January 20—Novus ordo seclorum?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

How do we explain that the world is turning upside down after November 5, 2024, and will continue following January 20, 2025? Perhaps the answer is that the Left here and our enemies abroad know what they have done to Trump and, during the Biden dereliction, to the U.S. itself during the last four years. And thus, they know what these scoundrels would do if they were now in the place of an ascending Trump and a re-awakening U.S. if they had experienced from themselves what they did to Trump and us. Another explanation is that we are waking up from a bad four-year dream, or recovering from a bad hangover, or have arisen from a coma, and for the first time have rediscovered confidence within ourselves.

Full article:

Part One - January 21, 2025

How do we explain that the world is turning upside down after November 5, 2024, and will continue following January 20, 2025?

Symptoms?

Take the media?

The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and others suddenly did not endorse their usual left/Democratic presidential candidate this election. So, many of their writers are now fired or resigned in anger or fear.

Owners claim their own papers are too biased. Changes are promised. But why now? Why did CNN lose its defamation suit? Why is CBS thinking of settling with Trump after editing an interview with Kamala Harris to help her chances in the waning days of the 2024 campaign?

Silicon Valley? What happened there?

Instead of Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million invested in ensuring the Trump campaign did not win (as in 2020), why are he and the wealthiest tech lords in the world traipsing to Mar-a-Lago? Why did Mark blame his former CEO Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook’s DEI mindless McCarthyism?

There is to be no more Trump-Hitler?

Even Joe and Mika took their hajj to Palm Beach?

Snoop Dog is no longer cutting videos about shooting Trump, but praising his near hero?

Bezos’s rockets and Elon’s are now to be frenemies?

Why did MSNBC suddenly fire(?)—or see leave—its CEO Rashida Jones? Was it just ratings, or public disgust as well with the likes of Rachel Maddow (who why now took a pay cut?) and the protected racist rantings of Joy Reid?

Why now, all of a sudden, do the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times report to us that Team Biden and the media who covered the White House all knew that he was cognitively challenged from the start of his tenure as they both conspired to smear and slander all who spoke the truth?

Why is everyone shocked that Joe Biden just declared that a mythical 28th Amendment is “the law of the land”?

Again, why now these about-faces? Why not last July; why not, say, February or September 2022 or perhaps 2023? Why do we hear only now that Joe Biden signed an executive order banning LNG exports to Europe—and claimed he did not know what he signed?

Also, suddenly, there really was a Wuhan Lab origin to the birth of Covid, after all. And mirabile dictu Peter Daszak is no hero and not deserving of a single dime of more federal money? Will there be no more bobblehead Dr. Faucis to buy? Why is there no longer a market for them and other Fauci paraphernalia?

Why is Liz Cheney no longer a folk hero? Was she not praised for coaching a witness and shutting out other Republicans from serving on the January 6 House committee?

Christopher Wray sent in his resignation and now suddenly warns us of cabals of Chinese espionage operatives in the U.S.? Again, did they just now appear?

Why is everyone from CEOs to the FBI abruptly shutting down their DEI departments? Would they have done so if Harris had won?

And did we not hear that the caravans heading northward to our border have been turning around? Why is Mexico so complimentary of the once diablo Trump?

Why is Trudeau gone?

For that matter, why did the Assad regime abruptly fall after the election, and why does Hamas wish to negotiate, and why does the current Iranian president suddenly swear Iran wants no bomb, no desire to assassinate Trump, no wish for a wider war with Israel?

As for the trivial, why did the Danish government just put Greenland imagery on its royal coat of arms? And why did it send $1 billion to Greenland, and why not 1, 5, 9 years ago?

So why is the world turned upside down, as the British played after their shocking defeat at Yorktown (e.g., “Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.”)?

Part Two - January 22, 2025

The obvious answer to all these disconnects, shockers, and paradoxes is not quite the whole answer: that Trump won in the greatest political comeback in U.S. history, that he might well be a Reaganesque president to Biden’s Carter, that his success will be his revenge and reveal to the country just how badly our John Gill Biden ruled in comparison.

Or even perhaps the answer is that the Left here and our enemies abroad know what they have done to Trump and, during the Biden dereliction, to the U.S. itself during the last four years. And thus, they know what these scoundrels would do if they were now in the place of an ascending Trump and a re-awakening U.S. if they had experienced from themselves what they did to Trump and us.

Another explanation is that we are waking up from a bad four-year dream, or recovering from a bad hangover, or have arisen from a coma, and for the first time have rediscovered confidence within ourselves.

What caused our slumber, or rather what were the goads that drove the U.S. absolutely insane from the summer of 2020 to January 20, 2025?

Was it the fatal combination of the insane Covid lockdown, and the hysterical, Stalinist reprisals to any dissent? Did that social isolation and economic ruin offer tinder for the George Floyd riots?

How otherwise would entire cities go up in smoke of 35 dead and $2 billion in arson and looting damage over the unfortunate death of a violent career felon? No one wished to remember that the deified Floyd once broke into a home and put a gun to a woman’s pregnant stomach, and at the time of his arrest was in self-imposed ill health, high on fentanyl, suffering heart disease, recovering from Covid, arrested for passing counterfeit currency, resisting arrest, and perished while a cop sneered as he kept him down on the pavement gasping for breath? To lament Floyd’s death but to disagree he should appear in murals with a halo and feathered wings, remember, was heresy, blasphemy, and grounds for firing.

Did all that warrant the deaths and destruction that followed, and would it have occurred had not the locked-up and quarantined population been first driven crazy by the pandemic and the reaction to it? Was all that the fuel that reawakened the woke/DEI virus and nearly fatally infected the country?

So, the four-year hiatus is over. And there is a sense of joy, or rather relief that abroad America will once again protect its friends and worry its enemies. We will try to forget the years of craziness of printing trillions of dollars, of retribalizing and fixating on our superficial appearances, of demanding from others the confession that there are three equal sexes, and the windmills and solar panels will keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, day and night, and China is merely a friendly rival, and that thieves steal from stores only because rich people made laws that it is bad to take things people need but they do not.

So, the pseudo-realities constructed during the years of madness have evaporated and left behind a foul-smelling vapor. Are we supposed to laugh even now about the eerie machinations of our “51 experts” who claimed the damming Hunter laptop was “Russian disinformation,” or that Joe Biden, our savior on January 6 and the defender of our Constitution can leave office declaring in his dementia that he alone has just ratified and put into law the 28th Amendment as he says, “the law of the land.”

So, what will follow now that we Americans have arisen from our four-year stupor and once again are masters of our own destiny?

How long will it take for the Left, now in their caves licking their wounds, to reemerge as they did during the Senate confirmation questioning? Then the hysterics, ignorance, and obnoxiousness of Senators Hirono, Kane, Schumer, Warren, or Whitehouse likely guaranteed the unanimous or near-unanimous votes to confirm all the nominees who endured their adolescent performance art rants.

Who knows such answers? But for now, perhaps there is a month, maybe three, to fuel a renaissance, a counter-revolution that will first return us to normality, as the last shall be first, the first last.