HANSON: The world woke up

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In less than six months, the entire world has been turned upside down. There is no longer such a thing as conventional wisdom or the status quo.

The unthinkable has become the banal.

Take illegal immigration — remember the 10,000 daily illegal entries under former U.S. President Joe Biden?

Recall the only solution was supposedly “comprehensive immigration reform” — a euphemism for mass amnesties.

Now, there is no such thing as daily new illegal immigration. It simply disappeared with common-sense enforcement of existing immigration laws — and a new president.

How about the 40,000-50,000 shortfall in military recruitment?

Remember all the causes that the generals cited for their inability to enlist soldiers: generational gangs, obesity, drugs, and stiff competition with private industry?

And now?

In just six months, recruitment targets are already met; the issue is mostly moot.

Why? The new Pentagon flipped the old, canceling its racist DEI programs and assuring the rural, middle-class Americans — especially white males — that they were not systemically racist after all.

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Instead, they were reinvited to enlist as the critical combat cohort who died at twice their demographic share in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How about the “end of the NATO crisis,” supposedly brought on by a bullying U.S.?

Now the vast majority of NATO members have met their pledges to spend 2% of GDP on defence, which will soon increase to 5%.

Iconic neutrals like Sweden and Finland have become frontline NATO nations, arming to the teeth. The smiling NATO Secretary-General even called Trump the “daddy” of the alliance.

What about indomitable, all-powerful, theocratic Iran, the scourge of the Middle East for nearly 50 years?

Although it had never won a war in the last half-century, its terrorist surrogates — Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis — were supposedly too dangerous to provoke.

Now?

Most of their expeditionary terrorists are neutered, and their leaders are in hiding or dead. Iran has no air force, no real navy, no air defences, and no active nuclear weapons program.

Its safety apparently depends only on the mood of the U.S. or Israel on any given day, not to fly into its airspace and take out its missiles, nuclear sites, generals, or theocrats at will.

What happened to the supposedly inevitable recession, hyperinflation, stock market collapse, unemployment spikes, and global trade war that last spring economists assured us would hit by summer?

Job growth is strong, and April’s inflation rate is the lowest in four years. GDP is still steady. The stock market hit a record high. Trade partners are renegotiating their surpluses with the U.S.

It turns out that staying in the U.S. consumer market is the top priority of our trading partners. It seems their preexisting and mostly undisclosed profits were large enough to afford reasonable U.S. symmetrical tariffs.

For now, news of tax cuts, deregulation, “drill baby, drill” energy policies displacing Green New Deal strangulation, and $8-10 trillion in potential foreign investment has encouraged — rather than deterred — business.

Then there were our marquee elite universities, whose prestige, riches, and powerful alumni made them answerable to no one.

And now, after the executive and congressional crackdown on their decades of hubris?

Supposedly brilliant university presidents have resigned in shame. The public has caught on to their grant surcharge gouging.

Campuses have backed off their arrogant defiance of the Supreme Court’s civil rights rulings.

They are panicked about the public exposure of their systemic antisemitism.

They are scrambling to explain away their institutionalized ideological bias and their tawdry profit-making schemes and mass recruitment of wealthy foreign students from illiberal regimes.

So, the mighty Ivy League powerhouses are now humbling themselves to cut a deal to save their financial hides and hopefully return to their proper mission of disinterested education.

What happened to the trans juggernaut of sex as a social construct and its bookend gospel that biological men could dominate women’s sports?

People woke up. They were no longer afraid to state that sex is binary and biologically determined. And biological men who dominate women’s sports are bullies, not heroes.

Where are the millionaire scamming architects of BLM now? Where is the “DEI now, tomorrow, and forever” conventional wisdom?

Where are Professor Ibram X. Kendi and his $30,000 Zoom lessons on how to fight racism by being racist?

They have all been exposed as the race hustlers they always were. Their creed that it is OK for supposed victims to be racist victimizers themselves was exposed as an absurd con.

So, what flipped everything?

We were living in an “emperor has no clothes” make-believe world for the last few years. The people knew establishment narratives were absurd, and our supposed experts were even more ridiculous.

But few — until now — had the guts to scream “the emperor is naked” to dispel the fantasies.

When they finally did, reality returned.

— 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.