The Graveyard of Destructive Ideas

American Greatness ^ | 24 Feb, 2026 | Victor Davis Hanson

[MtnClimber]

Elite fashions harden into dogma, dissent becomes taboo, institutions fall in line—and only when reality intrudes does yesterday’s madness begin its overdue collapse.

How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support—and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed?

There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity.

The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory). They begin insisting that a new existential threat requires immediate government intervention, novel legislation, ample funding, and public awareness of the impending danger.

So out of nowhere, the public is warned that the scorching planet will be inundated by rising seas in a mere decade. Or that millions of transgender youth are our next civil rights frontier, given that they suffer in silence without political advocacy, new laws, programs, and the chance for “life-saving,” powerful hormonal treatments and radical sex-reassignment surgeries. Indeed, the travel time from an outlandish idea by the faculty lounge to liberal status quo is a mere few years.

Next, the media, hand-in-glove with academia, springs into action to persuade the skeptical public to “follow the science” and “trust the experts.” It castigates any doubters as cranks or “conspiracy theorists” who spread “disinformation” and “misinformation”; or as racists, nativists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes who must be silenced.

Hollywood and sports celebrities often piggyback on the frenzy, hijacking awards ceremonies and pre-game national anthems to out-virtue-signal each other, warning the public that they must adapt and change—or else!

Almost overnight—to take just one example—going to an isolated beach without a mask during the COVID pandemic, showing skepticism about the efficacy or safety of experimental mRNA

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TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: ecoterrorism; ecoterrorists; elitism; globalwarminghoax; greennewdeal; leftism; vdh; victordavishanson

[MtnClimber]

“We must constantly encourage Western journalists to write precisely the opposite of our real intentions and anyone who writes or speaks about our real intentions accurately or impartially in the Western sense of these words must quickly be dismissed and ridiculed as someone of the Right or a fascist, someone who wants to bring back McCarthyism.” - Ivan Agayants Explaining the benefits of disinformation. Quoted in “KGB” - Page 142

[MtnClimber]

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In sum, just five years ago, when Joe Biden and his masters took control of the government, the orthodoxy was that we were to restructure the entire economy along failed European lines in order to save the planet. There were no longer to be the two age-old sexes, but a dozen or more in 2021 America.

An excellent article from the recovering master, Prof Hanson.

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[Tell It Right]

Classic VDH. He’s one of the best at summarizing the past few years of leftist lunacy so that we never loose sight of the forest for all of the trees.