China Boomeranging
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Sometime in late November the Chinese Communist Party apparat was aware that the ingredients of some sort of an epidemic were brewing in Wuhan. Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they might have taken more seriously […]
Remembering Who Is Keeping Us Alive
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review I tried an experiment yesterday. I went to four large supermarkets in Fresno County, the nation’s largest and most diverse food-producing county, and looked at both checkouts and shelf space. The two big sellers seemed to be cleansers of all sorts (bleach wipes were all sold out, for example) […]
America In a New Upside-Down World
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The world is changing at a pace not seen in years, and it is no time to become captives of fear despite the real and immediate dangers we face. The coronavirus and the ensuing panic, at least for a few more weeks, have stagnated the economy and scared global […]
The Great Coronavirus War Is upon Us
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Try this thought experiment. Envision the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, as a living, breathing enemy — which, of course, is exactly what it is. But imagine for a moment that we are in real war with a cognizant, thinking, and clever enemy whose sole reason to live is to […]
The Portentous Biden Blowup
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Joe Biden lost it again on the campaign trail at an auto plant being built in Detroit, and in a now familiar script. His blowup had all his characteristic theatrics of prior such encounters. There were the shouting at blue-collar workers, the he-man, corn-pop-like braggadocio, the ad hominem expletives […]
Iran Doesn’t Understand ‘Maximum Pressure’
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Iran has misjudged not only the toxic effects of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions on the regime but also the entire psychology of U.S. policy toward Iran. The result is that Iranian unemployment is soaring, its gross domestic product is tanking, inflation is raging, oil prices are crashing, and […]
California Is a Cruel Medieval State
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness One way of understanding California is simply to invert traditional morality. What for centuries would be considered selfish, callous, and greedy is now recalibrated as caring, empathetic, and generous. The current ethos of evaluating someone by his or her superficial appearance—gender or race—has returned to the premodern values of […]
What We Don’t Know about the Coronavirus Is What Scares Us
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The recent spread of the coronavirus is causing a global panic. Our shared terror arises not so much from the death toll of the new flu-like disease — more than 3,000 people have died worldwide — but from what we don’t know about it. Experts at least agree that the […]
Globalization Bleeding
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review By the early 21st century, cosmopolitans were gushing that high-tech, instant communications, transnational agencies and agreements, free-flowing capital, international corporations, and a new eerily uniform global elite had, finally, made nationalism, borders, and even the nation-state itself all irrelevant. Nationalism was apparently relegated to dustbin of history, as we hit […]
New Impeachment Rules Would Snare Obama
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person. Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. […]
Angry Reader 02-28-20
From An Angry Reader: Subject: Gray Matter Your articles are so offensively lacking in context, thoughtfulness, and reflection on history–basically simpleminded attack ads– that I am going to erase the National Review’s bookmark from my browser. And there is no case for Trump any more than there was a case for Mussolini. ———————————————————————————————————— Dear Angry […]
Trump’s Chances for Reelection Are Looking Better and Better
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Donald Trump has at least five strong historical arguments for his reelection. One, he is an incumbent. Incumbent presidents have won 14 of 19 reelection bids since 1900. The few who lost did not enjoy positive approval ratings. In a Gallup poll from earlier this month, Trump enjoyed his highest […]
‘Gray Matter’–Deficient Americans
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Former New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England, dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn sprout — easy, mindless, automatic. “I could teach […]
NeverSanders?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Almost everything the Democratic Left said about Donald Trump causing a Republican Party implosion proved untrue—and yet is proving true this year of the Democrats. Trump’s agenda, for the most part, was Reaganesque, with a few important exceptions—closing the border and enforcing immigration law, getting tough with China’s unfair […]
China’s Government Is Like Something out of 1984
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The Chinese Communist government increasingly poses an existential threat not just to its own 1.4 billion citizens but to the world at large. China is currently in a dangerously chaotic state. And why not, when a premodern authoritarian society leaps wildly into the brave new world of high-tech science in […]
The Farming Wit and Wisdom of Mike Bloomberg
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Here is what Democratic candidate for president Michael Bloomberg said in 2016 at Oxford, in what he apparently offered up as an ad hoc history of labor, agriculture, and industry, leading up to his own sophisticated era, as reported in the New York Post: “I could teach anybody, even people in […]
Reaching Peak Progressivism
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness In 2020 we have finally hit peak progressivism. The adjective “peak”—apex or summit— is often used to describe something that has reached its maximum extent but thereafter will insidiously decline—like supposed U.S. domestic oil production in 2000 when more oil was purportedly taken out of, rather than still in […]
The Democrats’ February Blues
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review All political parties and candidates have bad days. But the new progressive Democratic Party had four of its worst days in recent memory in a single week in February. On February 3, the Iowa caucuses imploded for the first time in their history. The new app-driven counting melted down, discrediting […]
Limbaugh: A Genius at Radio
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Genius is often defined in myriad ways. One trusted criterion is the ability to do something extraordinary in a field where others could not — and doing something that perhaps will never be done again by anyone else. By that measure, Rush Limbaugh certainly is the genius of talk radio, […]
The Once and Future Scandal
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Now that the four-and-a-half-month-long Ukraine impeachment bookend to the 22-month Mueller charade is over, it clearly accomplished nothing other than substantially raising the polls of both Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The public was reminded that Representative Gerald Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are every […]