A Time of Chaos Upon Chaos Atop Chaos Victor Davis Hanson
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/22/a-time-of-chaos-upon-chaos-atop-chaos/
There are a series of battles to come in January 2021, in 2022, and in 2024 that will be definitive, if the chaos of 2020 does not become even more chaotic.
America will weather its current hysterias.
But the tensions and furor are reminiscent of the last generations of the Roman Republic. In its last century, Romans began to adjudicate politics by obsequious partisan town criers (their version of our media), mass demonstrations, and freelance street gangs. Looters, arsonists, and demonstrators did pretty much as they pleased in the streets of Rome without fear of legal consequences.
In our time, the media has now vanished—kaput, no more, ended.
Within a few hours, it goes from a Ministry-of-Truth love session with Joe Biden to a steaming verbal assault on the president’s press secretary—without a shred of awareness how ridiculous they appear in their passive-aggressive schizophrenia. The only constant is that reporters unapologetically seem to jettison their principles and professionalism to calibrate what they say and do by whose politics they support. They would prefer to be entirely discredited under a Biden presidency than be real journalists during a Trump Administration.
The current unspoken subtext of the media-progressive party fusion line is the following: It would be a felonious crime should conservatives now dare to disrupt a transition in the manner that the Left did in 2016. They should not dare to sue about voting machines in key states as did the Clinton surrogate Jill Stein. They would never attempt, in 2016 fashion, to sabotage the Electoral College voting by appealing to constitutionally appointed electors, or surveille top Biden campaign and transition officials and coordinate such monitoring inside the Trump Oval Office.
The point of the Steele dossier, the Russian collusion hoax, the calls for future impeachment even during the Trump transition, the abuse of the foreign intelligence surveillance courts and the weaponization of the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department was to weaken the Trump campaign, to disrupt the Trump transition, and to wound fatally the Trump presidency. For the architects, abettors, and enablers of those past efforts now to accuse Trump officials of adhering to what they created on a massive scale is comic.
Even more importantly, the media poorly prepared the nation for their envisioned Biden presidency. To foster that agenda, journalists have done enormous damage to the country. The bias inherent in Silicon Valley’s monopoly of the internet and social media communications was poorly disguised in efforts to aid the progressive effort. It is a matter now of only when, not if, these trusts and monopolies will be regulated and broken up.
There will still be half-hearted defenses of episodic accurate polling at the national or state level. But these pleas will be in vain, given that by and large, pollsters, as in 2016, did not just get the critical state voting wrong but predictably wrong in a predictable direction for predictable purposes. In pursuit of short-term gain, pollsters irrevocably ruined their reputations.
A frail Joe Biden was never fully vetted. Rather, he was protected and sheltered by the media. Now 330 million Americans will see whether cognitively he is up to impromptu press conferences, 18-hour days, tough negotiations with opportunistic foreign leaders, and the demands of traversing the country to rally both the country and his party adherents. A media that fed 25th Amendment hysterias during the Trump administration will have to pivot, and now declare any such talk absurd—lest Biden be subjected to the same sort of Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test that Trump aced.
The disturbing revelations about the Bidens and Burisma in October were never covered. As a result, for the duration of the Biden Administration, Hunter Biden will remain an object of scrutiny and investigation, along with many of his now angry associates who feel betrayed and are ready either to talk of their misplaced loyalty or broker ways out of their complicity. Who knows how long the media, without their ratings propped up by the Trump bogeyman, will ignore the buzz of a Biden familial syndicate—with a Kamala Harris always waiting in the wings.
So no one knows to what degree further revelations will emerge about Biden family corruption—only that all these allegations have heretofore not just been ignored but deliberately smothered by the media. And that is not a sustainable effort. The smell of scandal will linger throughout the Biden presidency.
After the 2017 machinations to lever Robert Mueller and his dream team into power, few on the Left canever credibly decry a possible appointment of a disinterested special prosecutor to look into Hunter Biden and familial associates. If Trump were to follow in the spirit of his enemies’ own protocols, what should he do—appoint a special counsel to look into the Bidens, with a Trumpian twist of pardoning the incoming president in advance for any crimes that emerge?
But most importantly, Americans have no idea of what the latest incarnation of Joe Biden will bring. Biden gave only scripted and teleprompted bromides from his basement. The media never pressed him to be clear on issues like the China reset, the Middle-East recalibration, fracking, the Green New Deal, reparations, the wall and open borders, proposed tax increases, and on and on.
So the country has little warning whether the Biden Administration will be guided by the hard Left agenda of Kamala Harris, “the squad,” or Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—or stung by the rejection of progressive extremism in the congressional elections and the close presidential race enough to move to the center.
Will Biden pursue or give up notions of ending the Electoral College, packing the court, admitting in new states, ending the Senate filibuster, neutering the Second Amendment, and other assorted radical promises? Whatever he decides will disappoint his leftwing BLM/socialist base, swing-state terrified congressional Democrats—and likely the bewildered American people.
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