Poking the Snoring 

Conservative Dragon

By: Victor Davis Hanson

 Part One – June 28, 2023

Conservative America has been growing ever angrier. But it still had remained inert and in somnolence about the ongoing woke revolution.

But just lately that comatose dragon is beginning to awake—and with a roar.

Conservatives usually do not boycott or embargo. They are too busy with work, family, church, and community. In sum, most of them have a different work schedule than the architects of Antifa and BLM. But apparently, if pushed, they can organize and do so in numbers and dollars far greater than the various leftist “communities” or for that matter leftists in general.

As a result of this anti-awakening, we can ask what are the collective losses in diminished stock, subscriber losses, sales slumps, inert attendance, and PR damage to Disney, Anheuser-Busch, Target, or the Los Angeles Dodgers. Why has Fox lost one million viewers plus?

So far in aggregate $10, $15, $20, $40 billion in total for them all? Would corporate American wish to pay that tab to appease whom exactly? The Malibu Elite? The Ivy League professoriate? The network television anchors? The diversity/equity/inclusion mob?

Perhaps, but what cannot go on, does not.

Will an Ivy-League MBA, fresh out of graduate woke indoctrination courses, still so smugly and snarkily steer an Anheuser-Busch CEO to hire another Dylan Mulvaney to gush about his transitioning, as he incidentally signals Bob Smith in Akron that he should therefore buy more Bud Lite?

Here we discover that Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Bud Light, and her boss, Daniel Blake, Budweiser’s group vice president for marketing, either dreamed up or green-lighted the Mulvaney confessionals.

Are they typical corporate toadies who leave woke MBA programs to convince their bosses that they have a finger on the pulse of woke America? What happens to a corporate grandee when he or she almost single-handedly loses the firm billions of dollars?

Will another Los Angeles Dodgers’ thirty-something PR genius convince corporate management that it must highlight gay men in drag, emulating sexual acts with a Christ actor, while dressed as nuns and priests—on Dodger baseball “pride” night?

Will such geniuses continue to point out to the front office that surely some four million Catholic Jorge Ramoses and baseball-addicted Juan Ortega of the greater LA area will rush out to buy Dodger tickets, memorabilia, and food at Dodger Stadium—once they hear they can get a rare chance to watch transgendered nuns feign sex acts with a gay Jesus or Virgin Mary in drag?

Traditionalists now have shunned the Oscar, Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Awards ceremonies that as a result have descended into a little-watched woke echo chamber. Ditto the White House Correspondents Dinner. Ditto network late-night comedy. Ditto most first-run Hollywood movies. What was so wrong in the past with Ingrid Bergman gracefully accepting a best actress Oscar for Gaslight or a nomination for For Whom the Bells Toll?

The NBA finals brag of a 4-5-million-person television audience—in other words, about 15 percent of the audience that watched the 1998 NBA finals, a quarter century ago, when there were 60 million fewer Americans. Does the NBA believe that a woke LeBron James has the star power of Michael Jordan? Do today’s players show the drawing power of an Oscar Robertson or a Larry Bird?

So ratings and sales suggest something has been going on, as the dragon occasionally yawns and spouts a flame or two before falling back into slumber.

Aggrieved Virginia parents stirred up by a woke K-12 curricula changed the gubernatorial race and elected Glenn Youngkin.

If riled, traditionalists can make a huge difference, rather than the current “see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya” attitude of dropping out and shunning the madness of 2023 popular culture.

But they must sustain such efforts and accept that they are living in fifth-century AD Rome, fifteenth-century Byzantium, or Vienna, circa 1683—at the brink of post-civilizational chaos with enemies that hate traditional America at the gates—or rather inside the gates.

Part Two – June 30, 2023

In 2024, the Left will spend $4-5 billion on the presidential and congressional races, with another $4-5 billion in free advertising in propaganda from network news, PBS, NPR, and the Silicon Valley mob. The latter again will do their leftist best, from rigging the order of Google searches to banning supposed “misinformation” and “disinformation”from non-Twitter social media to blacklisting traffickers in “hate speech” who might critique Democratic candidates.

The only remedy would be for millions of poll watchers to turn out on Election Day 2024. The Right must draft legions of lawyers right now to ensure balloting laws are not massaged by leftist activist lawyers and judges.

There must be a rare conservative mass get-out-the-vote effort (i.e., mail-in and early balloting), targeted at rest homes and retirement communities. Republicans, until they restore integrity to balloting, must bring Barack Obama’s proverbial “gun to a knife fight” (a phrase Obama stole from David Mamet’s screenplay of The Untouchables) determination not to keep losing, and master third-party vote harvesting and ballot curing.

The Left does not have the numbers (look at the poor poll numbers on every of Joe Biden’s current policies), but neither do conservatives—unless they organize and trump the tactics of the Left. (No, I am not suggesting protestors mass outside Hunter Biden’s house in the fashion leftists swarm with impunity the homes of Supreme Court justices in felonious, but exempt, efforts to intimidate them into rendering more favorable opinions.)

But there are things the Right can do, if it wishes to stop losing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections (George W. Bush’s razor-thin 2004 being the outlier)—and finally for the first time in 36 years win 51% of the popular vote, as George H.W. Bush last managed in 1988 against a weak Mike Dukakis.

So what would an aroused dragon do?

Start focusing on local and state prosecutor races to stop George Soros’s stealthy efforts to destroy American jurisprudence and render existing laws null and void. Nullifying the law is eroding the major American cities as we once knew them, and empowering thousands of career criminals to hurt, maim, and kill the innocent, and in general wreck the civilization of our now medieval urban centers.

Future historians will ponder how San Franciscans destroyed their once beautiful city in about three years, by defunding the police, decriminalizing theft and assault, transmogrifying the homeless into blameless victims, and creating a climate overtly hostile to the old two-parent, three-child nuclear family.

The only mystery is to what degree a San Franciscan—mugged, his house robbed, his shoe bottoms stained with human feces, his car window smashed, his beloved Whole Foods locked and shuttered, his Walgreen’s shelves caged like a prison infirmary, and his taxes and fees astronomical—finally cannot take it anymore and either leaves en masse or votes for adults of the real world?

Match lawsuit for lawsuit to ensure balloting in key states returns to majority vote casting on Election Day. Require identification to vote. Note the Left believes in process, or rather changing any rules and traditions deemed not useful.

When they are in the Senate minority, they praise the filibuster, when not, they would junk it as a “Jim Crow relic.” They worshiped the “blue wall” of the Electoral College. When it crumbled, it became a fossilized relic of old white-male Founders.

They loved the 9-person Warren Court that created new laws faster than Congress. And they reveled in flipping to the left Republican appointees like Harry Blackman, William Brennan, Lewis Powell, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, and Earl Warren, as well as Sandra Day O’Connor and John Roberts. And when the court went rightward, then they blasted it as a racist clique and pushed for a 15-justice court, to be packed by the Left.

Remember, the Left will try to ensure that no more than 30 percent of the voters in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin cast ballots on Election Day 2024. They know the error rate on tens of millions of mail-in ballots is a fraction of what it is on millions of in-person, Election-Day cast ballots. Leftist logic: swarm registrars with hordes of mail-in ballots that they do not dare reject or do not have the time and resources to check for full names, proper addresses, valid signatures, or matches with registrar rolls.

In 2022, California sent out 21.9 million ballots. But only 11.1 million people supposedly voted.

That left about 10.8 million ghost ballots floating about and supposedly never cast and thus unaccounted for. The Left claims that the fact nearly 11 million ballots were mass mailed but never claimed or used, is no indication that the state simply sends out ballots to anyone who breathes or that many of the 11 million who voted were not eligible but simply got one of the 21.9 million ballots and sighed, “Well, why not then?”