by Victor Davis Hanson
The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny.
Pseudo-Heroes
It is difficult to determine whether the bizarro worldview of the
current Democrat-media nexus can simply be attributed to either its
generic Trump Derangement Syndrome or the attendant Wile E.
Coyote/Roadrunner obsessive/compulsive disorder. But the crazy world of
the Left increasingly bears scant resemblance to reality.
In this alternate universe, Eric Swalwell was a liberal icon and
invaluable asset for years, though admittedly a bit randy and
occasionally a serial sexual predator—a fact that the man himself made
little effort to hide.
Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was, at last, the Left’s “real
thing,” the white working-class liberal stiff who could win back the hoi
polloi—although he couldn’t get his story straight on whether his Nazi
tattoo was an accident or supposed proof that he was brainwashed into
Nazism by the toxic US military.
Tim Walz was also hailed as the Left’s Mr. Everyman, a truck-driving
street fighter, although he is now in anti-American socialist Spain, at a
time of war, libeling his own country and American soldiers as being in
the service of a fascist cause.
Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly a mere eccentric autodidact, wannabe
insider, and generous party host, though a bit too eager to use his
girls to buy his way into liberal academic and intellectual circles.
Sam Bankman-Fried was a lovable genius gadfly, a billionaire slob, but with a big and timely checkbook for radical causes.
Jussie Smollett was to be the next George Floyd rallying cry, if only his ridiculous lies were not so ridiculous.
And George Floyd—multi-felon, ex-convict, past home invader who once
stuck a pistol in a woman’s stomach, arrested while passing counterfeit
bills, high on drugs, and resisting arrest—became the innocent martyr
who died at the hands of diabolical, murderous police and set America
afire.
Erasing Joe Biden
Along with such a pantheon, somehow the Democrat borg also fantasizes
that the historic legacy of the Biden years has been squandered by
Trump—as if the country suffers from collective amnesia.
But any sane person knows that Biden served as a waxen effigy,
puppeteered by the radical Left to serve as a moderate veneer over the
most radical agenda in modern memory.
In just four years, Biden’s handlers obliterated the southern border,
admitting 10–12 million unvetted aliens, including an estimated 500,000
criminals, apparently as a demographic booster shot for their otherwise
unpopular agendas.
Almost daily, we read of Americans assaulted, raped, and murdered by
illegal aliens—stories almost always smothered in the left-wing media.
Rampant multibillion-dollar theft of US entitlement money by foreign
nationals or recently naturalized citizens from Minneapolis to Los
Angeles is also daily fare. The nihilistic Biden years of open borders
have cost the nation untold amounts in blood and treasure. Yet the
Left’s answer is to attack ICE officers attempting to enforce federal
immigration law.
Stranger still is the contrast between protesters who seem to be
mostly affluent, suburban white women. The latter, for some reason, seem
to be free between 9 and 5 on workdays, to spit on, scream at, and
obstruct ICE officers—whose ranks are working-class and 45 percent
non-white.
All this is called progressivism: impeding the deportation of violent
criminals who prey on poor neighborhoods, lacking the security that the
protesters take for granted in their own protected enclaves.
The Biden puppeteers enriched and empowered theocratic Iran by
lifting sanctions. They did little to nothing when Iranian proxies in
Syria, Iraq, and Yemen serially attacked US installations and ships.
The Biden years saw near-record gas prices, 9 percent hyperinflation,
all-time high crime spikes, and a president who even Democrats now
admit was non compos mentis. He was toppled as a candidate for
reelection by a coup of Democrat backroom politicos, but only after a
disastrous debate. In his place, they and donors appointed a mostly
inert Kamala Harris as nominee, who, as a 2020 presidential candidate,
had failed to win a single delegate.
Iran Fantasies
The Left has created another fantasy world out of the current six-week Iran war.
When Trump warned on a Monday that the Iranian regime might face
terrible punishment for its continued drone and missile attacks, he was
libeled as a modern Nazi exterminator, hellbent on mass death. When on
Tuesday Iran relented and asked for negotiations, Trump suddenly became
smeared as a TACO naif, apparently too eager for peace. Each day, the
Left tries to think up a new argument for American defeat, even as Iran
suffers more one-sided damage. Their idea is to embolden Iran to hold
out, in hopes that Trump—under constant left-wing assault, international
pressure to lower gas prices, and his own restive Congressional
allies—will fold and then be trashed by the Left as a TACO again.
More preposterously, the Left has peddled the fantasy that Trump’s
demands for Iran to surrender its nuclear material (mostly
hyper-enriched during the Biden administration) copied the Obama Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, the so-called Iran deal.
But who could deny that, under Obama, the deal empowered Iran to
rearm even more rapidly with lifted sanctions, nocturnal cash transfers,
and the unfreezing of its assets?
The frenzied armament and empowerment of Iran either terrified or
impressed the Obama administration enough to hatch the wacky idea of
envisioning a Shiite crescent of Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, and Gaza.
Such terrorist regimes would “balance” the moderate Arab states and
democratic Israel in “creative tension.”
And the message to Iran was not nuclear disarmament, but slow,
graduated nuclear armament, albeit of the sort to be completed during an
administration to come.
In contrast, Trump’s deal was with an obliterated, prostrate Iranian
military. The US fleet was in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and the
blockade of Iran. More than 300 US combat aircraft could render Iran a
medieval mess with impunity, should it persist in its terrorist agendas.
Begging a fully armed and defiant Iran merely to postpone its
acquisition of a bomb is not the equivalent of dictating to a flattened
Iran a series of demands that, if unmet, will lead to its veritable
destruction—after it had already suffered the loss of a half-century
investment in a half-trillion-dollar arsenal and military
infrastructure.
In the surreal left-wing narrative, the more Iran lost its air force,
navy, most of its missiles and drones, its command and control, its
subterranean arsenals, its nuclear production facilities, and its
factories that turn out weapons of war, the more the Democrat-media
nexus declared the war lost and the Americans—after six weeks and 13
lost lives—to be trapped in a quagmire analogous to the war in Vietnam
(eight years of war with 58,000 dead, 150,000 wounded).
Impeaching Pete Hegseth?
Examine another fantasy: the charade of a Democrat effort to impeach
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on silly charges of supposedly aiding an
unauthorized war against Iran, war crimes, reckless handling of
classified information, obstruction of Congressional oversight, abuse of
power, politicization of the military, and conduct bringing disrepute
to the US and its armed forces.
Each of these writs is either false or more aptly applies to the Biden and prior Democrat administrations.
Note that Hegseth, in a single year, fixed the years-long crisis of
falling enlistment that he inherited. He has now even exceeded
recruitment targets by emphasizing that soldiers should concentrate on
combat effectiveness and not fixate on race, sex, or sexual orientation.
His Pentagon oversaw the summer 2025 destruction of Iranian nuclear
facilities (with no fatalities), the military extradition of Nicolás
Maduro and the recalibration of a once-rogue Venezuela (with no
casualties), and the current six-week war that had destroyed the
military capability of a once-feared, 93 million-person theocratic Iran
(with 13 fatalities so far).
Hegseth has rebooted procurement with emphasis on far more excellent
weapons rather than too few superb ones. Compare that to the prior
secretary, Lloyd Austin, who went medically AWOL without informing the
White House that he was incapacitated for 3–4 days in the ICU. He
oversaw the Pentagon’s historic misadventure in Afghanistan and the
constant attacks on US soldiers in the Middle East that went unanswered
and emboldened Iran’s terrorist proxies. No Republican called for his
impeachment.
The war in Iran is not “unauthorized”; it has not exceeded the 90-day
limit under the War Powers Act. However, Barack Obama’s seven-month
unauthorized bombing of Libya, under the Democrats’ current logic,
really was a “war crime,” as was his “unauthorized,” months-long
predator assassination campaign on the Afghan border that killed 500,
including four US citizens.
The Congress that wants to impeach Hegseth should extend its gaze to
Joe Biden’s 30-year unlawful possession of unsecured and classified
documents and his use of them with an unauthorized ghostwriter who
subsequently destroyed subpoenaed tapes with impunity.
The military has been depoliticized. That is, it no longer serves as a
fast-track laboratory for the Left to try out its radical
theories—transgenderism, racial tribalism, and unconstitutional racial
prejudiced preferences.
Resuscitating Lawfare?
Finally, for over a decade, the Left has waged a coordinated, often
extralegal effort to destroy the campaigns and presidency of Donald
Trump. What lawfare did the Left not sanction?
The first impeachment hinging on the hearsay evidence on an unnamed
pseudo-whistleblower who connived with the prevaricator Adam Schiff—with
the acquiescence of a partisan inspector general?
The Russian collusion hoax orchestrated by the past and present Obama FBI and CIA?
The laptop disinformation campaign, to use the government to censor
the news and promulgate the lie of a Russian-concocted Hunter Biden
laptop on the eve of an election?
The unconstitutional effort to de-ballot Trump in 25 blue states?
The SWAT-like, staged raid on the then-ex-president’s home at
Mar-a-Lago to find some 100 classified documents from more than 11,000
confiscated?
The pervasion of the legal system to wage four years of lawfare in five civil and criminal courtrooms?
Despite all that, we are now warned by Democrats like Susan Rice that
when the Left regains power, they are going to restart their vendettas
to punish their enemies.
An unbalanced politico, James Carville, advises the Democrats to keep
quiet about their real plans upon returning to power: to pack the court
to destroy the 157-year, nine-justice Supreme Court; to end the
66-year, 50-state Union with two new blue “states,” Puerto Rico and
Washington, DC—all to obtain in an instant four new left-wing senators;
and to kill off the 220-year-old Senate filibuster.
Carville is upset that the decade-long lawfare against Trump failed.
So now he advocates expanding the warping of the justice system to
charge Trump’s family and friends.
What is the one constant theme in this alternate left-wing universe?
No Democrat outlines an immigration agenda, a way to round up Biden’s
criminal illegal alien entrants, an energy plan, a way to balance the
budget, an anti-corruption agenda to stop the multibillion-dollar
looting of the federal and state welfare systems, or a new strategic
plan abroad. Instead, the party creates alternate realities that demand
changing the system itself rather than working within it to appeal to
the American voter.
Living with daily delusions and shrieking at Trump demons raging in their collective heads is no way to run a country.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the
Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former
classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a
visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023
Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public
Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National
Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley
Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm
in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming
and agrarianism.
He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/21/all-the-dream-houses-of-the-left/
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The
percentile data in Table 1 are particularly instructive because they
reveal the distributional implications of the group mean differences
across the full ability spectrum. At the 50th percentile within each
group (the group median), the figures closely track the meta-analytic
means. The gap between black and white medians—approximately 17 IQ
points—is consistent across the observed and simulated values. At higher
percentiles, where the selection of students for cognitively demanding
academic programs and professional roles is concentrated, the
differences become even more consequential in representational terms,
though the size of the gap in absolute IQ points remains broadly
similar.