Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 // The Victor Davis Hanson Show

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Starry-eyed radicals in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that they either were going to take over America or destroy it. 

One of their favorite psychodramatic mottos was “Change it or Lose it,” even as protests focused on drugs, music, race, class, sex, fashion—and almost anything and everything. 

Sixties radicals tutored America on long hair, wire-rim eyeglasses, and who was a drag, a square, a bummer, and who was hip, cool, groovy, mellow, and far out. Most of these silly revolutionaries were not unhinged Weathermen killers or SDS would-be Communists, but just adolescents along for the good-time ride.

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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part One

A canon of the Left has always been that “words matter.” But do they? 

Only sometimes, and selectively so.

So when Trump, for example, insisted on calling the SARS-CoV-2 virus the “China virus”—in a manner of the 1918 “Spanish flu,” or the way the Left did in the first few months of the pandemic or subsequently referred to mutant strains as “the South African virus,” or the “Brazilian virus”—he then became a “racist.” (How ironic that “Wuhan/China virus” may be the most appropriate term, if it is confirmed that Chinese scientists engineered the gain-of-function COVID-19 virus, and if especially their research was known to or overseen by the Chinese military).

Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 & Just the News

Listen to Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discuss Biden, the Harris faction, the new evidence on COVID and its cures, and whether America is slumping into cultural and political regression.

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Think about it: For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.

Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited—regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant—given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family. 

Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.

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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part Two

There were a few more lies we lived with in our Kingdom of Untruth.

The Satanic Andrew Cuomo Deification

Over last summer and early fall 2020, Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo reached mythic media proportions. His ingratitude was enshrined as New York, “get-used-to-it, buddy” chutzpah. Yes, he momentarily feigned gratitude that Trump had listened to his hysterical daily rantings about the streets littered with corpses unless, right now, immediately, Trump sent a hospital ship, a tent-city hospital, thousands of ventilators, and protective equipment. 

And Cuomo got them all. Yet mysteriously he did not seem to use them much. As the 2020-election campaign geared up and his name was dropped as a key cabinet secretary or even VP, Cuomo dropped his daily attacks on the hapless Mayor De Blasio and turned on his former benefactor Trump. Or as NPR put it, “The regular briefings helped buoy his approval ratings in New York and make him perhaps the country’s most recognizable Democratic leader in the struggle against COVID-19.”

Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 // Private Papers

Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discuss the firebombing of Japan, Battlefield Monuments Commission, and favorite war movies.

Victor Davis Hanson // The Liberty Web

It has been more than three months since the Biden administration took office. What are your impressions of President Biden and his administration, and what kind of change do you see in the U.S. in the future? (You pointed out that Biden is proving to be the Biden he always was—as incompetent as Jimmy Carter, without the latter’s probity. He may prove as corrupt as Bill Clinton yet without his animal energy.)

Obviously, his 2020 virtual candidacy that promised “unity” and “moderation” was, to be honest, a ruse to capture the votes of the centrist of the Democratic Party. Biden sees his last hurrah as a chance to become the most leftwing president in history, and no longer the mere understudy of Barack Obama—especially given the hard left absorption of the old Democratic Party that praises him to the skies and warns him of any apostasy from its redistributive socialism. No president in memory has been more secluded and protected. Favored media and a legion of woke activists have created a cordon sanitaire around Biden, albeit with ample input from Jill Biden and the Obamas. He simply is not physically up to meeting with real media and legislators without scripted prompts and rules of engagement, and he is not up enough on his newfound wokeist doctrine to defend things like court packing, reparations, or the Green New Deal.

Irony That Immigration Policy Becomes Discrimination

President Biden has called for “unity,” but you wrote in your April 18 article “The Joe Biden Who Never Was” in AMERICAN GREATNESS, “If unity is defined as achieving record-low minority unemployment, or enhancing the entry-level wages of working Americans by curtailing massive illegal immigration or raising middle-class incomes after years of stagnation, then Biden will not be a uniter.” What do you think about the Biden administration’s economic and immigration policies that could well divide the country?

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