Vote No on 1984 By Victor Davis Hanson
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/vote-no-on-1984/
Thought crimes, ministries of truth, and memory holes belong in Oceania, not America.
If we were to wake up in 2022, would we be more likely to see a 15-person Supreme Court, a Senate without a filibuster, a nation without an Electoral College, and an effort to admit two more states and with them four more senators if Joe Biden or Donald Trump were president?
Why would we blow up a nine-justice Supreme Court after 151 years, or a 233-year Electoral College, or a 170-year Senate filibuster, or a 60-year 50-state Union? And why now? What is the theme, the argument, the momentum for shattering these traditions, other than that progressives see them as ancient impediments to their radical ends?
Who, if president, would alter our ways of governance, and who would resist? Why are the proponents of these radical changes to the way we are governed so fanatical and yet so quiet about their intentions?
We know that about 99.7–99.8 percent of those under 60 who are infected with the coronavirus survive the disease. We know that the more we lock down everyone under quarantines, the more we risk scattering our resources to cover everyone — many of whom do not need such investment — only to short the vulnerable and elderly who most certainly do need the protection.
In which administration — Biden’s or Trump’s — will more Americans die or become ill under quarantine from increased substance, familial, and spousal abuse, from missed medical procedures and surgeries, from depression and suicide, and from the loss of their livelihoods than will die from the virus itself?
Will the forced loss of school time and ensuing economic lethargy hurt the future of today’s youth, the 20-year-olds and younger Americans, who are nearly immune from infection? Are we nuts to wonder why our “health-care professionals” swear to us in petitions that demonstrating in the streets — packed with people screaming, often without masks and sanitizers, and in phalanx-like ranks — benefits the mental health of the oppressed but sitting in a pew in church is insurrectionary and nearly felonious?
Are we crazy who watch the violence in our streets and scream at our TVs that that masked man, this hooded woman on the screen is, in real time, assaulting the police, looting a family’s store, tossing a firebomb at a police car — and all with virtual immunity? Did Americans miss out on some new state or local law decreeing that it’s now legal to ransack a store or demolish a business?
Are we callous and uncaring to expect the police to arrest those who destroy the livelihoods and property of others, or are those who commit such violence the real merciless ones? And which candidate is more likely to support the equal enforcement of the law, and with it the present and future of the those cannot protect themselves and their own?
Is this even an election year, a campaign with two candidates? Is there a media Left, or is it a Big Tech/Big Media ministry that rents itself out to the most opulent left-wing candidate, and now assures that what is aberrant is perfectly normal?
Is Joe Biden even campaigning in the American tradition of an election year? Does he go hammer and tongs with the press, wake them up at rallies, bring the press into his hectic traveling circle?
Has any reporter asked him to just assure us that Hunter’s emails are indeed Russian disinformation, that he never met a single one of Hunter’s foreign lobbyists/agents, that none of his income came from foreign interests via his son — in other words, that all that he has assured us in the past is not a complete fabrication?
Which septuagenarian, Biden or Trump, is more likely to allow a journalist’s question and then give an answer? To crisscross the country? To take flak and return it? Who will seek victory through meeting the people, and who by avoiding them? Are we unhinged to trust our senses that in the year 2020, for the first time in 100 years, a candidate simply stayed home and outsourced his campaign to an obsequious media?
When they tell us that abortion does not kill the living, that our elite follow the science that nonetheless shows that life is viable in the womb if not ended by the scalpel, who is crazy, who sane?For a generation so prone to damn the past by the standards of the present, what will our grandchildren say about us in 50 years, we who have aborted 2,000 to 3,000 infants a day? Will they scream that we were racists to allow 1,000 African-American lives to be extinguished every 24 hours? And which current presidential candidate would be more likely to say, “Please, don’t do this” and which to boast, “Who are you to object?”
When listening the other day to the senatorial furor directed at Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder and CEO, I thought of the 19th-century agrarian venom against the railroad monopolies that rigged freight rates when farmers had no other way to ship their produce. Dorsey essentially admitted that, as a private tech baron, he too can do as he pleases. And as he pleases means censoring conservative content on all he owns.
Dorsey, like the late-19th-century railroad conglomerates, operates a virtual octopus, as do Facebook and Google. Their tentacles squeeze out all their competition. They are vertically integrated. Long ago they strangulated competitors and censored and rigged their operations in a way that assumes that they are neither operating in the public domain like a utility nor subject to antitrust and anti-monopoly laws that tend to reappear when moguls express open contempt for their customers.
Which candidate, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, is more likely to rein in Big Tech? In 2023, will our Google searches, Twitter accounts, and Facebook postings become more massaged and warped under a President Trump or a President Biden?
What memory hole have we fallen into? If any of us did what Hunter Biden has for 20 years, what jail would we be in now? We thought we had seen, read, and heard evidence that Joe Biden and his brood have for decades crafted a family influence-peddling syndicate, in which his family sold the Biden name to help foreign and domestic profiteers gain an advantage over their competitors, as “Pop” Biden raked in 50 percent of Hunter’s profits. Is there yet any argument that Joe Biden has not done this?
At least for now, no Biden has sued the peripatetic Rudy Giuliani for libel and character defamation. No forensic analyst from famed CrowdStrike had stepped forward to say that the “metadata” prove that Hunter’s emails and texts are fake. No recipient of Hunter’s communications has said they were forged. No Silicon Valley sleuth had dedicated his progressive services to prove the Hunter laptop is a fiction, a tool of Russian disinformation.
Yet we are told by the ruling classes, the media, and the elite that there is no such scandal. We, not the Bidens, are unethical for asking about crimes; they are ethical for committing them. Who is more likely to allow justice to play out: Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Will John Durham continue pursuing his investigation of criminal activity at the FBI, DOJ, and CIA in 2021 if Joe is president, or if Donald is?
Whom does the top of the Fortune 400 prefer for president? Who promises to spend $50, $70, $100 million of his fortune to warp the way we vote? Does the progressive term “dark money” still apply when all that it now entails is spending in order to nullify the will of the middle and lower-middle classes? Is Michael Bloomberg or George Soros now the topic of an exposé about the corrupting influence of money on politics?
For three years, our elites cried “Russians, Russians” under every American bed — a chorus sung by the very architects of the “reset” who preached to us in 2009 that we needed to reach out to Vladimir Putin.
But by 2020, we had seen the corruption of the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA in their joint quest to cobble together a Hillary Clinton–concocted hoax to smear Donald Trump as an illegitimate president because he “colluded with Russia.” Or so we were instructed by our media Big Brothers.
Were not FISA courts lied to and deceived? Certainly, evidence was altered by the FBI. Names of the improperly surveilled were unmasked and leaked to toadyish reporters — as the lawbreaking became a sort of sport, a plaything, this ruining of lives.
American citizens, in government and in campaigns, were spied on by their public servants, unlawfully, unethically, and unscrupulously. We were told, after 22 months and $40 million, that the greatest collection of supposedly stellar American legal talent — just think of it, Robert Mueller and his all-stars, the dream team, the hunter-killers of the courtroom — would crucify the president on a cross of Russian gold.
All for what? A lie of Hillary Clinton’s, constructed in part to help her win a “sure thing” presidency? A way of hiding her own various email lies and scandals? A way of justifying her defeat? What were all those firewalls for? What did the DNC, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele nexus seek to hide? How many lies were told and lives ruined as the price for seeding and growing the colossal farce? Who would be more likely to hold all those culpable accountable: Donald Trump or Joe Biden?
Most Americans appreciate that, in real dollars at the pump or in heating costs for their homes, their energy bill is cheaper than ever. Who is upset that in places such as rural Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and rural Pennsylvania and Colorado, once-forgotten young men and women now earn good money in the energy business?
It was once a source of pride not only that the United States was the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, but that we had reduced our carbon footprint far more and at less cost to the economy than have many of the loudest signatories of the Paris climate accord.
But most important, Americans saw fracking as a way out of the labyrinth of the Middle East, where for 75 years Americans have sent expeditionary armies, usually on the subtext that Middle East energy was key to the world and especially to the American economy.
What country had the post-war U.S. not sent troops to in the wider region? Iraq? Syria? Lebanon? Libya? Kuwait? Somalia? Sudan? What crises were we warned might lead to world or at least regional war — Suez, the Iranian hostage debacle, the Straits of Hormuz? Who then would wish to revert to the pre-fracking status quo? Joe Biden or Donald Trump?
We live in a new age of iconoclasm. The ignorant have harvested all the low fruit of Confederate-general statuary and are now knocking down any totem deemed more illustrious than any other, from Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to Cervantes, Columbus, and Father Junípero Serra. Do the statue-topplers hate their betters, or do they wage war on the past because they, by comparison, fall so short in the present? Do they fear, when they get their ropes and chains out, that they might be arrested for destroying something not their own? Could any of them sculpt or cast what they deface and topple?
One day a school, an eponymous building, a street retains its traditional name; the next, it does not. New nouns appear out of nowhere; old ones are Trotskyized. New rules of capitalization within hours dictate that some words are now proper nouns; other similar terms, not so much. Who is more likely to say, “No more, we are not going to mindlessly wage war on our past in a fit of frenzy” — Joe Biden or Donald Trump? When and how did yesterday’s NBA star become today’s Socrates?
Professional sports used to be an escape from the conundrum and conflicts of modern life. Not now. Viewership of all the major sports has dived. Must Americans swallow yet another woke dose from mostly vain athletes before they can watch them bounce, throw, or catch a ball for an hour or two? Who is more likely to say, “Stand for the flag!” Who is more likely to see race as incidental not essential to character — Biden or Trump?
The 2020 election is — but is not — about hapless Joe Biden and his surrogate hard-left agenda.
Instead, 160 million are voting not on whether we will soon have Orwell’s 1984 but on how in the world we can end the nightmare that is already here upon us.
Put more bluntly, the choice is either Donald Trump, who is trying to rid America of Oceania and its thought police, or Joe Biden, who will give us still more thought crimes, memory holes, and ministries of truth.
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