Writer and thinker Victor Davis Hansen recently published an excellent piece in American Greatness outlining a modern phenomenon he calls “The Progressive Imaginarium”. This is a tactic – and Hansen correctly identifies its employment as “impromptu séances,” used by America’s loud, often corpulent, and thoroughly desanguinated politicos, celebrities, and cultural elites to lay claim to any number of popular victimhood scenarios. In our zeitgeist, shouting a claim of victimhood is meant to be rewarded with laurels, or at least earn a mention in dispatches from under the rolling barrages—way down in the muddy media trenches of the culture wars.
Hansen goes on to outline many of the bizarre claims and distortions — from Joe Biden’s public-pool nemesis “Corn Pop,” to Senator Corey Booker and his slasher foil “T‑Bone,” to Rachel Dolezal and Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren, to Jussie Smollett and the phony assassins who singled him out for a good tar and feathering on the mean streets of Chicago.
That all of these people are bananas is beside the point. Every movement must have its cast of useful idiots.
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