The NFL House of Cards
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review The Corner The problem with the NFL is not just Donald Trump, but the greater dilemma that the league’s reason to be has become predicated on a labyrinth of lies. The majority of the viewing audience is not young, hip, and loyal as hyped, but, even if fading, still […]
Allegations of Foreign Election Tampering Have Always Rung Hollow
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Blaming foreign influence on an election loss has become a habitual practice for unsuccessful presidential candidates, but such allegations have never rung true. On her current book tour, Hillary Clinton is still blaming the Russians (among others) for her unexpected defeat in last year’s presidential election. She remains sold […]
From an Angry Reader: Dear VDH, I faithfully read and enjoy your many commentaries on current events. But surely, as a historian, you should realize that Dred Scott was rightly decided, as I thought even in my youth. Even my reliably left-leaning constitutional-law professor colleague, who was shocked by my condemnation of Wickard v. Filburn, […]
What If South Korea Acted Like North Korea?
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review If it threatened to destroy its neighbor — China — the neighbor would act. Think of the Korean Peninsula turned upside down. Imagine if there were a South Korean dictatorship that had been in power, as a client of the United States since 1953.
Diversity Can Spell Trouble
By Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas America is experiencing a diversity and inclusion conundrum—which, in historical terms, has not necessarily been a good thing. Communities are tearing themselves apart over the statues of long-dead Confederate generals. Controversy rages over which slogan—“Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter”—is truly racist. Antifa street thugs clash with white […]
Beware of Narratives and Misinformation
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Narratives surrounding the DNC hack & Antifa reveal media bias and government bureaucracy at their worst. U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee e-mail accounts, leading to the publication of about 20,000 stolen e-mails on WikiLeaks. But that finding was reportedly […]
A Little DACA Honesty
The Corner- The one and only. // National Review By Victor Davis Hanson It is surreal to look at more than a dozen clips of Barack Obama in non-campaign mode prior to 2012 assuring the country (“I am not king”) that he simply could not usurp the power of the Congress and by fiat illegally […]
Throwing Away the Russian Card
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review The love-hate relation with Putin, from the Obama-era red reset button to the current collusion hysteria, has been a disaster. “They [the North Koreans] will eat grass but will not stop their program as long as they do not feel safe.”— Vladimir Putin, Beijing, China, September 5, 2017 China […]
Virtual Virtue
By Victor Davis Hanson//American Greatness It is not healthy for a society to live two lives that are antithetical, as America has been doing in recent decades. Disillusionment with government and popular culture arises at anger over two entirely different realities. One truth is politically correct and voiced on the news and by the government. […]
Two Resistances
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review The quiet resistance — the one without black masks and clubs — is the more revolutionary force, and it transcends race, class, and gender. After the election of Donald Trump, there arose a self-described “Resistance.” It apparently posed as a decentralized network of progressive activist groups dedicated to derailing […]
Linguistic McCarthyism
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review Most Americans recoil from the statue-smashers and name-changers. ‘The Bard,” William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar — a story adopted from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives — a frenzied Roman mob, […]
Calculating The Risk Of Preventive War
by Max Boot Strategika The issue of “preemptive” war is more in the news now than at any time since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The impetus, of course, is the rapid development of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, which will soon give Pyongyang the capability to hit any American city with a […]
Preemptive Strikes and Preventive Wars: A Historian’s Perspective
By Barry Strauss Strategika Preventive wars and preemptive strikes are both risky business. A preventive war is a military, diplomatic, and strategic endeavor, aimed at an enemy whom one expects to grow so strong that delay would cause defeat. A preemptive strike is a military operation or series of operations to preempt an enemy’s ability […]
Preemptive Strike Or Preventive War?
by Williamson Murray // Strategika Image credit:Poster Collection, US 1696, Hoover Institution Archives. With the troubles bubbling over on the Korean Peninsula, as the North Korean regime approaches possession of nuclear weapons and missiles capable of striking the United States, two words, preemptive and preventive, have gained increasing currency. While similar in meaning, their […]
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Partisan conflict is not new, nor is GOP internal dissent. What’s new is in-fighting among the elites. The Left-Wing Trump Haters About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental. The hard-leftist […]
Equal by Catastrophe
By Victor Davis Hanson//Inference Review The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel Princeton University Press, 528 pp., USD$35. In his new book, Walter Scheidel offers a simple, though jarring, story of how past societies struggled with inequality. The Great Leveler is a […]
The Fire And Fury Of Presidents
by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Image credit:Barbara Kelley “We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.” —Barack Obama, April 2016 The media recently went ballistic over President Trump’s impromptu promises of “fire and fury” in reply to the latest North Korean threats—and even more so when he later doubled down under […]
The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Will Progressives erase the history of their racist heroes, or only their racist enemies? Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving […]
Our War against Memory
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The new abolitio memoriae Back to the Future Romans emperors were often a bad lot — but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were flattered by toadies when alive […]
The Silliest Generation
By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness Every generation, in its modesty, used to think the prior one was far better. Tom Brokaw coined “The Greatest Generation” to remind Americans of what our fathers endured during the Depression and World War II—with the implicit message that we might not have been able to do what they […]