The Trillion-Dollar Chameleon
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Big Tech is hiding in plain sight. Twenty years ago, no one had heard of either Facebook or Google, neither of which existed yet. For that matter, no one knew much about social media or search engines in general. Cell phones were still simply mobile, small, […]
Can Countries Make Themselves Great Again?
by Victor Davis Hanson Wednesday, January 17, 2018 Originally Published on Hoover.org in Defining Ideas Is Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America great again” mere campaign rhetoric in the tradition of Barack Obama’s “hope and change,” George H. W. Bush’s “a kinder, gentler nation,” and Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning in America again”? Or do such renaissances […]
Strategika Issue 47: The State of U.S. Naval Readiness
Title: The Sinews of Empire By Seth Cropsey Originally published on Hoover.org Modern scholars of politics revel in their complex descriptions of state action. Rather than oversimplifying and reducing the state to a unitary body, they separate its internal components and assess each of their relative strengths. There’s something to this. However, politics […]
What the ‘Dreamer’ fight is really about
Op-Ed By Victor Davis Hanson Los Angeles Times The loud fight over what will happen to America’s “Dreamers” isn’t what it seems. For both sides, it’s a fig leaf used to mask their true intentions. In his first term, Barack Obama admitted that he had no constitutional authority (“I’m president, I’m not king”) to […]
This is CNN . . . in 1945
By Victor Davis Hanson| January 15, 2018 American Greatness What if something like CNN and modern communications were around in early 1945? What if the rules of presidential news coverage were then as they are now? And what if such a mythical CNN hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt as much as it despises Donald Trump, then […]
President Nobama
by Victor Davis Hanson//National Review Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy. Donald Trump continues to baffle. Never Trump Republicans still struggle to square the circle of quietly agreeing so far with most of his policies, as they loudly insist that his record is already nullified by […]
Why Socialism Fails
by Paul R. Gregory Wednesday, January 10, 2018 Defining Ideas Image credit: Barbara Kelley As the collapse of the Soviet Union approached, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the victory of liberal democracy over planned socialism in his 1989 essay, “The End of History?” More than a quarter century later, the USSR has indeed disintegrated. Its former east European […]
Trump Threatens to Deal Another Blow to the Palestinian Cause
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review By cutting off hundreds of millions in American aid to the Palestinian Authority, the president could radically alter the Middle East. President Trump set off another Twitter firestorm last week when he hinted that he may be considering cutting off hundreds of millions of dollars in annual […]
From Resistance to Nullification to What Next?
By Victor Davis Hanson — National Review Trump’s critics ratchet up to insurrection, but Trump’s tax reforms and our growing economy could derail their dreams. George H. W. Bush gave up power quietly and turned to charity work and occasional ceremonial speaking after his reelection defeat in 1992. George W. Bush — like Jerry Ford […]
It’s Worse Than a Crime . . .
The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review I agree with most commentators that Michael Wolff’s sensational mythologies in Fire and Fury will be largely forgotten within three weeks — with one caveat (see below). Wolff confirmed what most already knew about the Left’s abandonment of standards of journalistic […]
Will Nuclear North Korea Survive 2018?
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Given several rapidly developing geopolitical factors, North Korea may look much different by the end of the new year. For good or evil, we may see radical changes in North Korea in 2018. The beefed-up United Nations sanctions by midyear could lead to widespread North Korean […]
Is Trump Really Crazy?
By Victor Davis Hanson| January 8, 2018 American Greatness Michael Wolff’s sensational exposé of the supposed chaos of the Trump White House is no doubt largely a mix of fantasy, exaggeration, and some accidental truth. The postmodernist author even admits that his own methodologies defy verification, and so leave it up to the reader to […]
Criticisms of Comey and Mueller Aren’t ‘Character Assassination’
The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In his efforts to refute Charles Cooke’s recent exposé of Jennifer Rubin, I was surprised to see David Frum, in passing, attack my Hoover colleague, legal scholar Peter Berkowitz (a “Sean Hannity–style character assassination of James Comey and Special Counsel Robert […]
The Great Experiment
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review We’ve gone from hard left, under Obama, to hard right, under Trump. Judge the ideologies by their results. Most new administrations do not really completely overturn their predecessors’ policies to enact often-promised ideologically driven change. The 18-year span of Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower to John […]
A New Year’s Toast To The Old Breed
by Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas The late World War II combat veteran and memoirist E. B. Sledge enshrined his generation of fellow Marines as “The Old Breed” in his gripping account of the hellish battle of Okinawa. Now, most of those who fought in World War II are either dead or in their nineties. […]
Civilization’s ‘Darkest Hour’ Hits the Silver Screen
by Victor Davis Hanson//National Review A masterful new film shows how Churchill saved the world from Nazi Germany in May of 1940. The new film Darkest Hour offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie Dunkirk. The story unfolds with the drama of British prime minister Winston Churchill’s assuming power during […]
Nagging Questions for the Special Counselors
The Corner The one and only By Victor Davis Hanson//National Review 1) If the FISA Court orders to explore the purported Trump-Russian collusion were predicated on phony Steele/Fusion GPS documents and suppositions that prove largely untrue (Comey himself testified under oath that he could not verify their contents), then are subsequent transcripts of court-approved […]
The Bigmouth Tradition of American Leadership
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review To everything, there is a season. America has always enjoyed two antithetical traditions in its political and military heroes. The preferred style is the reticent, sober, and competent executive planner as president or general, from Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter. George […]
A New History of the Second World War
The New Yorker Book Review By Joshua Rothman December 23, 2017 Photograph by FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Second World Wars” is not a chronological retelling of the conflict but a high-altitude, statistics-saturated overview of the dynamics and constraints that shaped it. In 1936, Charles Lindbergh arrived in Berlin to […]
Christmas Lessons from California
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Nature this year is predictably not cooperating with California. Rarely has such a naturally rich and scenic region become so mismanaged by so many creative and well-intentioned people. In California, Yuletide rush hours are apparently the perfect time for state workers to shut down major freeways […]