by WorldTribune Staff, September 6, 2023
The Left has over the past two decades managed to gain control of most institutions of power and influence in the United States, including the corporate boardroom, major media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood, historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson noted.
Here’s what they did with that power:
“Between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bicoastal rich and subsidized poor — obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed,” Hanson wrote for American Greatness on Sept. 4.
The Obamas entered the White House “spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate (‘spread the wealth,’ ‘just downright mean country,’ ‘get in their face,’ ‘first time I’ve been proud of my country’) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized,” Hanson noted.
After governing by dividing the country, the Obamas “left the White House as soon-to-be mansion living, mega-rich elites, cashing in on the fears they had inculcated over the prior eight years,” Hanson added.
While demonizing his opponents and his country, Obama sought to “push through the accompanying unpopular agendas of an open border, mandatory wind and solar energy, racial essentialism, and the weaponization of the state,” Hanson wrote.
But Obama was stopped from accomplishing all that he set out to as Democrats lost some 1,400 local and state offices during his eight years in the White House. Obama’s party also lost both houses of Congress during his tenure.
Then came 2020 and an opportunity for many Obama loyalists to return to the Executive Branch and complete Obama’s unfulfilled ambitions to transform the Democrat Party and the country.
“It was ironic that while Obama was acknowledged as young and charismatic, nonetheless a cognitively challenged, past plagiarist, fabulist, and utterly corrupt Joe Biden was far more effective in ramming through a socialist woke agenda and altering the very way Americans vote and conduct their legal system,” Hanson wrote.
“Stranger still, Biden accomplished this subversion of traditional America while debilitated and often mentally inert — along with being mired in a bribery and influence-peddling scandal that may ultimately confirm that he easily was the most corrupt president to hold office in U.S. history.”
How was it possible?
“Covid had allowed the unwell Biden to run a surrogate campaign from his basement as he outsourced his politicking to a corrupt media,” Hanson continued. “Senility proved a godsend for Biden. His cognitive disabilities masked his newfound radicalism and long-accustomed incompetence. Unlike his past failed campaigns, the lockdowns allowed Biden to be rarely seen or heard — and thus as much liked in the abstract as he had previously been disliked in the concrete.”
Hanson detailed what Biden’s puppeteers have unleashed in less than three years:
“They launched a base attack on the American legal system. Supreme Court judges are libeled, their houses swarmed, and their lives threatened with impunity. The Left promised to pack the court or to ignore any decision it resents. The media runs hit pieces on any conservative justice deemed too influential. The prior Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer whipped up a mob outside the court’s doors, and threatened two justices by name. As Schumer presciently put it, they would soon ‘reap the whirlwind’ of what they supposedly had sowed and thus would have no idea what was about to ‘hit’ them.
“Under the pretense of Covid fears, balloting went from 70 percent participation on election day in most states to a mere 30 percent. Yet the rates of properly rejected illegal or improper ballots often dived by a magnitude of ten.
“Assaults now followed on hallowed processes, laws, customs, and institutions—the Senate filibuster, the 50-state union, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, Election Day, and voter IDs.
“Under Biden, the revolution had institutionalized first-term impeachment, the trial of an ex-president while a private citizen, and the indictment of a chief political rival and ex-president on trumped up charges by local and federal prosecutors—all to destroy a political rival and alter the 2024 election cycle.
“Biden destroyed the southern border — literally. Eight million entered illegally — no background checks, no green cards, no proof of vaccinations. America will be dealing with the consequences for decades. Mexico was delighted, receiving some $60 million in annual remittances, while the cartels were empowered to ship enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year. …
“There is no longer a commitment to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is a woke, intolerant group trying to ban free expression under the pretense of fighting ‘hate’ speech and ‘disinformation.’
“The Left has revived McCarthyite loyal oaths straight out of the 1950s, forcing professors, job applicants, and students applying for college to pledge their commitment to ‘diversity’ as a requisite for hiring, admittance, or promotion. Diversity is our era’s version of the Jacobins’ ‘Cult of Reason.’
“Race relations hit a 50-year nadir. Joe Biden has a long history of racist insults and putdowns. And now as apparent penance, he has reinvented himself as a reverse racial provocateur, spouting nonsense about white supremacy, exploiting shootings or hyping racial tensions to ensure that an increasingly disgusted black electorate does not leave the new Democratic Party.
“The military has adopted wokeism, oblivious that it has eroded meritocracy in the ranks and slashed military recruitment. It is underfunded, wracked by internal suspicion, loss of morale and ginned up racial and gender animosity. Its supply stocks are drained. Arms productions is snail-like, and generalship is seen as a revolving door to corporate defense contractor board riches.”
The question now is, will the Left’s upheaval succeed?
“All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country,” Hanson concluded.
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Hanson: Under Obama, the Left seized all levers of power; Then came the revolution added by Editor Two on
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