{"id":63947,"date":"2021-02-10T03:00:52","date_gmt":"2021-02-10T08:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=63947"},"modified":"2021-02-09T17:21:46","modified_gmt":"2021-02-09T22:21:46","slug":"victor-davis-hanson-on-animal-farm-americas-nightmare-2021-version","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/02\/10\/victor-davis-hanson-on-animal-farm-americas-nightmare-2021-version\/","title":{"rendered":"Victor Davis Hanson on <em>Animal Farm<\/em>, America&#8217;s nightmare 2021 version"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amgreatness.com\/2021\/02\/07\/our-animal-farm\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Victor Davis Hanson<\/a> outlines the original George Orwell novel and then contrasts today&#8217;s situation with what progressives demanded back in the 1960s and 70s:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Animal-Farm-by-George-Orwell-cover.jpg\"><img style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 0px 15px\"\u00a0src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Animal-Farm-by-George-Orwell-cover-409x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"409\" height=\"600\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-63948\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Animal-Farm-by-George-Orwell-cover-409x600.jpg 409w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Animal-Farm-by-George-Orwell-cover-436x640.jpg 436w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Animal-Farm-by-George-Orwell-cover-102x150.jpg 102w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Animal-Farm-by-George-Orwell-cover.jpg 461w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 409px) 100vw, 409px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America&#8217;s Animal Farm. <\/p>\n<p>But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking on two feet and absorbed all the levers of American cultural influence and power: the media, the bureaucracies, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, publishing, the academy, K-12 education, professional sports, and entertainment. And to them all, the revolutionaries added their past coarseness and 1960s-era by-any-means-necessary absolutism.<\/p>\n<p>We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism. <\/p>\n<p>Conspiracies? <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/5936036\/secret-2020-election-campaign\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Now they brag of them in <em>Time<\/em><\/a>. Read their hubristic confessionals in &#8220;The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.&#8221; Once upon a Time, radicals used to talk of a &#8220;secret history&#8221; in terms of the Pentagon Papers, or a &#8220;shadow campaign&#8221; in detailing Hollywood blacklisting. They are exactly what they once despised, with one key qualifier: Sixties crudity and venom are central to their metamorphosis. <\/p>\n<p>Our left-wing American revolutionary cycle from the barricades to the boardroom was pretty quick \u2014 in the manner that the ideology of the <em>Battleship Potemkin<\/em> soon led to Stalin&#8217;s show trials, or Mao&#8217;s &#8220;long march&#8221; logically resulted in the Cultural Revolution. The credo, again, is that the noble ends of forced &#8220;equity&#8221; require any means necessary to achieve them. <\/p>\n<p>The Left censors books in our schools, whether <em>To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> or <em>Tom Sawyer<\/em>. It is the Left who organizes efforts to shout down campus speakers or even allows them to be roughed up.  <\/p>\n<p>The Left demands not free-speech areas anymore, but no-speech &#8220;safe spaces&#8221; and &#8220;theme houses&#8221; \u2014 euphemisms for racially segregated, &#8220;separate-but-equal&#8221; zones. &#8220;Microaggressions&#8221; are tantamount to thought crimes. The mere way we look, smile, or blink can indict us as counterrevolutionaries. Stalin&#8217;s Trotskyization of all incorrect names, statues, and commemoratives is the Left&#8217;s ideal, as they seek to relabel Old America in one fell swoop. No one is spared from the new racists, not Honest Abe, not Tom Jefferson, not you, not me.<\/p>\n<p>For &#8220;teach-ins,&#8221; we now have indoctrination sessions. But the handlers are no longer long-haired 1960&#8217;s dreamy, sloppy, and incoherent mentors. They are disciplined, no-nonsense brain-washers.<\/p>\n<p>The Left&#8217;s Russia is our new old bogeyman. Putin is the new &#8220;We will bury you&#8221; Khrushchev.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Victor Davis Hanson outlines the original George Orwell novel and then contrasts today&#8217;s situation with what progressives demanded back in the 1960s and 70s: Yes, the downtrodden pigs, the exploited horses, and the victimized sheep finally did expel Farmer Jones from America&#8217;s Animal Farm. But in his place, as Orwell predicted, revolutionary pigs began walking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,53,13],"tags":[311,263,459,127,354,1020,99],"class_list":["post-63947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-liberty","category-politics","category-usa","tag-1960s","tag-1970s","tag-censorship","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-georgeorwell","tag-progressives","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gDp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63947"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63950,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63947\/revisions\/63950"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}