Our Brave New Biden World

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, December 08, 2020

 

America traditionally has not reinvented reality after an election, although prior presidential winners have often tried, as in the fashion of our politics. But the new powers of social media, Silicon Valley, and a woke media have made reality-changing now a reality.

 

Suddenly Antifa and BLM have all but disappeared from their heroic barricades. Where and why did they go? Did they ever really exist?

 

Mysteriously, a week or two before the election, the flood of violence in our major cities began downsizing to a tiny trickle. How strange that former angry throngs are now in nearly suspended animation. Are all those black kneepads, helmets, and umbrellas now in closets? Are all those whiny Pajama Boys on the barricades back teaching in their Zoom classrooms, or taking their college Zoom classes in their parents’ basements?

 

What changed? What in the world convinced committed revolutionaries to cease their long march to revolutionary justice?

 

Did COVID-19 suddenly remind them that shouting in the faces of others, mocking social distancing, marching in tight phalanxes, shunning hand cleansers and mass mask-wearing were dangerous — although such activities had apparently been safe and even good for civic health while protesting a few weeks before? Was newly found social responsibility the reason that the looting, arson, destruction, and defacement went into hiatus?

 

Is the calm — along with the 90–95 percent “turnout” in the major swing-state cities — the bargaining chips by which the Left claims responsibility for the Biden “win”?

 

And just as suddenly, the evil elixir hydroxychloroquine is in the news again — but this time not as more proof that Trump indulges in conspiracist quackery to force down your throat everything from bleach to lethal, heart-stopping, anti-malarial drugs. Abruptly, a few studies, especially from abroad, in the past month “suggest” that hydroxychloroquine could be efficacious in treating and ameliorating the symptoms of early COVID-19 illnesses—and at the egalitarian cost of about 7 cents a pill.

 

Who knew that the destitute of India and Africa suddenly are attesting that the cheap and available medication has somewhat slowed some of the lethal manifestations of the coronavirus? What happened to rehabilitate this old drug — whose advocacy recently had become synonymous with career destruction and that “science” condemned as worthless in treating COVID-19? Was there worry this December that thousands worldwide might have been sickened or might have died from not considering its medical efficacy in early stages of the disease? A media study just released from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that over the past year news stories about Trump and hydroxychloroquine (overwhelmingly negative in tone) were more numerous than all stories combined that reported on the research and development of all the COVID-19 vaccines.

 

Speaking of COVID-19, has CNN had a sudden change of heart about “China bashing”? Why are the media now reporting that the Chinese were duplicitous in misleading the world about the much earlier origins of the virus and its contagiousness? Does this new post-election realism mark another mysterious change from the old edict of “Trump bashing the Chinese” to “President Biden soberly and judiciously cracking down on egregious Chinese behavior”?

 

Why a few days after November 3 were vaccines suddenly in the news, with praise that they are now safe and efficacious, and that even Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have dropped their pre-election suspicions of the jabs? Was news of their safety and utility a late-breaking discovery of the first week of November?

 

We, of course, had been winked and nodded by Pfizer that in early September important announcements would be coming in late October — in part because Pfizer was becoming afraid that the denigration of the vaccine by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden (who wished to discredit the efforts of Operation Warp Speed) might harm its rollout?

 

And yet, Pfizer, this past summer, told neither the media nor the president of the United States about its ongoing progress with the vaccine but instead, strangely, contacted the Biden campaign. A few days before the election, Pfizer announced it would not announce any success pre-election, so as to avoid playing Election Day politics — all so that it could play politics a few days afterwards by boasting that indeed millions of doses were soon on the way to the American people.

 

How miraculous that a vaccine that was the culmination of nine months of nonstop work was abruptly declared still experimental, with no specific date in sight for its approved roll-out; and yet, about three weeks later, it was transmogrified into a safe, effective, and life-saving remedy.

 

It was almost as if Pfizer were claiming — after taking millions in Trump-administration funding guarantees for logistics, and exemptions from legal liability for their multibillion-dollar risk — that they, well, had never been a part of Operation Warp Speed after all. Or were they? Sort of? It depends?

 

Lockdowns? Amid a late-fall spike that has hit the Western world hard, why suddenly is there renewed national dialogue about the damage done by closing schools, businesses, and commerce? Did the national consciousness in early November abruptly decide that COVID-19 versus quarantines was a lose/lose situation, or is it that President-elect Biden will single-handedly soon be responsible for every COVID-19 fatality? Is it now in retrospect wrong to tag any president with 100 percent culpability, since others might begin in late January blaming a Typhoid Joe for each coronavirus death, a Hoover Joe for each closed business, and a Bull Connor Joe for each accusation of local police excess?

 

Hold on: Perhaps in late January we will learn that COVID-19 deaths were in the past somehow improperly calculated, given lethal comorbidities — suggesting perhaps that many patients die with the coronavirus rather than solely because of it? Will we learn that case numbers are, well, subject to interpretation, given that the better indicator of lethality rates suggests that people younger than 70 who catch the virus have a 99 percent-plus survival rate? And will our late-January COVID death tolls be more or less similar to those in Europe, suggesting an effective, collective, and unifying Biden amelioration?

 

Will our new Biden-approved COVID-19 advisers now come from a range of disciplines, rather than being faulted for not strictly being a virologist or an epidemiologist? After all, oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel, a Biden pandemic consultant who will be advising the nation on a contagious disease that is most lethal to those over 65, in the past had declared that people older than 75 were mostly superfluous. He has vowed to skip his own medical care when he reaches that nearly terminal age, given the comorbidities that make mid-septuagenarians marginalized. Are these perfect credentials to adjudicate COVID-19 care for our vulnerable elderly?

 

Unity and brotherhood have magically sprouted. What happened to Biden’s condemnation of Trump supporters as “ugly folk” and “chumps” and “dregs”? On November 4, did we suddenly realize that these pejorative terms were really ones of endearment, part of Joe’s ecumenical calls for “unity” that is to end the nasty “divisiveness” for those who for years have tossed around the repugnant slur of “Nazi” and worse?

 

Who knew that unproven voting machines, early voting, and mail-in voting were vital proofs of our confidence in democracy? Were we not told by Elizabeth Warren and warned by foundations and universities in 2019, after the “hacked” 2016 election, that computers would be unsecured, and that valid ballots required signatures and addresses and witnesses? And then suddenly in November 2020 — not so much?

 

Is Jill Stein now a saint or demon to have sued — into December 2016 — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to overturn their recorded votes? Was it still legitimate, à la Hillary Clinton’s recent advice to Biden to “never” concede a presidential election “under any circumstances” — or was Hillary too a threat to the republic?

 

Will the Trump “recession” and “depression” suddenly in a few more weeks become an astounding “recovery” or even the “Biden boom” after the “Biden vaccine” ends the “Trump lockdown”?

 

And can we return to media normality again, when reporters cease attacking the president but instead legitimately question the commander in chief about the existential issues of the day, such as Joe Biden’s favorite socks or milk shake, or why is he not showing even more anger at — Donald J. Trump? Or why and how he controlled his temper so masterfully when provoked by — Donald J. Trump? Or can he repair the global damage wrought by — Donald J. Trump? Or what does Biden think about the future of the soul — of Donald J. Trump?

 

When did special counsel go from deified to expendable? Sometime in early December 2020, when John Durham was rebranded as such? Is all praise of the idea of a Mueller special counsel erased, replaced by new slogans on the barnyard wall to the effect that special counsels are merely highfalutin hired partisan guns who should be summarily dismissed?

 

Given Joe Biden’s mental robustness and sharp-as-a-tack repartee, it will be nice again to have no more conspiracy theories floating about the cognitive disabilities of the commander in chief — no demands for the president to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, no Ivy League psychiatrists diagnosing as nuts a person whom they have never met or talking about interventions to remove the demented president by force. It will be nice not to have to guess what remedies the non-transparent president is taking for his infection, or his cholesterol, once the new chief executive is an open book about his medications.

 

Likewise, it will be a relief to hear no #MeToo accusations about our president, no stories of prior sexual assaults, no fights over whether “every survivor” has the “right to be believed,” no female alleging a past presidential sexual “incident.”

 

As the world turns post-November, so do policy realities. Did Donald Trump really make a mess of the Middle East — one that can be cured by lifting sanctions on Iran, reentering the Iran deal, and resuscitating the funding of Hezbollah terrorism?

 

Or will we hear that the Biden plan alone has enticed Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel? And will the Biden plan subsidize, refresh, and re-empower Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to ensure they are central to a Mideast peace? Or will Biden’s team shrug that the Palestinians are “essential” and then more or less do what Trump did?

 

Is Vladimir Putin still the evil colluder, enemy of all human decency, or is he to be rehabilitated by a liberal reset 2.0, given that Joe Biden “understands Putin” and thus forges a new “correct” partnership for peace with Russia?

 

Do we now have sudden “allies” and a new “multilateral framework” in which NATO partners finally — either in fear of Mighty Joe Biden, or in reference to his Old Joe from Scranton decency — pony up their 2 percent of GDP contributions to NATO defenses? Or will it be wiser to accept that it is our sacred duty to protect rich NATO allies and let them worry about what they wish to contribute to their own defense?

 

In our brave new media/Silicon Valley world, we are rebirthing post-November realities and truths. The past is being erased or refabricated. The present is malleable, as it searches to create the absolute “truth” of our near future.