Special Edition

LEFTWING HYSTERIA

 and the 

ART of PSYCHODRAMA

Part Six

By: Victor Davis Hanson

December 9, 2022

A second seminal false narrative psychodrama followed the death of George Floyd. No sooner had Floyd died while in police custody than his deified image began appearing in street art with a halo and wings. We may have given the Taliban billions of dollars in invaluable military equipment, a billion-dollar embassy, and a $300-million refurbished air base. But by golly, we also left behind pride flags and George Floyd murals on the walls of Kabul.

Some 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, assault, and death followed Floyd’s death. The pre-election mayhem resulted in $2 billion in damage, 35-40 deaths, and 1,500 injured law-enforcement officers, arguably the worst continuous riot in our history.

Most of the 14,000 arrested were set free or decriminalized. Burning down a business was later felt to be less of a crime than wandering peacefully outside the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Everything from a police precinct and federal courthouse to a historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC was torched. We were lectured by 1619 fabricator Nikole Hannah-Jones that property theft and looting were not really crimes at all, as the streets were turned over to the mob. Molly Ball in her infamous post-election Time essay, preened how the Left, fueled by Silicon Valley money, “conspired” (her words not ours) to warp the election, including modulating the level of street protests to the benefit of Joe Biden.

So, the iPhoned image of the smirking Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, whose fainting calls that he could not breathe were ignored by Chauvin, was all that was needed to feed what soon became endless and institutionalized national hysteria. Death and destruction soared. BLM and Antifa claimed control of the streets of major U.S. cities. It mattered little that even the Washington Post had found that of the millions arrested each year, unarmed black men were not any more demographically disproportionally shot and killed than were so-called whites.

That Floyd was a career felon, who had once stuck a loaded gun in the stomach of a pregnant woman during a home invasion robbery, with a string of additional past felonies, mattered not at all. Nor did the fact that he was arrested passing counterfeit currency, repeatedly and violently resisting arrest, was high on fentanyl, and would have been alive had he not committed a currency felony, or not resisted police efforts to detain him, or not been high on dangerous illegal drugs. Nor did anyone stop for a nanosecond to consider that Officer Chauvin’s seeming excesses were not characteristic of the 11 million arrests per year nationwide.

So, the Left ran with the narrative that George Floyd was saintly and that his death was typical of a racist law enforcement industry. What followed was defunding the police which led to mass firings, resignations, and understaffed police departments. All that erosion emboldened career criminals who spiked violent crime to forty-year highs. The violent wave disproportionally involved not just black assailants, but black victims of mostly black assailants.

Soon, in reaction to the rioting and hysteria, the even more surreal emerged. Mass demonstrations without social distancing and masks were greenlighted by the bicoastal Karen class. The rationale was that while anyone not woke must follow their CCP-like quarantines, the woke did not—given that not protesting in the streets was more injurious to the marginalized than getting or spreading Covid. (It was at this point that all confidence in and respect for the lockdowns began to evaporate, after their selective, unscientific, and weaponized application.)

The Left went further. Suddenly proportionally representative college admissions were replaced by reparatory standards that were demographically asymmetrical and largely neglectful of most meritocratic standards. The post-George Floyd woke mania then effectively disenfranchised from top universities and employment working-class qualified white males. After it all, it was the one class and racial demographic without insider heft and connections. The deplorable nothings were considered expendable. Their exclusion was statistically necessary for greater inclusion of the “underrepresented.” The marginalized soon became overrepresented by our moral deities, who were just delighted by the absence of the former and the greater inclusion of the latter.

December 10, 2022

Special Edition

LEFTWING HYSTERIA

 and the 

ART of PSYCHODRAMA

Part Six

By: Victor Davis Hanson

December 9, 2022

A second seminal false narrative psychodrama followed the death of George Floyd. No sooner had Floyd died while in police custody than his deified image began appearing in street art with a halo and wings. We may have given the Taliban billions of dollars in invaluable military equipment, a billion-dollar embassy, and a $300-million refurbished air base. But by golly, we also left behind pride flags and George Floyd murals on the walls of Kabul.

Some 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, assault, and death followed Floyd’s death. The pre-election mayhem resulted in $2 billion in damage, 35-40 deaths, and 1,500 injured law-enforcement officers, arguably the worst continuous riot in our history.

Most of the 14,000 arrested were set free or decriminalized. Burning down a business was later felt to be less of a crime than wandering peacefully outside the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Everything from a police precinct and federal courthouse to a historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC was torched. We were lectured by 1619 fabricator Nikole Hannah-Jones that property theft and looting were not really crimes at all, as the streets were turned over to the mob. Molly Ball in her infamous post-election Time essay, preened how the Left, fueled by Silicon Valley money, “conspired” (her words not ours) to warp the election, including modulating the level of street protests to the benefit of Joe Biden.

So, the iPhoned image of the smirking Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, whose fainting calls that he could not breathe were ignored by Chauvin, was all that was needed to feed what soon became endless and institutionalized national hysteria. Death and destruction soared. BLM and Antifa claimed control of the streets of major U.S. cities. It mattered little that even the Washington Post had found that of the millions arrested each year, unarmed black men were not any more demographically disproportionally shot and killed than were so-called whites.

That Floyd was a career felon, who had once stuck a loaded gun in the stomach of a pregnant woman during a home invasion robbery, with a string of additional past felonies, mattered not at all. Nor did the fact that he was arrested passing counterfeit currency, repeatedly and violently resisting arrest, was high on fentanyl, and would have been alive had he not committed a currency felony, or not resisted police efforts to detain him, or not been high on dangerous illegal drugs. Nor did anyone stop for a nanosecond to consider that Officer Chauvin’s seeming excesses were not characteristic of the 11 million arrests per year nationwide.

So, the Left ran with the narrative that George Floyd was saintly and that his death was typical of a racist law enforcement industry. What followed was defunding the police which led to mass firings, resignations, and understaffed police departments. All that erosion emboldened career criminals who spiked violent crime to forty-year highs. The violent wave disproportionally involved not just black assailants, but black victims of mostly black assailants.

Soon, in reaction to the rioting and hysteria, the even more surreal emerged. Mass demonstrations without social distancing and masks were greenlighted by the bicoastal Karen class. The rationale was that while anyone not woke must follow their CCP-like quarantines, the woke did not—given that not protesting in the streets was more injurious to the marginalized than getting or spreading Covid. (It was at this point that all confidence in and respect for the lockdowns began to evaporate, after their selective, unscientific, and weaponized application.)

The Left went further. Suddenly proportionally representative college admissions were replaced by reparatory standards that were demographically asymmetrical and largely neglectful of most meritocratic standards. The post-George Floyd woke mania then effectively disenfranchised from top universities and employment working-class qualified white males. After it all, it was the one class and racial demographic without insider heft and connections. The deplorable nothings were considered expendable. Their exclusion was statistically necessary for greater inclusion of the “underrepresented.” The marginalized soon became overrepresented by our moral deities, who were just delighted by the absence of the former and the greater inclusion of the latter.