America does not have to be perfect to be good (despite what radical progressives tell us)
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News The summer season has ripped off the thin scab that covered an American wound, revealing a festering disagreement about the nature and origins of the United States. The San Francisco Board of Education recently voted to paint over, and thus destroy, a 1,600-square-foot mural of George Washington’s life in […]
The Selfish Actors of Illegal Immigration
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Almost every party invested in open borders proves utterly selfish, without regard for the legitimate interests of others or of the law itself. The Illegal ImmigrantThe immigrant is the pawn of Latin American governments who view him as inanimate capital, someone who represents thousands of dollars in future foreign-exchange […]
Of Progressive Carnivores and Cannibals
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Obama-era Democratic Party bears little resemblance to the themes embraced just 11 years ago by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primaries. The parameters of marriage, in Obama’s words “between a man and woman,” has now transmogrified beyond gay civil unions to legal gay marriage to […]
Strategika Issue 59: U.S.–China Trade Tensions
Trade War 2.0—China Sets Sail to Import Innovation, Export Governance Please read a new essay by my colleague, Christopher R. O’Dea in Strategika. By agreeing to restart stalled trade talks at their meeting in Osaka last week, President Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping averted a new round of punitive measures in a trade conflict […]
Democratic Candidates Are Running a Race of Authenticity
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness An epidemic of false identities, massaged resumes and warped ancestries has broken out among the current Democratic presidential primary candidates. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years claimed Native American ancestry. An embattled Warren ironically took a DNA test that only proved her critics’ contention that she was no more […]
A Modest Immigration Proposal
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) believes that American detention centers that house illegal aliens — over 1 million illegal arrivals during the last six months alone — are similar to “concentration camps.” A storm of criticism met her historically fallacious comparisons. Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her Hitlerian reference by […]
Would President Joe Biden Become 25th Amendment Material?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Ispeculate only because since January 2017 our popular culture and intelligentsia have suggested President Trump is crazy and should be removed under the 25th Amendment. Apparently, accusations about the mental health of presidents and would-be presidents are now legitimate political attack strategies under the new progressive rules. After all, […]
Democratic Candidates Aren’t on a Winning Track
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Presidential candidates from both parties usually sound hard-core in the primaries to appeal to their progressive or conservative bases. But for the general election, the nominees move to the center to pick off swing voters and centrist independents. Voters put up with the scripted tactic as long as a […]
Iran and the Levels of Global Power
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In the current American–Iran stand-off are a number of global players. That is hardly new, but what is novel is that, for the first time in decades, there’s almost no power that can obstruct or alter U.S. efforts to confront Iranian aggressions in America’s own time and fashion. In […]
The Anti-Trump Circus
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness We are now in the fourth year of an anti-Trump mania, and about reaching the point of caricature. The Left should have learned something after the failed celebrity appeal to undermine the Electoral College, the initial articles of impeachment, the empty invocations of the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, […]
America Can Afford to Stay Calm with Iran
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness President Trump recently ordered and then called off a retaliatory strike against Iran for destroying a U.S. surveillance drone. The U.S. asserts that the drone was operating in international space. Iran claims it was in Iranian airspace. Antiwar critics of Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric turned on a dime to blast […]
Crack-ups at the Crossroads of Intersectionality
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole—each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures: out of one nation arise many […]
We Hold All the Cards in the Showdown with Iran
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness In May 2018, the Donald Trump Administration withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, popularly known as the Iran nuclear deal. The United States then ramped up sanctions on the Iranian theocracy to try to ensure that it stopped nuclear enrichment. The Trump […]
The China-Iran-Border Matrix
Victor Davis Hanson // Nationals Review President Trump and Secretary Pompeo have worked the U.S. into an advantageous position with a consistent policy toward bad actors. We are now at a point that even left and right agree that China’s rogue trajectory had to be altered. And while progressive critics of Beijing now are coming […]
America’s First Third-World State
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review ‘Third World” is now an anachronistic geographical term of the old Cold War. But after 1989, “Third World” was reinvented from a political noun into an adjective to mean more than just Asian, African, and Latin American nations nonaligned with either the West or the Soviet bloc. Rather, the […]
When Normality Became Abnormal
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer. Everyone […]
Victor Davis Hanson: Why are the Western middle classes so angry?
Victor Davis Hanson // Bozeman Daily What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s election and the “yellow vests” protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning […]
The 2020 News Cycle Will Look Very Different
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Russia collusion narrative and associated Robert Mueller hysteria are all but over. Mueller’s obstruction of justice narrative involving the non-crime of collusion is ending, too. Donald Trump’s tax-return psychodrama is going the way of the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment and the comical in-house coup […]
The FBI Tragedy: Elites above the Law
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review We are told, however, that the FBI’s culture and institutions are exempt from the widespread wrongdoing at the top. Such caution is a fine and fitting thing, given the FBI’s more than a century of public service. Nonetheless, many of those caught up in the controversies over the Russian-collusion […]
Greece Finds New Footing as a Player on the World Stage
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness ATHENS—After Greece temporarily hosted a pair of U.S. military drones, Greek Defense Minister Panagiotis Kammenos said last fall that, “It’s very important for Greece that the United States deploy military assets in Greece on a more permanent base.” Indeed, Greece just took delivery of some 70 military helicopters that […]