VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Post-postmodern America

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the United States by stopping the border wall and allowing in anyone who could walk across the southern border.

Over 7 million did just that. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 annual American fentanyl deaths.

Then border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” left-wing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So cash-strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once-magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming, but to stay far away from their advocates — by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the U.S. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Pre-civilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.

They could not care less that their targeted reservoirs help store water in drought, prevent flooding, enhance irrigation, offer recreation and generate clean hydroelectric power. Now an absurd green California is currently destroying four dams on the Klamath River. In adding insult to injury, it is paying the half-billion-dollar demolition cost in part through a water bond that state voters once thought would build new — not explode existing — dams.

The Biden administration is mandating new dates when electric vehicles will be all but mandatory.

To prove their current viability, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm led a performance art EV caravan on a long road trip.

When she found insufficient charging stations to continue her media stunt, she sent a gas-powered car ahead to block open charging stations and deny them to other EVs ahead in line.

Only that way could Granholm ensure that her arriving energy-starved motorcade might find rare empty charger stalls.

In some California charging stations, diesel generators are needed to produce enough “clean” electricity to power the stalls.

The state has steadily dismantled many of its nuclear, oil, and coal power plants. It refuses to build new natural gas generation plants.

Naturally, California’s heavily subsidized solar and wind plants now produce too much energy during the day and almost nothing at night.

So the state now begs residents to charge their EVs only during the day. Then at night, Californians may soon be asked to plug them in again to transfer what is left in their batteries into the state grid.

One of the loudest leftist voices to defund the police, and decriminalize violent crimes in the post-George Floyd era, was Shivanthi Sathanandan, the 2nd vice chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

She was recently not shy about defunding: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me. DISMANTLE.”

But recently the loud Sathanandan was a victim of the very crime wave she helped to spawn.

Last week, four armed thugs carjacked her. They beat her up in front of her children at her own home, and sped off without fear of arrest.

The reaction of the arch police dismantler and decriminalizer on her road to Damascus?

The now bruised and bleeding activist for the first time became livid that criminals had taken over her Minneapolis: “Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.”

The common theme of these absurdities is how contrary to human nature, impractical and destructive is utopian wokism, whether in matters of energy, race, crime or illegal immigration.

There are two other characteristics of the Woke Revolution.

One, it depends solely on its advocates never having to experience firsthand any of the nonsense they inflict on others.

And two, dangerous zealots with titles before, and letters after, their names prove to be quite stupid — and dangerous.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.