When and How Did We Get Here?—Gradually, then Suddenly. Part Four
https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-four/
The final catalyst that led to our collective implosion was the election year 2020 and the accelerating Trump Derangement Syndrome. As the cities burned, unbelievable madness followed in efforts to ensure the incumbent president would not be reelected.
Suddenly, congressional officials, mayors, and governors all refused to keep the peace by requesting federal troops to stop the summer riots. The more the cities went up in flames, the more the blue states blamed Trump. It was almost as if they would fault Trump for the ongoing violence and blame him even more if he sent in the military to quell it.
Had they forgotten the Rodney King LA riots of 1992, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Colin Powell, called up President George H. W. Bush to encourage him to deploy the 5,000 Marines then ready to go into South Central and Watts to quell the violence? And so, Bush did just that and stopped the mass looting and rioting.
No matter. The nation was now a Luche Libre of open anti-Trump craziness. Mark Zuckerberg poured in a historic $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars in key election precincts. Social media suppressed news unfavorable to Biden.
Street riots and protests were modulated to aid the Biden campaign. Liberal Time essayist Molly Ball described the “conspiracy”:
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
Seventy percent of the electorate in many states voted by mail prior to Election Day (with a radical drop in the rate of rejected ballots), in the greatest revolution in national balloting in our history. Or as Ball gushed:
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks…
Shortly after the first debate Trump got Covid—to the delight of his opponents—and was hospitalized (and may have been stricken during the actual debate itself). Biden had sought refuge in the Covid lockdowns to justify his eight-to-noon basement campaign, and there were only two debates. Trump lost the first, Biden the second—but the latter took place after 60 million people had already voted.
In nineteenth-century front porch style and for the first time in a century, a major party candidate outsourced his entire campaign to subordinates, in Biden’s case the media, big money, and leftwing politicos.
Suddenly, our retired generals were libeling their president as a veritable Nazi and a fascist. We were to learn later that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley had called up his Chinese communist counterpart to apprise the Chinese military that in times of international crises, Milley, now both general and apparently certified psychiatrist, would diagnose Trump, and if he was found unstable, would not necessarily follow his presidential orders but instead warn the Chinese.
The FBI? It too was now actively paying Twitter and Facebook contractors to suppress the news to aid the Biden campaign. Its last three directors had either lied to federal investigators or pled amnesia when grilled before Congress. The CIA Director and the Director of National Intelligence under Obama had both lied under oath—with impunity. And now the two cheered on the lie that Trump was a “Russian asset.”
The CIA? Its retired “authorities” had gone over to the dark side. They now organized 50 former intelligence officers knowingly to lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” That whopper they knew to be a lie, given the FBI had the laptop and had already authenticated it, but kept it tightly in their control. Leon Panetta, ex-CIA director, was assuring us that the Russians fabricated the embarrassing information in the Hunter Biden laptop. Whom to trust?
What followed by 2023 were attempts to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot, to use lawfare to bankrupt, to indict, to convict, and to jail him before the election. Democrats were mobilizing to find ways to stop the certification of the 2024 election should Trump win—pretty much what they had accused Trump of doing in 2020.
The country might have been able to remain unchanged as it recovered from the revolutionary seeds that Obama has sewn over his eight years in office. It might have survived its national quarantine and lockdown. It could have endured the George Floyd riots and the mass racial hysteria that followed them. And it might have sustained the Trump Derangement Syndrome and Election Day insanity.
But it was not able to overcome all four incitements and goads. And so, what had been “gradual” became “sudden.”
The result is that America has never been the same since.
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