Somehow, having an Enemies List is all right if you’re Barack Obama and not Richard Nixon. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online It has become an iffy idea to cross Barack Obama. After seven years, the president has created a Hugo Chávez–like deterrent landscape, intended to remind friends and enemies alike that he […]
By Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Nations in the Middle East that once aligned with America are now indifferent. Interests who opposed the United States grow defiant. Fence-sitting countries that calibrated their policies to the perception of U.S. strength are leaning toward our adversaries. Chaos is the result. The recent splashdown in the Straits
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media Hillary Clinton may yet win the Democratic nomination—if she is not indicted. After all, it is hard for a New England spread-the-wealth socialist like rival Bernie Sanders to appeal to working-class southern whites, minorities, or the wealthy Democratic establishment. It is still likely that
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services The U.S. economy grew at an anemic rate of less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2015. While the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent, the all-important labor force participation rate is at a historic low of just 62.7 percent. More than 90 million able-bodied
White liberals and black careerists vigorously reject the MLK ideal of a color-blind society. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites. One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. Two, once non-white claimants pass the racial litmus test, they must think and speak
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJMedia In a September 2007 congressional inquiry about the ongoing surge in Iraq, then Senator Hillary Clinton all but called Gen. David Petraeus a liar. After Petraeus gave a cautiously optimistic—and prescient—appraisal of the growing quiet in Iraq, Clinton curtly dismissed him with the literary term
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes and censorship have to do with higher learning? American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else. Colleges still wear the
By Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Image credit: Barbara Kelley By the end of 2015, it had begun raining and snowing throughout California after fifty months of drought. Meteorologists had long forecasted that the cyclical return of the so-called El Niño Southern Oscillation—the episodic rise in temperature of a band of ocean water that develops in
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media I recently took a few road trips longitudinally and latitudinally across California. The state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants—and few in between. Or rather, as
Memo to RNC: Stop ridiculing Trump and look at what voters see in him. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online A disclaimer: Trump is not my preferred candidate. I hope he does not win the Republican nomination. But I understand why millions seem to be mesmerized by his rhetoric. I certainly wish that