Thoughts on the 1776 Commission and Its Report
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The newly formed President’s Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report. The group was chaired by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn. The vice chair was Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the commission.) The unanimously approved conclusions focused […]
Translating Trump: VDH on the Bill Bennett Show
Victor Davis Hanson // The Bill Bennett Show Listen to the podcast here
An Impeachment Incitement
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Donald Trump was impeached again on Wednesday, a week before leaving office in one of the great travesties of modern politics. Here are reasons why the exercise proved a farce. One, impeachment was never intended by the founders to become a serial effort to weaken a first-term president. But […]
The Spartan way of war
Victor Davis Hanson // The New Criterion Sparta’s check of imperial Athens in the inconclusive so-called First Peloponnesian War (460–445 B.C.) foreshadowed a remarkable subsequent twenty-eight-year growth in Lacedaemonian power and influence. At the war’s end, Sparta had established itself as the only impediment left to an increasingly Athenian Greece. Fourteen years later, a second, and […]
Russia’s Putin and Navalny collide; who will survive?
An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill To understand the events of Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny’s near-fatal poisoning and his Jan. 17 return to Russia, you must know that there are two Navalnys: Navalny No. 1 is described by Kremlin-controlled media as a CIA agent, corrupt, a hater of Russia, a […]
Assault on the Capitol Has Let Loose the Electronic Octopus
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Two days after the 2020 election, a defiant Kathy Griffin retweeted the notorious picture of her holding a prop that looked like the bloody head of a decapitated Donald Trump. Earlier last year, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted out a call to his followers to destroy Israel. Both […]
Is the Wisdom of Homer Immune to Cancel Culture?
Victor Davis Hanson // The Patriot Post Amid the current hysteria of toppling statues and renaming things, we keep mindlessly expanding the cancel culture. We are now seeing efforts to ban classics of Western and American literature. These hallowed texts are suddenly being declared racist or sexist by preening moralists. Or, as one Massachusetts high […]
Defenders of Civilization?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876. What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate […]
A Guide to Wokespeak
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review With the rise of the Left inevitable over the next two years, the public should become acquainted with the Left’s strange language of Wokespeak. Failure to do so could result in job termination and career cancellation. It is certainly a fluid tongue. Words often change their meanings as the political […]
Victor Davis Hanson: After 2020 election – here’s how to keep track of upside-down world of media and politics
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News After Nov. 3, the meaning of some words and concepts abruptly changed. Have you noticed how new realities have replaced old ones? Media cross-examination of the president is now an out-of-date idea. The time for gotcha questions has come and gone. Why ask a president whether he is a traitor or a […]
What Will Historians Make of Our Annus Horribilis?
Victor Davis Hanson // Townhall The year 2020 is now commonly dubbed the annus horribilis — “the horrible year.” The last 10 months certainly have been awful. But then so was 1968, when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The Tet Offensive escalated the Vietnam War and tore America apart. Race […]
Target: America
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review China sounds giddy at the ending of the Trump presidency. Before COVID-19, it was locked in a likely lose/lose trade war with the U.S. The American corporate world was finally starting to complain that its once easy profits in joint-ventures were now being gobbled up by an increasingly voracious China. […]
Where Did the New Mad Left Come From?
Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Bouts of extreme leftism are frequent in history. Plato’s Apology, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? — all offer us insight into the mind and methods of the hard Left. America has experienced surges of mainstream anarchism, socialism, and communism, most profoundly during the […]
Strategika #69: China and the Pandemic
Remedies For China’s Role In The Pandemic Please read a new essay by my colleague, John Yoo in Strategika. The more we learn about the origins of the coronavirus, the more the case against China grows. Chinese doctors and scientists encountered COVID-19 patients as early as November 2019, but Beijing suppressed their efforts to research […]
Our Brave New Biden World
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review America traditionally has not reinvented reality after an election, although prior presidential winners have often tried, as in the fashion of our politics. But the new powers of social media, Silicon Valley, and a woke media have made reality-changing now a reality. Suddenly Antifa and BLM have all but disappeared […]
The Scars of 2020
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Amid plague, national lockdown, riot and arson, iconoclasm, recession, and the most contested voting in history, the country leaves 2020 with some scars that won’t heal. Mail-in Voting: Election Day as we once knew it no longer really exists. It has been warped, trimmed, and made nearly irrelevant in the […]
Is America to Be First, Second — or What?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review During this strange “transition,” it has been common now to assert that “multilateralism” is back — and with a vengeance. Joe Biden’s envisioned team allegedly will jettison the unilateralist idea of “America alone” and supposed soft neo-isolationism. Instead, the U.S. will resume its historic but neglected role as the leader […]
Denigrating Hoover
Victor Davis Hanson // The Stanford Daily Matt Larson (“Hoover has gone too far,” Nov. 19, 2020) cited me among others in his Stanford Daily angry attack on Hoover Institution scholars. He alleges that we at Hoover are purportedly “more interested in making money and promoting right-wing politics than in doing actual academic research.” Larson also charges […]
Why Our Universities Have Failed
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Where did Antifa youth rioting in the streets receive their intellectual and ethical bearings? Why are the First and Second Amendments no longer fully operative? How did the general population become nearly ignorant of their Constitution, history, and the hallmarks of their culture? Why do employers no longer equate […]