Optimism, Inc.: One Too Many Lies?
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
I think daily, incrementally, insidiously the number of Americans that does not believe official Ministry of Truth communiques grows larger. And the number promulgating them for careerist purposes shrinks.
The white-driven, Anti-Asian hate-crime spree lie is about dead. The data showed the very opposite: whites were under-represented as generic hate-crime perpetrators and in particular were not responsible for the uptick of anti-Asian violence, either proportionally or in absolute numbers. African-Americans were overrepresented, both generically and especially in the case of Anti-Asian crimes.
The Capitol January 6 “armed insurrection” lie (as opposed to a spontaneous mob frenzy) is dissipating, despite the Biden whopper that it was more a threat than Pearl Harbor or 9/11 to democracy (5,000 were killed on those two days). We are learning by leaks, bits and pieces of witnesses, and an occasional honest account that there were no armed insurrectionary “leaders”; no protestor, however frenzied, killed anyone. Indeed, the only violent death was an unarmed veteran shot and killed by a — mysteriously unnamed–Capitol officer.
No Capitol officer was murdered by Trump crazies. No one was arrested with a firearm.
No one any longer believes the government-peddled great vaccination myth that systemic racism harms the marginalized from becoming vaccinated while recalcitrant white neanderthals endanger us all by conspiratorially refusing vaccination.
In truth, there are plenty of vaccination spots everywhere now (one can walk into a pharmacy without an appointment and get a shot in minutes here in rural Fresno County). Whites have a higher percentage of being vaccinated than Hispanics and blacks. And there are cultural and historical reasons, not current bias or racism, for the reluctance of such groups.
The big lie is based on a measurement of those who were actually vaccinated rather than the availability of vaccinations to all, regardless of race. In California from the very beginning there were efforts to target minority/majority communities, and to add in groups other than adjudicated by age (which is an equal-opportunity co-morbidity of COVID-19).
Moreover, the media theme that a bunch of white deplorable nuts are endangering us all by not getting vaccinated, while historically oppressed minorities are not, by not getting vaccinated simply is eroding. With the government on the one hand worried sick that millions of doses will go unused, and with media hysterias on the other that the drug stores are wasting thousands of vaccinations that go unused, it is impossible to juggle the misinformation by simultaneously claiming that some minority groups are going unvaccinated because greedy whites grabbed all the doses and thus got vaccinated at disproportionate rates.
So each day as the woke Minster of Truth narratives mount, so does the skepticism of a weary public to the propaganda.
We are becoming cynical 1980s Eastern Europeans who quietly scoffed at their daily government news. And this is step one to a repudiation of the lies we have been living with—that masks were necessary outdoors even for those fully vaccinated; that derelict, sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo is a noted author, Emmy-winner and national icon rather than a reckless sexual-harasser and responsible for needless death and misery by his unhinged long-term facilities policies; that Oprah, LeBron, and the Obamas are genuine voices of what it is like to be oppressed in America, and all the subsidiary untruths: the “brave” former intelligence officials who signed campaign-sensitive affidavits seconding Joe Biden’s insistence that Hunter’s laptop was a Russian disinformation trick; that Trump scoffed at “proof” that Russians put bounties on Americans in Afghanistan as they were appease; and that Joe Biden has no cognitive issues and never did, at least of the sort that prompted his predecessor to take cognitive tests and draw the attention of a Yale psychiatry professor to diagnose him as unhinged in absentia.
In sum, the woke movement daily, hourly, second-by-second hinges on untruth, from the 1619 canard to America is systemically racist. And the number who spot the lies is beginning to outnumber the number who lives by them—which means the Revolution is likely to follow the Jacobin rather than Bolshevik fate.
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/optimism-inc-one-too-many-lies/
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