Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
In American journalism, there are supposed to be some clear, nonnegotiable third-rails.
One is zero tolerance for overtly racist language and comportment among our movers and shakers. Reporters, for example, for four years damned Donald Trump for his neutralizing summation that there were both “fine people” and extremists mingled among the hordes of protestors during their occasionally violent encounters in Charlottesville, Virginia
Victor Davis Hanson // The John Bachelor Show
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
The Left used to march on the Pentagon; now it runs it from the inside. Secretary of Defense Austin represents the new profile of a defense secretary and upper-echelon of the military. In exchange, upon retirement and without criticism from the Left for revolving right onto corporate defense contractor boards, and getting rich, these military/industrial/intelligence retired elites become loudly woke. Wokism, then, serves as a veritable insurance policy against the old Elizabeth Warren-type railing against generals and admirals cashing in. Lower down the chain of command, captains and majors know their own promotions rest more on the quality of their diversity memos and quota promotions, not so much anymore on the strict military performance under their commands.
Continue reading “Historian’s Corner: Assessing America in the Age of Woke”
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
The Left has atomized traditionalist American culture. Campus curricula are designed to indoctrinate and graduate cultural Marxists. Society itself is already seeing the result in a general decline in services and professions as the academic quality of college graduates continues to erode. When we get official government notices, or talk to bureaucrats or read of public policy, we expect such communications to be incoherent rather than just weaponized, the work of high-schoolers not of college graduates. Twenty-something BA holders who are as arrogant as they are ignorant do not bode well for the country over the next 50 years.
Continue reading “Historian’s Corner: Assessing America in the Age of Woke”Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News
Join Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler, and find out how racist are the anti-racists, how citizenship should replace the Left’s racial tribalism, how Marx and Freud developed the two most destructive ideas of the 19th century, and how the new bureaucratic power is producing a cynicism not unlike that in Eastern Europe about 1955.
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
For over a year, the American establishment and media borg have ostracized anyone who dared to connect the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic with the Chinese military-sponsored, level-4 biosafety Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Then, suddenly and without apologies for their past demagoguery, “journalists” and “experts” concede that the nearby Wuhan lab may well be the most likely genesis.
Why the abrupt change?
Donald Trump is no longer president.
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Wokeism has become our most popular secular religion—at least for a moment dethroning climate change. It reduces all of the past and present into puerile binaries between “whites” and “non-whites.”
Its aim is for the present generation to rewrite our history—whether by The 1619 Project and cancel culture or iconoclastic statue-toppling and Trotskyization of names and places. Wokeism becomes a child’s morality tale of noble non-white victims versus villainous white victimizers. Erasing the past and its language supposedly fuels a recalibration of the future, all in the here and now, a holy Year Zero
In the process, wokeism has done a lot of damage to America, and will do even more if left unchecked. Here are its chief characteristics.
Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Two weeks ago, I drove up Route 168 to Huntington Lake, sometimes known as Lakeshore, California.
I had not been there since winter. I have a small house up there, at nearly ground zero of the “Creek Fire” (September to December 2020) that devoured much of the central Sierra National Forest. The house, along with those of my neighbors, should have been engulfed with the other tragic destruction of 900 or so other cabins and structures over a vast area. But it was due to heroic efforts of the local and state Fire service frontline fighters and employees, some of whom drove their dozers into the flames and made a huge firebreak around the market, restaurant, marina—and our houses—near the lake. When I fly on American or United from Fresno to Dallas or Denver, the entire four-month-long, 400,000-acre black swath of destruction is visible from high above. The fire suppression cost was nearly $200 million alone. No one knows the cost of all the lost property, equipment and infrastructure—and probably never will.
Continue reading “Optimism, Inc: Dante’s California Inferno—Nine months later.”
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Here are some puerile comments from a Sarah Jeong 2018 rant on social media. She was appointed for a while to the New York Times editorial board, which is usually and otherwise bothered by racial venom:
Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins…Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men…White people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.
OK, you reason, she was just a young pampered Ivy League sensationalist, addicted to social media, eager to gain clickbait attention.
Continue reading “Eeyore’s Cabinet: When Is Some Hatred, Some Racism OK?”