent lie of being “hacked” was confirmed for what it was.
Biden’s ABC town hall and Trump’s NBC counterpart went exactly as one would expect. Ex-Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos lobbed softballs to Biden, while avoiding any mention of the Hunter Biden email scandal. The Trump “moderator” Savannah Guthrie, spouse of a former Al Gore aide and a former prominent Democratic operative, did her best to reassure her colleagues that she was debating Trump, not moderating disinterested town-hall questioners.
These Ministry of Truth–style arrangements are not sustainable propositions. When journalists sell their souls to the Left in such a Faustian bargain — as we know from the private cackles of a Ben Rhodes or Jonathan Gruber or John Podesta — they earn only contempt from their progressive paymasters, who treat them as bought lackies.
So it was no surprise that the usually obsequious Wolf Blitzer of CNN was blasted as a partisan and a hack by Speaker Nancy Pelosi for timidly suggesting that Pelosi maybe should sort of, kind of work for compromise on a stimulus bill for ailing Americans. Blitzer got the same treatment that marquee journalists get from Joe Biden when they hesitantly apologize for wondering whether he is going to pack the Court or whether he could possibly know just a bit about Hunter’s shenanigans. So CBS’s Bo Erickson seemed shocked that Biden would attack him for simply asking Biden to comment on his son’s emails: “He called it a ‘smear campaign’ and then went after me” — as if Biden should have had no cause to doubt that CBS would be staying in its lane as a Biden propagandist. The ruling political class has far less respect for its dutiful and numerous toadies than for its few perceived remaining critics.
Long Live Jim Comey
The emails also raise more questions about the FBI in the Lisa Page/Peter Strzok/Andrew McCabe/James Comey age of corruption.
Rumors have been long spreading that the FBI has been stonewalling DOJ requests for documents pertaining to its own misbehavior between 2016 and 2018 in promulgating the Russia-collusion hoax.
Apparently, the FBI’s silent, wait-it-out subtext was that with a supposedly likely Biden victory, John Durham most certainly would stop investigating FBI corruption, especially given the possibility of the next president’s old footprints leading in and out of the morass.
Such lack of confidence in the FBI is warranted when one reads the entire Strzok-Page trove, reviews the work of Kevin Clinesmith, or recalls how dozens of FBI phones were mysteriously and almost simultaneously cleansed of data.
The public still does not know why the FBI allowed the DNC to turn over its hacked hard drive not to the FBI but only to CrowdStrike, a private, pro-Clinton firm run by an ex-FBI Washington grandee. The public has belatedly discovered that the FBI never questioned CrowdStrike’s Hillary-friendly, media-manufactured initial narrative that the “Russians” broke into the DNC trove on behalf of Donald Trump.
No one in government, known for its leaking propensities, let it be known to the public that for some two years CrowdStrike’s president had been forced to concede under oath to a congressional committee that in fact his firm had discovered no evidence at all of Russian hacking. Left unasked was then: Who or what obtained the emails? And why did the FBI and CrowdStrike for years mislead if not lie to the public?
Wages of Ridiculousness
The progressive project is now hubristic, drunk with power and the belief that it can control an America that does not like it and that in turn it holds in contempt.
But with hubris comes nemesis, as we saw on all fronts last week. Joe Biden, the DNC, the media, Silicon Valley, the identity-politics industry, and the FBI were all shown to be not so much partisan and corrupt as, far more important, inept and ridiculous.
The corrupt can tolerate charges that they are dishonest, because such an accusation implies (they assume) a tacit compliment that they are also cunning and adroit in obtaining such power in the first place to use for such unethical purposes.
But when they become so brazen that they are exposed as silly and absurd, they begin to fear. The Left doesn’t mind being portrayed as Machiavellian or even perhaps a little Rasputin-like. But they can’t tolerate being revealed as the buffoons they so often are.
And last week they were certainly buffoonish.
------------------------
Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. 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.
Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, A Few Cracks, Progressive Wall To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
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| Victor Davis Hanson |
by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson: The contemporary progressive agenda — of, say, an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren — has rarely appealed to 51 percent of the American electorate. Most polls show opposition to Court packing and the abolition of the Electoral College.
Voters don’t seem to like the Green New Deal. They oppose fracking bans, late-term abortions, open borders, and illegal immigration. Medicare for all and health care for illegal aliens aren’t winning issues. Usually the Left hammers these causes in primaries and then for six months denies their earlier support during the general-election campaign.
Still, these agendas endure because the Left has been as adroit in operating the levers of American cultural, economic, and social influence and power as it has been unsuccessful in obtaining popular political support for its elite-driven policies.
The media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, corporate boardrooms, the arts, public schools, higher education, the entertainment industries, Hollywood, the foundations, and professional sports exercise clout unseen at any time in American history.
In other words, the proverbial people daily accept that they will have their social media and Internet usage massaged by the Left. Movies and TV shows will propagandize progressive rather than reflect traditional or conservative themes.
The nation’s billionaires are largely progressives. They will use their suddenly non-dark money and heft to advance their pet left-wing projects. Corporate advertising will reflect woke messaging.
Government will be staffed by tens of thousands of partisan activist regulators and deep-state bureaucrats who, if for nothing other than self-interest, will lobby for larger and ever more activist government.
There will be no escape from the progressive panopticon when one flips on an NBA game, or watches the Super Bowl halftime show. The nation’s newspapers, online media, and public networks are force multipliers of this largely elite effort to transform America into something never envisioned by its Founders.
Hunter Becomes the Hunted
But every now and then, a few fissures appear in the massive ideological wall that reflect its structural weaknesses and provide peepholes to the truth.
Such were the past two weeks.
We just learned that one idiosyncratic computer repair operator had months ago handed over to the FBI — but kept copies in reserve — the hard drive of a Hunter Biden laptop. (Why would anyone these days not entirely trust the FBI?)
Does Joe Biden’s carefully orchestrated and scripted campaign now hang on the thread of Hunter abandoning his laptop for want of a less-than-$90 fix-it bill, just as he once left his drug paraphernalia in a rented car? And why wouldn’t the Biden campaign simply deny the authenticity of the computer hard drives, show proof that Biden on key dates was nowhere in the vicinity of the alleged meetings, and hunt down the recipients and senders of the emails to show that they are fake or to prove the supposedly embarrassing pictures were photoshopped?
If not, we are back to Hillary’s brilliant high-tech 2016 campaign machine being betrayed by the texted libido of Carlos Danger.
Hunter’s correspondence may become the most incriminating corpus of emails and photos in modern political history, far more damning than even Hillary’s private-server scandal — given that the Biden family was apparently receiving money to massage U.S. foreign policy in ways that were in its, not America’s, interests. In place of the email ruse of Hillary’s yoga and wedding planning, we have Hunter’s crack pipe and escorts. Whereas the former could falsely claim her deleted emails were all about such private business, Hunter could only too accurately confess that many of his were likewise very private.
In response, the Wall started to crack. Twitter and Facebook ad hoc started making up or, rather incoherently, rewriting existing protocols to ban the transmission of evidence. That had all the effect of wearing a mask to stop a pesky SARS-CoV-2 invader.
Big Tech’s paranoias ipso facto likely proved that Joe Biden was lying when he denied knowledge of his son’s Ukrainian, Russian, and Chinese influence-peddling and profiteering. How odd that, to the tech barons, it was an easy call to aid and abet his untruth, just weeks before an anticipated progressive return to power.
Indeed, unless the Bidens successfully challenge the authenticity of the emails, any reader will learn that Joe Biden, at least in his son Hunter’s indignant view, may well have presided over a vast tribal scheme to leverage his own office for family profiteering — with a much-resented greedy 50 percent rake-off for dear old “Pop.” Did Joe Biden charge his own ethically challenged family a greater finder’s fee than most agents charge?
The brazenness of such shake-downing and the magnitude of such grifting appear staggering. Was all of the above known to the FBI at the very time the U.S. House of Representatives was impeaching the president for a phone call in which he expressed outrage that the Ukrainians in the past had so shamelessly colluded with the Bidens at the expense of U.S. interests? Hunter’s emails read almost like a de facto script of what Trump lectured the Ukrainians about.
In other words, if authenticated, the trove more or less repudiates all the denials of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, the DNC and the media about the Bidens’ quid pro quoing. And it post facto confirms that the impeachment of Donald Trump was an utter farce, another case of progressive projection, the same way that Hillary’s collusion ruse hid her own email embarrassments.
The Media Monster
More stunning was the cohesive effort of the media — online, social, and Internet — to squash the story and excommunicate any who dared to investigate or promulgate it. The public could only conclude that Donald Trump’s harangues about a deeply conflicted FBI and a fused Democratic-Media Party were, if anything, understated.
Who in the world would ever again trust a media account of a Democratic politician caught in scandal? And how could such a walls-are-closing-in bombshell be quashed? Only by huge tech monopolies, exempt from antitrust laws, and operating as public Internet utilities without oversight of the sort applied to power companies, interstate commerce, or communication corporations.
In other words, Hunter’s emails were a test case. Would a trillion-dollar Facebook or Twitter dare to censor a story on purely political grounds to protect its own candidate, without fear of provoking a backlash that might lead to its own regulation and fragmentation?
Yes, of course, given the arrogance of Silicon Valley billionaires. Apparently, they had not a care that silencing, or radically censoring, the public communications of one candidate’s allies to aid his rival would constitute the largest unreported campaign contribution in U.S. election history — the private equivalent of a public FCC shutting down before Election Day Rush Limbaugh’s privately owned broadcasts or bleeping out parts of Sean Hannity’s show.
Almost at the same time, Amazon Streaming deplatformed Shelby and Eli Steele’s documentary on Ferguson (What Killed Michael Brown?) — but not on grounds that it was factually incorrect. The implicit default reason was that the documentary film was only too convincing and might embarrass the rich, elite, establishment leftists who entirely embraced BLM mythography.
The soft-spoken Shelby Steele was no obscure documentarian, no wild-eyed partisan, but one of the most prominent intellectuals and writers in America, with a maverick reputation of speaking and writing inconvenient truths about race relations, past and present.
Note that at the same time the Steeles were censored, the progressive octopus was doing its best at damage control, as the 1619 Project and its Pulitzer Prize–winning author were imploding from the increasing weight of their own untruth. In the end, the New York Times had to quietly Trotskyize its own website. Nikole Hannah-Jones had to lie, insisting that she had never claimed 1619 was the foundational date of America — even though she herself had made this ludicrous assertion the centerpiece of her entire mythology. In the end, she was reduced to a Jussie Smollett–style narcissistic defense that those who exposed her hoax were, of course, racists, scared of powerful, historical figures — such as herself — no doubt “speaking truth to power.”
We accept that the media feel that their duty — often explicitly outlined by reporters such as Jim Rutenberg, Christiane Amanpour, Jorge Ramos, and Jim Acosta — is now rank activism. Reporters proclaim that they can no longer be neutral in the age of Donald Trump but must be partisan volunteers in league with the Left to save the country from the supposedly various conspiracies posed by the demonic Trump.
Note in this context that Steve Scully, the moderator of the second debate, which Trump sensed in advance was loaded, was shocked at any hint that he was biased. What did it matter that he had interned for Joe Biden? Who cared that he kept up his close friendship with the Bidenites?
When it was revealed that he had texted arch-Trump-hater Anthony Scaramucci for advice about handling Trump’s boisterous accusations of bias, Scully went with the full leftist defense of “I was hacked!” He guessed rightly that, as happened with Joy Reid’s homophobic tweets, plenty of “journalists” and “institutions” would snap to his defense. And so C-SPAN and the Debate Commission, on the word of Scully alone, did just that — at least until his transparent lie of being “hacked” was confirmed for what it was.
Biden’s ABC town hall and Trump’s NBC counterpart went exactly as one would expect. Ex-Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos lobbed softballs to Biden, while avoiding any mention of the Hunter Biden email scandal. The Trump “moderator” Savannah Guthrie, spouse of a former Al Gore aide and a former prominent Democratic operative, did her best to reassure her colleagues that she was debating Trump, not moderating disinterested town-hall questioners.
These Ministry of Truth–style arrangements are not sustainable propositions. When journalists sell their souls to the Left in such a Faustian bargain — as we know from the private cackles of a Ben Rhodes or Jonathan Gruber or John Podesta — they earn only contempt from their progressive paymasters, who treat them as bought lackies.
So it was no surprise that the usually obsequious Wolf Blitzer of CNN was blasted as a partisan and a hack by Speaker Nancy Pelosi for timidly suggesting that Pelosi maybe should sort of, kind of work for compromise on a stimulus bill for ailing Americans. Blitzer got the same treatment that marquee journalists get from Joe Biden when they hesitantly apologize for wondering whether he is going to pack the Court or whether he could possibly know just a bit about Hunter’s shenanigans. So CBS’s Bo Erickson seemed shocked that Biden would attack him for simply asking Biden to comment on his son’s emails: “He called it a ‘smear campaign’ and then went after me” — as if Biden should have had no cause to doubt that CBS would be staying in its lane as a Biden propagandist. The ruling political class has far less respect for its dutiful and numerous toadies than for its few perceived remaining critics.
Long Live Jim Comey
The emails also raise more questions about the FBI in the Lisa Page/Peter Strzok/Andrew McCabe/James Comey age of corruption.
Rumors have been long spreading that the FBI has been stonewalling DOJ requests for documents pertaining to its own misbehavior between 2016 and 2018 in promulgating the Russia-collusion hoax.
Apparently, the FBI’s silent, wait-it-out subtext was that with a supposedly likely Biden victory, John Durham most certainly would stop investigating FBI corruption, especially given the possibility of the next president’s old footprints leading in and out of the morass.
Such lack of confidence in the FBI is warranted when one reads the entire Strzok-Page trove, reviews the work of Kevin Clinesmith, or recalls how dozens of FBI phones were mysteriously and almost simultaneously cleansed of data.
The public still does not know why the FBI allowed the DNC to turn over its hacked hard drive not to the FBI but only to CrowdStrike, a private, pro-Clinton firm run by an ex-FBI Washington grandee. The public has belatedly discovered that the FBI never questioned CrowdStrike’s Hillary-friendly, media-manufactured initial narrative that the “Russians” broke into the DNC trove on behalf of Donald Trump.
No one in government, known for its leaking propensities, let it be known to the public that for some two years CrowdStrike’s president had been forced to concede under oath to a congressional committee that in fact his firm had discovered no evidence at all of Russian hacking. Left unasked was then: Who or what obtained the emails? And why did the FBI and CrowdStrike for years mislead if not lie to the public?
Wages of Ridiculousness
The progressive project is now hubristic, drunk with power and the belief that it can control an America that does not like it and that in turn it holds in contempt.
But with hubris comes nemesis, as we saw on all fronts last week. Joe Biden, the DNC, the media, Silicon Valley, the identity-politics industry, and the FBI were all shown to be not so much partisan and corrupt as, far more important, inept and ridiculous.
The corrupt can tolerate charges that they are dishonest, because such an accusation implies (they assume) a tacit compliment that they are also cunning and adroit in obtaining such power in the first place to use for such unethical purposes.
But when they become so brazen that they are exposed as silly and absurd, they begin to fear. The Left doesn’t mind being portrayed as Machiavellian or even perhaps a little Rasputin-like. But they can’t tolerate being revealed as the buffoons they so often are.
And last week they were certainly buffoonish.
------------------------
Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. 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.
Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, A Few Cracks, Progressive Wall To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
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