Leftwing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychodrama. Part One Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/leftwing-hysteria-and-the-art-of-the-psychodrama-part-one/
What follows is an extended analysis of how the Left obtains power without agendas that win popular support, and how such aggrandizement inflames social relations and national unity.
The progressive media—which constitute the majority of print newspapers, network news, public radio and TV, Google/Apple/Yahoo news, and the best-funded online venues—have fused with the hard-left Democratic Party. Most in the media, like most Democrats, accept the reality that the progressive, and increasingly neo-socialist, agenda does not and will never win majority support.
Americans want a closed border, a crackdown on crime, fossil-fuel independence, control of inflation and drunken spending, and an end to the woke cancel culture.
So how does the fusion media/political Left obtain power? Usually by the politics of distraction and feigned crises—perhaps better defined as the art of the psychodrama.
Daily the Left scans the news. It ceaselessly ferrets out any story that can be sensationalized and distorted to frighten, to anger, or to confuse the public into thinking America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, and downright awful place run by an elite, rich cadre of prejudicial, white-male Christian nationalists.
And then, presto, social media fuels the agreed-on lie. Television news accelerates it. And print journalism distorts it—all part of an agenda to justify radical changes (“fundamental transformations”) in America otherwise impossible.
Such leftwing propagandizing and warping the news disguise the reality that the Left is now the home of the hyper-rich, the racial tribalists and separatists, and the cultural elites. The lies additionally manufacture necessary conditions for crises, and with crises an opening to push through legislation and candidates otherwise likely to be rejected.
When a purported interracial incident hits the news—or rather offers the rarer ingredients of a white assailant and a black victim—it becomes utilized as yet another proof that America is not only racist, but also must offer radical reparatory atonement for its sin. The reparatory project is to be overseen by powerful bicoastal elites working on our behalf, but never subject to the consequences of their own toxic ideologies.
It took most Americans about an hour to detect that Jussie Smollett was a complete fraud and hoaxer. White MAGA-hatted rednecks, prepped and armed with nooses and bleach, don’t stomp around in near-Arctic weather in the streets of liberal Chicago neighborhoods, in the wee hours no less, to meet up with young black actors on Empire.
Much less can even diabolical white racists defy the laws of chemistry and carry around liquid bleach in near-zero air temperatures, assured it will not solidify. Much, much less are they overpowered and put to flight by a singly diminutive, physically unimpressive actor, while he kicks and swings, and yet, juggler-style, holds his sandwich and cell phone—all with a noose around his neck no less. All this is what progressive America asked us to believe—and remedy.
No matter. The evil genius of the huckster Smollett lay in that he knew that his scheme of personal aggrandizement paralleled and could weld with progressive America’s agendas and so he offered himself as yet another justification for collective racial guilt, atonement, and reparatory concessions.
Then we were off to the races, as everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Kamala Harris was appalled at Jussie’s slightly bloody, staged wounded face, and by extension how “racist” America still remained—and how more of their progressive work was called for to fix it.
The more absurd the scenario, all the better. Leftwing Chicago far more fit the “it can happen anywhere” script of racially driven anti-black violence than Biloxi, Mississippi.
Dare suggest that the has-been actor Jussie was a mediocre con artist, terrified of descending into deserved obscurity without a fresh injection of staged victimhood, and one became a “racist.” If one went further and pointed out that while Jussie faked violence against a black man, meanwhile, nightly in Chicago black men were stabbed and shot to collective indifference of the race industry, one then became a hyper-racist. The common denominator of any such comparison of these two phenomena, as it turned out, was not just black victims of physical violence in Chicago, but the majority of perpetrators of both real and faked violence in this case were themselves black.
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