by Victor Davis Hanson
SNL, Margaret Brennan, and EU elites mock Trump supporters, yet their own cluelessness only fuels the populist rise they fear.
Three recent but completely unrelated events illustrate the deranged hatred of Donald Trump and his supporters continuing now even into a second decade. And yet the venom only further marginalizes the left.
In its too-long 50th anniversary spectacle, Saturday Night Live offered a skit in which marquee actor Tom Hanks did an impression of what the left thinks is a supposedly neanderthal Trump supporter.
The episode was NBC’s tele-version of the recent Obama-Hillary Clinton-Biden vocabulary of cheap MAGA disparagement: clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, semi-fascists, and ultra-MAGAs.
Most of those stereotyped props were evident in Hanks’ character.
He was wearing a red MAGA hat (real and not the fake versions of Jussie Smollett’s wild and sinister imagination).
Hanks sounded off as a superstitious evangelical, a slow-speaking Southern twanger, and a poorly dressed slob.
And of course, the SNL writers insisted that he play the gratuitous racist. So, Hanks, as a clueless Black Jeopardy contestant, initially refused to even shake the hand of the African-American, assumed intellectually and morally superior, gameshow host.
We are supposed to believe the Hanks caricature is in contrast with progressives—usually represented in society as the bicoastal enlightened, well-spoken, and snappily dressed.
Perhaps the SNL crowd thought the counterpart to Hanks’ MAGA sluggard was the recent hard-left, Democratic standard-bearer—the eloquent Kamala Harris of mesmerizing word-salad fame?
Aside from the reality that Trump captured a record number of African-American male voters, nearly split the Hispanic vote, and made gains with Asian- and Jewish-Americans, he also won massive defections from Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
So, does the SNL, Tom Hanks, or the left have any idea why it lost the popular vote due to such a diverse group of Democrat apostates?
Democrats should ask: Who is truly slow-witted? Is it the stumbling Tom Hanks caricature or the real Joe Biden and his ilk?
The latter bequeathed Americans an open border, 12 million illegal aliens, hyperinflation, two theater wars abroad, mega-trillion-dollar deficits, and the Green New Deal that impoverished the middle classes of all races.
At about the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation. He was immediately pressed by host Margaret Brennan, the epitome of the supposedly sophisticated, hip, left-wing journalist, and thus the converse of the Hanks caricature.
Yet when pressing Rubio about the recent dress-down speech of Vice President J.D. Vance to the European ministers, Brennan thought she would draw on her historical wisdom to confound the supposed Trump megaphone.
Did Vance not know, Brennan demanded of Rubio, that he was lecturing Europeans about their unfortunate abandonment of free expression and speech? And in Germany of all places, she intoned—the very place, she insisted, where the Nazis once weaponized free speech to conduct the genocide!
It took Rubio about a nanosecond to clue the historically illiterate Brennan that the Nazis never allowed any free speech.
It was not excessive or even crude free speech that caused the Holocaust, but precisely the complete absence of all sorts of dissenting views in the marketplace of ideas.
Ironically, it was precisely Brennan’s own defense of censoring “hate speech,” “disinformation,” and “misinformation” that the Nazis used to brand as extreme and unacceptable any view contrary to their own.
Next, the stunned European ministers in Munich, of course, sat aghast at Vance’s tutorial.
None refuted what he was saying, namely that European elites’ efforts to delay or cancel elections that might bring national conservative populists to power are contrary to the European enlightenment.
The use of weaponized, selective law enforcement to go after peaceful anti-abortion protestors, but not known violent Muslim illegal immigrants, is not only contrary to a free society but suicidal.
But Vance had a deeper subtext to his remarks.
The left-wing European elite fear even more than they hate the rising populist pushback.
The European apparat knows their own past two decades of massive illegal alien influxes, disarmament, deindustrializing, crashing fertility, green mandates, high taxes, crushing regulations, asymmetrical trade tariffs, and suppression of free speech and dissent were precisely what created the populist backlash.
The growing counter-revolution was not because of bogeyman charges of “racism,” “Islamophobia,” or “xenophobia,” much less “hate speech.”
The real culprit was bankrupt policies that not only did not work but impoverished the entire European Union middle classes.
So, the cure to restore European influence and prestige abroad and prosperity and security at home is not more censorship but more debate, dissent, and fresh ideas.
All that transparency might jumpstart the economy, encourage entrepreneurism, ensure national security, and return Europe to a civil, safe—and influential—society.
Sometimes Trump haters prove to be his best allies. Their venom shows us they either lack common sense or intelligence or both.
Such was the case with Tom Hanks, Margaret Brennen, and the European ministers.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/20/tom-hanks-margaret-brennan-and-the-european-ministers-reveal-it-all/
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