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 U.S. 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.
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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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. fleet was in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and the blockade of Iran. More than 300 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Nicolas 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 U.S. 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 U.S. citizens.
The Congress that wants to impeach Hegseth should extend its gaze to 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 hinged 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, D.C. — 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. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by emailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
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