Are We on the Verge of Civil War?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Americans keep dividing into two hostile camps. It seems the country is back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the greatest age of affluence, leisure, and freedom in the history of civilization. The ancient historian Thucydides called the civil discord that […]
The Descent into Progressive Madness
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The progressive street is leading fossilized Democrats into a sort of collective madness. The dinosaurs of the party desperately seek relevance by sounding crazier than the new unhinged base that disrupts Senate hearings, loudly pronounces a new socialist future, and envisions octogenarian Maxine Waters as more the future of […]
Trump Buries The Old-World Order
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution The present continuance of institutions such as the EU, NATO, UN, and others suggests that the world goes on exactly as before. In fact, these alphabet organizations are becoming shadows of their former selves, more trouble to end than to allow to grow irrelevant. The conditions that created them […]
The New Refuge of Scoundrels
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Just when observers had concluded the desperate progressive opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court could not stoop much lower, it most certainly did. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), in the news recently for somehow unknowingly employing a Chinese spy as her gofer and chauffeur for 20 […]
Demonization of Nunes Is a Window Into Our Times
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Much of what we now know about the unethical and often illegal behavior of the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, and Department of Justice emerged due to the efforts of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Its chairman during its stunning disclosures has been Representative Devin Nunes (R., […]
The Circus of Resistance
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The resistance to Donald Trump was warring on all fronts last week. Democratic senators vied with pop-up protestors in the U.S. Senate gallery to disrupt and, if possible, to derail the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) played Spartacus, but could not even […]
Is Chaos an Impeachable Offense?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Trump is destabilizing the status quo, as he promised to do. The keepers of the status quo cry foul. Until 2017, there were certain political assumptions that most people no longer really believed but also preferred not to question — given the likely animus from the so-called bipartisan establishment, […]
When Funerals Become Politics
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Using funerals for political purposes has a long, but not distinguished, tradition. In 44 B.C. eulogist Mark Antony claimed to Roman mourners that he came to bury Caesar. But his speech created a frenzy and ended up ensuring a death warrant for the once “honorable” Brutus. In contrast, aside […]
Strategika Issue 53: U.S. Engagement with Russia
Toe-to-Toe with the Russkis: Is Realistic Engagement with the Russians Still Possible? Please read a new essay by my colleague from the Military History Working Group, Ralph Peters in Strategika. In the greatest film ever made about the human dimensions of strategy, director Stanley Kubrick’s Cold-War masterpiece, Doctor Strangelove, an excited strategic bomber pilot speaks of […]
Res Ipsa Loquitur
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Donald Trump in his Twitter storms apparently has no idea that he is winning. The Brett Kavanaugh opening hearing turned into a progressive circus, with shouting would-be Democratic presidential candidates vying with screaming protesters to see who could be the most obnoxious. Ossified senior Democrat senators appeared bewildered how […]
Trump on the Ground
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness For months, I’ve been driving on different routes through the vast San Joaquin Valley back and forth from the California coast—and through the usually economically depressed small towns on and near the Highway 99 corridor through the Central Valley. The poverty rate in many valley counties is higher than […]
Indoctrination Saturation
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review A definition of totalitarianism might be the saturation of every facet of daily life by political agendas and social-justice messaging. At the present rate, America will soon resemble the dystopias of novels such as 1984 and Brave New World in which all aspects of life are warped by an all-encompassing ideology of coerced sameness. […]
Americans won’t vote for socialism once they know what it is
Here is a piece by one of my colleagues. Paul Roderick Gregory // The Hill A series of polls have shown that pluralities of Democrats and millennials prefer socialism to capitalism. These surveys also make clear that respondents do not know what socialism is. Also Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has shown that Democratic primary voters will cast their ballots […]
Hanson: Struggle Between Elites And Masses Defines US Policy
Clifton Parker // Hoover Institution Victor Davis Hanson says history offers lessons for today’s technology-driven world, especially when it comes to elites, the masses, and the future of society. “When the masses feel their will is not reflected in government policies or respected by the professional classes that manages society, then historically there can be a pushback […]
The Truth Will Set Us All Free
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation — with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press. Mueller then unnecessarily stocked his […]
A Post-Trump World
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review It has been quite a ride since Inauguration Day — or, rather, from Michael Wolff to Omarosa and Michael Cohen, or from the Emoluments Clause to the 25th Amendment, or from talk of decapitating Trump to talk of blowing up the White House. Yet what might happen should Trump […]
The Ideology of Statue Smashing
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Statue smashing is back in the news. One night last week, University of North Carolina students pulled down “Silent Sam,” a bronze monument to students and faculty of the university who fought as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. The bronze figure is portrayed as static, quiet and without […]
The Diversity of Illegal Immigration
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution I live on farm beside a rural avenue in central California, the fifth generation to reside in the same house. And after years of thefts, home break-ins, and dangerous encounters, I have concluded that it is no longer safe to live where I was born. I stay for a […]
The Bombs of August
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium-fueled atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 repeated the attack on Nagasaki, Japan, with an even more powerful plutonium bomb. Less than a month after the second bombing, Imperial Japan agreed to […]
The Reexamination of Security Clearances Was Long Overdue
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Much has been written about former CIA and FBI official Philip Mudd’s recent unhinged outburst on CNN against Paris Dennard for the latter’s credible suggestion that many ex-officials have monetized the fact that they have retained their security clearances. Dennard was suggesting that those with security clearances, with a […]