Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I want to talk today about this sudden phenomenon of “Now they tell us.”
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, everyone, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, they all knew about Joe Biden’s dementia. Suddenly we’re given all of these revealing quotes that he was completely physically and mentally unfit to carry out the oath of office.
But we all knew that. People had been writing about it. And yet, when you wrote about it, you were called a “cheap faker.” You were ageist.
And now they’re just telling us, “Nah, it was all a cover-up. It was all a conspiracy. You were right all along, you people. He was demented and challenged.”
Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health, he’s now coming out—and he has for a long time, but especially recently—in saying, “Maybe that lockdown wasn’t such a good idea. That was the lockdown that destroyed, almost, the middle class.”
“You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from … ”
“Collateral damage.”
“So there—yeah, collateral damage.”
It led to missed cancer screenings, spousal abuse, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, suicides, all because we shut down, in an unprecedented fashion, our entire society, not just the economy, but the culture, the social life, the political life. And now we’re told by the architects of that failed policy that “we’re kind of sorry.”
Then there’s Joe Biden himself. He’s now openly saying that he doesn’t like what Merrick Garland did vis-a-vis Donald Trump. But he doesn’t mean that “I’m shocked that I weaponized the Department of Justice.” What he’s saying is that he wished that Merrick Garland had gone after Trump more vigorously and earlier. In other words, that lawfare wasn’t enough.
Why didn’t he say that six months ago? Why didn’t he say that during the campaign? But he didn’t.
Then we have this reporter, maybe some of you remember him, probably not, David Enrich from The New York Times. He co-authored a number of hit pieces on Brett Kavanaugh way back during the Kavanaugh hearings.
Now he’s coming out, in a letter to Mark Judge, who was one of the targets of his hit pieces: “I kind of feel bad, sort of, maybe. Maybe we went a little bit overboard. Maybe we shouldn’t have dug up things that may or may not have been true about Judge Kavanaugh when he was 17, 18. Maybe that was a bit much.”
And then we’re getting a whole nother group of what we call data dumps about the FBI and January 6th. So, not long ago, we were told, “Well, yes, there were informants, but actual agents, maybe very few. Just informants. And some of them probably wanted to go there anyway. But yes, there were informants.”
Remember Matthew Rosenberg for The New York Times had told us that. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who had covered January 6th, he said it was all cooked up—the sensationalism. That was an ambush interview by James O’Keefe. But nevertheless, it was an admission that there had—the hysteria had got out of control.
And now we’re learning that the FBI admits there were informants. And more importantly, they just released videos of the supposedly nonexistent, not really, kind of, maybe bomber who put these explosive devices in front of the DNC and the RNC, in which we were told—we weren’t told anything. We weren’t given videos. But the implication and the leaks to the media was that this was some hyper-Trump partisan.
All of these things demand the question, why now?
Why all of a sudden are we no longer crazy that Joe Biden was not fit as a fiddle, that the quarantine was a mess, that Brett Kavanaugh was not a rapist or sexual assaulter, that there’s more to January 6th than we’re told? And I could go on and on about these 11th-hour revelations.
It’s either, A, they’re afraid there’s going to be an accounting, very quickly, from the Trump administration, and they know that they had done things that were not just [unethical] but perhaps illegal.
No. 2, it also could be that in time, and they are opportunists, most of these people that I talk about—they see the national mood changing, that we’re at peak-woke and the reputation of the FBI or the NIH or journalism in general is at an all-time nadir.
Or maybe it’s something even more dramatic, like, if I were Donald Trump and his team, and we had lied and done all of these things, and I was now in power, I know what I would do to people like myself.
So, it’s a projection that they have culpable—a feeling of culpability and exposure. And now they’re trying to get everything out before there’s an accounting. Whatever the reasoning, it’s quite amusing and, in a tragic way, funny.
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