The American Descent into Madness

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Jerca Zagorc // Getty Images

Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

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A Child’s Garden of Animals: Barnicide

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

John Gould Wikipedia Commons

Part One

Barn Owls really do like barns. And they are invaluable predators of mice, squirrels, rats and such who all do their small part to wreck a barn and its environs. And yet they are not the fierce Great-Horned-Owls of six-foot wingspans that swooped just above the ground as they once terrified us in the orchard. They are not those strange little “screech” owls, without necks that roost at night in our redwood trees and hoot without fear. 

As I have mentioned here before, barn owls have the face of monkeys, hence the sobriquet monkey/monkey-faced owls. They seem globalists. In Greece, I once saw one on the island of Aegina in a crumbling Byzantine Church. At dusk in Hillsdale, Michigan I would see them on the bike path in an old pump shed. 

When growing up, there were always pairs who had nests in the rafters and kept rodents out of the barn, where the sweat boxes of raisins evened out before trucking the crop into Sun-Maid. I don’t think they attacked the flicker woodpeckers. But the more the two owls flew on patrol, the rarer seemed those pests that drilled holes throughout the barn (usually covered up with tin-can lids). 

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Class — The Word We Dare Not Speak

London: Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex leave Windsor Castle in Ascot Landau carriage during a procession after getting married at St Georges Chapel

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

How often during the last year of woke, have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? 

Million-dollar-a year university presidents virtue signal on the cheap their own sort of “unearned white privilege.” 

Multimillionaire Meghan Markle and the Obamas, from their plush estates, indict Americans for their biases. 

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VDH on Tucker Carlson

You can find the interview on the Left’s pathology below.

Or click here:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/victor-davis-hanson-lefts-vague-claims-america-racist

Trump Winds and Biden Whirlwinds

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn? 

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The Culturalist: Immigration from Ancient Rome to the US Border

Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News

Join Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc as they discuss immigration in the late, declining Roman Empire and the current chaos on our border.

Eeyore ’s Corner: From Hippies to Yuppies to Our Puppies

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part Three: Puppydom

The grandchildren of the hippies and the children of the Yuppies? They are a different, a hybrid bunch altogether. 

They combine all the worst traits of both leftist eras: selfishness, performance art, the I/me/my/mine self-infatuation (“my story,” “my truth,” “my narrative”), crudity, vulgarity and rudeness of the 1960s, along with the fixation on class, snobbery, elitism, money, careerism of the 1980s and beyond. And like both Hippies and Yuppies, their prolonged adolescence and child-like self-centeredness are signature traits.

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