Hanson: Only one side is waging war in U.S.

FPI / August 11, 2020

As the leftist mob rampages across America, Democrats and their corporate media allies are keeping the focus on the "revolutionaries and their enablers" while "most Americans watch and worry, in silence," historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson noted.

"Those trying to reject and then reboot America are small as a percentage of the population, but their tactics are diverse, and their frightened abettors and closet appeasers numerous," Hanson wrote for National Review.

"The result for now is that, as with most cultural revolutions, a tiny percentage of the population seems to be ascending, given that there is no real organized resistance other than isolated and disgusted individuals."

The quiet majority of Americans "of all races and classes," Hanson noted, "have watched all this for months — but kept mysteriously still. At first, they shrugged that a plague, a national quarantine, and a recession can make people do crazy things, and so they stayed mum."

But, as the rioting continues, "the public is getting worried," Hanson wrote.

So what will the majority ultimately do?

"It is slowly steaming but for the moment still holds on to a shred of hope that the madness will die out as the revolution cannibalizes its own — even though many know that it will not. Maybe the Democratic Party will tack back to the respectable Left, or so many dream," Hanson wrote.

"Yet at some point, if the rioting and revolution and overt socialism continue, the majority will weigh in, likely from mid September to mid October.

"The Democratic Party knows this. So its functionaries are now frantically trying to portray Trump as the instigator of the violence — or claim there is no violence at all. They permanently script and seclude the cognitively challenged Biden, and redefine Antifa and BLM as our own sons and daughters who, if a little rowdy and zealous at times, have their hearts in the right place and soon will calm down and join the victorious Democratic war wagon."

Antifa, or the front-line shock troops, "are the new superfluous elite, in that their college investments brought them neither prestige nor money, but only debt and sloganeering memorized from the sermons of their tenured and comfortable lounge professors," Hanson wrote. "They wake up to learn that their vaunted education and training were not appreciated and properly compensated by society. And so they often can turn to violence and indeed revolution if it comes their way. In the profiles of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, and Arab Spring second-stage revolutions, the common denominators are frustration and the feeling that the agitators deserved honor, money, and influence that either never was forthcoming or went to undeserving others."

Hanson noted that "the more unhinged among them believe that they can carve out 'autonomous' zones of 'resistance' in places such as Portland and Seattle and gradually spread their revolution through threats and intimidation — and perhaps more formally hijack the Democratic Party and come to power. Cellphones, selfies, networking, and childish coloring-book graffiti make the whole thing a sort of carnival where the like-minded frustrated agitators can vent about the unfairness of the world."

"Many of these self-righteous are indeed racist, as we see from the sheer joy they show at yelling in the face of black policemen and orchestrating the demonstrations while avoiding the televised looting," Hanson continued. "The more they scream 'Racism!' the more one concludes that in their own lives they were pretty sheltered and separate by design. They show special venom for any blacks who wave American flags or resist their groupthink, as if to say, 'You ingrate! Don’t you appreciate what I’m doing for you?' ”

Hanson noted of Antifa that "in their effort to achieve medieval exemption and penance, they partner with or more often even seek to hijack the Black Lives Matter movement. BLM leaders are self-avowed Marxists, but their real agenda is racist: to reduce the U.S. into two camps, one of victimized noble nonwhites and the other of victimizing white people who should accept their proper reparatory role given the sins of their ancestors and the racist and evil country they maintain and perpetuate.

"BLM offers amnesties to the victimizing white people if they kneel and apologize, or join their ranks, or hit the street."

Hanson continued: "A second group of revolutionaries are found in the new neo-socialist Democratic Party itself and its elite enablers. This cadre treats Antifa and BLM as useful pawns and has refused to criticize either. Violence in our cities is deemed a 'hoax.' In truth, it is now hard to find any issue on which the Democratic establishment has been at odds with BLM and even Antifa. The latter are critical to providing 30 percent or so of the hard-Democratic base without which the party cannot fulfill its agenda.

"The media, the universities, Hollywood, most foundations, the entertainment industry, professional sports, the Never Trump hump Right, and perhaps a few of the retired and active four-star military see the protests, even the violent kind, as necessary goads that will reveal the true dangers of Donald Trump to the nation. In that regard, anything that might prompt Trump to use federal troops to quell the violence, or split him off from the vestigial Republican establishment, or remind the permanent administrative state of his evil, is encouraged and exempt from criticism. This second tier of politicos believes that the revolution is useful in ridding the country of Trump. Then once things return to normal, they also will revert to their positions of influence prior to 2017, as Antifa and BLM are coopted or bought off.

"A final group of revolutionaries consists of the finger-in-the-wind bystanders — the corporate appeasers and the suburban upper-middle-class liberal establishment. They are bothered by the street violence of Antifa, the apparent drumbeat hatred of whites, and they fear what has been wrought by chaos, plague, lockdown, and depression. But they have, they wager, the money and influence to win exemption from the shock troops of Antifa and BLM.

"In the short term, they just wish that all the bad stuff would go away. In a collective fetal position, CEOs and various liberal-mainstay groups are happy to write checks to the revolutionaries, grant their demands, and voice their platitudes — on the theory that when the rough stuff really starts, they will be left alone to run the country as they think they always do. They are in a sense playing the role of the anti-czarist aristocrats who believed that the motley crew of Bolsheviks would be honored to have their money and support — and their own controlling influence.

"Add it all up, and so far, the revolution is well funded, proving useful for the Biden campaign, and airbrushed by the media as a necessary humanitarian effort to address 'systematic' and 'endemic' racism. But the main goal is to destroy Trump, by weaponizing plague, lockdown, recession, and riot to pave the way for a Biden bridge to hard-core socialism."

Free Press International