VDH's Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part Three

Militarily 

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

Part Two

Culturally 

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.

Donald A. Promnitz // The Sentinel

Author and historian Victor Davis Hanson visited Hanford to discuss the social and political lessons learned from 2020.

Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairs the Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. He is also a professor emeritus at Fresno State and a visiting professor at Hillsdale College.

Speaking at Glad Tidings Church on Tuesday night for the Rotary Club of Hanford, Hanson discussed the response to the pandemic, the death of George Floyd and the Jan. 6 riot and what he identified as their exploitation to push for more control and to silence dissent. He also spoke on the topic of “cancel culture” and its potential consequences, saying that anyone could be “one word away” from destroying their careers. 

If you’re a teacher, administrator, you own a small business, somebody can walk in your business and say, ‘I heard him say a word,’ and put it on the internet … and you’re done for,” Hanson said. “Or somebody can go through your high school yearbook, speaking to somebody from Selma High School and find things in there if they want to.”

Read the full article here

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. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News

Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler talk about Toobin’s folly, Fauci’s fraud, Biden-Harris diplomacy, and the price of Trump derangement syndrome. Does the new American right have an answer to all the dissimulation?

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part One

Wokism took off in June 2020. It became institutionalized after Joe Biden became president. We have now had nearly five months of the radical Biden political agenda to seep through the larger popular culture. So where are we now in this suddenly strange and nearly unrecognizable land?

Economically

For all Biden’s socialist talk, so far the Trump deregulation and tax cuts are still in effect. Their fumes should fuel a short recovery boom, given pent-up demand and post-Covid mania to eat out, to travel, to splurge, and to buy. Eventually, most Americans will leave their home lotus-eating pads and re-climatize back to work.

Continue reading “Historian’s Corner: Assessing America in the Age of Woke” →

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.

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