Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies.
When former President Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news.
There is a common theme here.
In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems.
We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws.
These "new orders" and "resets" always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes.
So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.
Hunter Biden's lost laptop will be declared, by fiat, not news. In contrast, the fake Alfa Bank "collusion" narrative will be national headline news for weeks.
Middle-class lifestyles will be curbed as we are instructed to strive for sustainability and transition to apartment living and mass transit. But the Obamas will still keep their three mansions, and Silicon Valley futurists will insist on exemptions for their yachts.
In truth, we are about to see a radical reset - of the current reset. It will be a different sort of transformation than the elites are expecting and one that they should greatly fear.
The world and the United States are furious over hyperinflation that may soon exceed 10% per year. We will be lucky if it ends only in recession or stagflation, rather than a global depression.
The mess was created by the same apparat who bought into "modern monetary theory." That silly university idea claimed prosperity would follow vastly expanding the money supply, keeping interest rates at de facto zero levels, running huge annual deficits, piling up unsustainable national debt, and subsidizing workers to stay home.
Natural gas and oil costs are now soaring to unsustainable levels - and to the point where the middle class simply will not be able to travel, keep warm in winter, or cool in summer.
Both in Europe and the United States left-wing governments deliberately curbed drilling and non-Russian pipelines. They shut down nuclear power plants and subsidized costly, inefficient solar and wind projects. They ended up not with utopia, but with fuel shortages, high prices, and energy dependency on the world's most repressive regimes.
The woke revolution in the West was supposed to teach us that the "white male"-dominated Western world is toxic. Its origins, ascendence, and current leisure and affluence were supposedly due only to systemic exploitation, racism, and sexism.
Elites introduced cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, and social ostracism to shame these supposed exploiters and to destroy their lives and careers.
Few asked how a supposedly noxious West of some 2,500 years duration became the number one destination of millions of global non-Western migrants and offered the greatest degree of global prosperity and freedom for its citizens.
So a reset reckoning is coming - in reaction to the "new orders" championed by Biden and the Davos set.
In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic "No!" to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility - as well as arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies.
What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked.
Closed and secure borders with only legal and measured immigration will return. Americans will demand tough police enforcement and deterrent sentencing, and a return to integration and the primacy of individual character rather than separatist fixations on the "color our skin."
The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre "mainstream" media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.
The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.
Victor Davis Hanson is a conservative commentator, classicist, and military historian. He is a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, the Hillsdale College, and the Center for American Greatness, and the author of many books.
10 comments:
He's talking about New Zealand surely.
This is the sort of reset that l was suggesting here in New Zealand in my last column. Hopefully it will happen to the extent that Victor predicts whether the incoming government is prepared to sponsor it or not.
My guess is that the people in this country will follow America and demand a return to the earlier times.
We know that nothing less than a complete removal of all this woke crap will be acceptable to a justifiably angry populace.
Well done Victor. A brilliant assessment.
Now it’s all down to us.
Bring on the reset of the reset I say.
“The woke revolution in the West was supposed to teach us that the "white male"-dominated Western world is toxic. Its origins, ascendence, and current leisure and affluence were supposedly due only to systemic exploitation, racism, and sexism. “
Now in New Zealand:
Each political party now must have a mummy and a daddy,
13 of the top 23 in the labour cult are female,
8 of the labour MPs and 4 greens are LGBTIQq,
The remainder of the MPs are either Karens or Kevins,
The GG is female,
And on top of that is the out-of-control wokeness insinuating itself into every ministry and academia.
Just look at the direction we are heading. Fearmongering, control, propaganda, separatism, apartheid, nepotism, corruption, and that is just the government.
I suspect we were one hell of a lot better off when “white males” dominated the government, and it wasn’t quite so effeminate.
I hope you're right, Victor. In truth, I'm not so sure it's going to be as easy as that.
For starters, you need political parties to vote for that reflect all the non-woke stuff we used to take for granted. These days, even on the right, they're harder to find than hen's teeth.
In addition, I believe a large proportion of the public have bought into much of the woke nonsense, little realising what these policies will ultimately mean for them.
Still, you have to live in hope.
Maybe NZ can be first at something meaningful for a change. The first Western nation to reject the woke, left-wing, "progressive" socialist agenda and return to real democratic principles, which it enshrines in law.
I don’t see this piece as having any relevance to the problems we face here. Hanson is of the Trump supporting, Democrat denigrating far right, seeing the world from an American perspective. He makes no mention of the Ukrainian crisis, apart from briefly in the first sentence, and then only as Biden’s view of it. It seems he sees it as of little importance in the context of geopolitics, which it most certainly is.
As a result of the Trump presidency America is today weaker than it was hitherto. Today the nation is more divided than any time since the Civil War, and he’s making sure that it stays that way with his so-called ‘big lie’ nonsense that the 2020 election was stolen. God help us if he ever gets back for another term.
We have our own problems to deal with here, some of which were imported, most obviously covid, which would have tested any government – and has around the world. But most worrying, at least to me, is the damage resulting from this co-governance, and other unwarranted concessions to Maoris at local and national level. This will permanently damage our relatively harmonious race relations which we have worked so hard to build. But we have other challenges too. Hanson can reset the world his way. Resetting New Zealand is our challenge.
Ewan McGregor
Lets hope Putin wins his little war, that will really screw the New World Order up, he may be a bastard but at least he is real, he is of the Old World Order that we all understood, not this bullshit that is been rammed down our throats.
Maybe we should all hold up Russia as an example of what can happen when people do not protect their democracy from authoritarianism, progressing to tyranny. How can Harvard Uni want a WOKE, Marxist to be a speaker at the Commencement ceremony this year, she seems to be the antipathy of what most Americans hold dear.
Reading 'the comments' is often as interesting as reading the article.
I almost fully endorse the comments of Dee M, & then we get to Unknown/Ewan McGregor, who endorses the fact that our M.S.M fake news, still has a tremendous influence on a large proportion of the voting age population.
How different the world would currently be, if for the past nearly two generations, the children had been educated, instead of being indoctrinated, & the media only distributed researched facts, instead of government approved propaganda..
Well, I’m not “Unknown” Allan. Unlike you, and a lot of other people that comment on this newsletter, I’m happy to be identified. Indeed, I regard it as an obligation, especially where disparagement is involved, and it should be requirement with this newsletter. It has been standard policy for years with the much-maligned ‘M.S.M fake news’. Ewan McGregor
Well said Ewen. Freedom of speech - the most important element of democracy. It is what encourages debate, so necessary at this time.
Helen Weston
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