Victor Davis Hanson (link below) just fired a precision-guided missile into the heart of progressive sanctimony, and the explosion is glorious. In one short column he has done what the Left's own internal contradictions have been doing for years: he has made its loudest priests look clownish, exhausted, and increasingly detached from reality. The piece is not merely conservative commentary; it is an autopsy report on three dying religions, DEI racialism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the Church of Climate Catastrophism. And the corpses are starting to smell.

1. DEI: The Millionaire Victimhood Industrial Complex

Picture this: Michelle Obama, net worth pushing nine figures, owner of estates in Martha's Vineyard, Kalorama, and Chicago, surrounded 24/7 by armed protectors most Americans will never afford for five minutes, sitting on a book-tour couch to inform us that systemic racism forced her to employ three full-time hair straighteners and that Black people literally cannot learn to swim because of white beauty standards.

This is not empowerment; this is performance art for guilty white liberals who need to be reassured that their racial penance checks are still morally necessary. The doctrine of DEI cannot compute the existence of a Black couple richer and more powerful than 99.999% of white Americans, so it simply ignores the data and doubles down on the sermon: "All disparities are proof of oppression, forever." The result is a First Lady who sounds like she's auditioning for a reparations telethon while her private Gulfstream idles on the tarmac. The absurd theatre writes itself.

2. Trump Derangement Syndrome: The Suicide Cult That Demanded the Rope

For four years the same people who now shriek "Release the Epstein files!" were perfectly content with Merrick Garland's Justice Department keeping those files sealed tighter than Fort Knox. They knew, because their own lawfare priests had scoured every page, that Donald Trump's name appeared in the least damaging context imaginable: he flew on the plane once (Miami to New York, no minors aboard), banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, and wished Ghislaine Maxwell "well" in the sarcastic way one wishes a black-widow spider well right before stepping on it.

But hatred is a hell of a drug. When Trump, now back in power, began dribbling the files out anyway, the very same voices who spent years insisting the documents would destroy him suddenly discovered a newfound devotion to victim privacy. Too late. Out come the texts of Stacey Plaskett taking real-time coaching from Jeffrey Epstein on how to smear Trump in congressional testimony. Out come the cosy emails involving Democratic donors and fixers. The mob demanded the guillotine and discovered, to its horror, that the blade was facing the wrong direction. Beautiful.

3. Climate Dogma: Do As I Say, Not As I Fly

The high priests of the apocalypse, Obama with his oceanfront mansions, Kerry with his family jet, DiCaprio with his yacht flotillas, continue to lecture the peasant class about cow farts and pickup trucks while burning more fossil fuel in a weekend than an Ohio steelworker does in a decade.

Even Bill Gates, the ultimate green billionaire, has finally admitted the quiet part out loud: wind and solar are adorable toys, but they will never deliver the 100 gigawatts per year of always-on, dispatchable power that his beloved AI data centers require. So he's back to nuclear and — gasp — natural gas. The congregation is starting to notice that the sermon only applies downward.

Meanwhile, the same administration that wants to ban your gas stove just approved the largest LNG export terminal in American history because Europe needs the molecules yesterday to keep Vladimir Putin from freezing Berlin. Reality keeps interrupting the liturgy, and the priests keep pretending they don't hear the knocking.

The Fatal Flaw of All Three Cults

Hanson nails the core pathology: these are deductive, not inductive, belief systems. They begin with the conclusion — "America is irredeemably racist," "Trump is Satan," "the planet has twelve years left" — and then torture every fact until it screams the pre-approved answer. When the facts refuse to cooperate (a Black president worth $100 million, Epstein files that boomerang on Democrats, renewable energy that can't keep the lights on for AI), the only options left are ever-louder denunciations and ever-more-absurd contortions.

This is why the Left now resembles a Soviet apparatchik in 1989 insisting that the bread lines are actually proof of socialism's success. The ideology has entered its terminal phase: the gap between its claims and observable reality has grown so wide that only the most credentialed or the most fanatical can still cross it without bursting into laughter, or tears.

The Punchline

The beautiful irony is that the harder the Left clings to these collapsing dogmas, the more it accelerates its own political and cultural irrelevance. Every Michelle Obama hair-stylist sob story, every "release the files you monsters!" own-goal, every John Kerry private-jet lecture, drives another cohort of normal people into the camp that simply refuses to recite the catechism anymore.

Hanson didn't just diagnose the disease. He handed the patients a mirror and watched them recoil in horror at their own reflection. And the rest of us get to sit back with popcorn and watch the final act of a tragedy that has stopped pretending to be anything else.

The gods of Leftist ideology are dying of embarrassment. Good riddance.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/20/the-embarrassments-of-ideology/