Unbearable Truths About Our Current Political Moment
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Sometimes the truth is like mythical kryptonite. It radiates power and yet promises great destruction. And so reality is to be left alone, encased in lead, and kept at bay. Take the Chinese genesis of the COVID-19 epidemic. We started in February with the usual Chinese deceptions about their […]
The War between Experience and Credentials
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review During this entire epidemic, and the response to it, there is a growing tension between front-line doctors and scientific researchers, between people who must use and master numbers in their jobs and university statisticians and modelers, and between the public in general and its credentialed experts. In a nutshell, the […]
Biden Has Become an Albatross for the Democrats
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Joe Biden is the apparent Democratic presidential nominee. After all, he had a seemingly insurmountable lead in delegates going into the rescheduled August convention in the postponed Democratic primary race. Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment. Biden […]
Coronavirus and the Great Lockdown: A Non-Biological Black Swan
The following article is from my colleague, Paul Roderick Gregory, in Real Clear Markets We stand on the precipice of the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression. It is associated with the exogenous shock of a novel Coronavirus that originated in Wuhan China and quickly spread into a worldwide pandemic. The sequence of events leading to this crisis, […]
Do the Media Even Exist?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness If we lived in a fair and just world, most of the current media would simply go away and try something else. The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well. We […]
Victor Davis Hanson: Biden VP selection echoes decision Democrats and FDR made in 1944
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News Few Americans can remember past vice presidents such as Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes or Thomas Marshall. In more recent memory, almost no one can recall vice presidential nominees who lost such as William Miller, Sargent Shriver or Lloyd Bentsen. John Nance Garner served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president for two terms (1933-41), […]
About Those Press Conferences
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review President Trump seems increasingly ambivalent about the utility of the daily and sometime marathon press conferences. He should be — and for reasons besides just their length and frequency. First, Trump gets bogged down into long, back-and-forth jousts with the touché Washington press corps. His impromptu skills, honed both as […]
Our ‘Corona Project’
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Whatever we eventually call it, there is a coronavirus “project.” ChemotherapyIt’s a race to identify the origins, nature, and danger of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the best way to treat, vaccinate against, and mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 disease — all without destroying America to save it. However the […]
Our Virus Is a Violent Teacher
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Before this virus has passed, those of the New York Symphony, like the defeated Redcoats at proverbial Yorktown, will be playing the real “The World Turned Upside Down”: And then strange motions will abound.Yet let’s be content, and the times lament,you see the world turn’d upside down. Before the […]
Pandemic Is but One of America’s Security Concerns
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The world was a dangerous place before — and will be after — the coronavirus pandemic. While Americans debate the proper ongoing response to the virus and argue over the infection’s origins, nature, and trajectory, they may have tuned out other, often just as scary, news. Many Americans are irate […]
‘It’s a Free Country, Brother’
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In this current crisis, the longest if not the first complete shutdown in U.S. history, the freedoms of American democracy are being tested in ways we scarcely ever imagined. Out of nowhere little Napoleonic governors arise to enact decrees prohibiting gardening or strolling on an empty beach — decrees that […]
An Informed Public Will Always Decide on the Virus
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review A number of NRO writers have offered today some valuable cautionary data about antibody testing and herd immunity. Certainly, one cannot yet anticipate what ongoing and planned antibody testing in particular areas might reveal. Perhaps based on anecdotal new reports and a few samplings from abroad, we might expect […]
A Little More Light in a Vast Sea of Viral Darkness?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Almost every day, more studies, strange data, anecdotal reporting, and theories emerge about the virus, many of which could change existing conventional wisdom. In discussions about the nature of any existing seroprevalence in California, and about how even apparently small percentages of those already infected in the population could radically alter rates […]
Suppression of Expression Obscures the Truth About the Virus
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Americans are acquainted with predictable but ultimately failed progressive efforts to suppress free expression by preemptive invective and politically correct finger-pointing. To believe that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers revealed too many contradictions, too many lacunae, too many episodes of timely amnesia, and too many unsubstantiated accusations […]
Angry Reader 04-20-2020
From An Angry Reader: Professor Hanson, I am not really angry. I apologize for the subject line but I guessed that it would get my email read. My primary complaint….. Your last “angry reader” entry is 2/28/20. I know you are busy, but some of us would love it (and buy it) if you had […]
Our New Post-Virus Lexicon
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Antibody badges = surely a German import Antibody tests = It seems that nobody tests. AOC = See, emissions went down during shelter in place. Best and Brightest = being wrong on modeling, human infectiousness, test-kit availability, travel bans, masks, and anti-malarial drugs, without ever having to say your’re sorry […]
Yes, California Remains Mysterious — Despite the Weaponization of the Debate
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review California is touchy, and yet still remains confused, about incomplete data showing that the 40-million-person state, as of Sunday, April 12, reportedly had 23,777 cases of residents who have tested posted for the COVID-19 illness. The number of infected by the 12th includes 674 deaths, resulting in a fatality rate […]