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09/14/2017 From An Angry Reader: Angry Reader Wes Bridgeman Dear Mr. Hanson, My father, Lt. Col. William Bridgeman (Retired), sent me the attached links and quotes that I would like to bring to your attention. This features the words of the figures themselves (Forrest and Lincoln), and I will let them speak for themselves. Please […]
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 […]
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09/13/17 From An Angry Reader: Angry Reader Rich Laughlin Mr. Hanson, please try using sentences with less words. Most recently, I read one of your articles that had a sentence with 44 words. Other sentences in the same article were almost as bad. Really. You are loosing me with those lengthy paragraphs that contain […]
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09/12/17 From An Angry Reader: Angry Reader Bob McCarthy For one who loves to cast aspersions on political incorrectness in the use of words, maybe you should ‘splain to your readers your use of the term “Mexifornia” in decrying the Mexican “takeover” of California, as racist a piece as I’ve ever read. I find it […]
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 […]
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From An Angry Reader: Angry Reader Southern Poverty Law Center: Cf: (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/22/american-freedom-alliance-event-blames-immigrants-california’s-destruction) “They keynote speaker for the event was Victor Davis Hanson, a Hoover Institute (sic) fellow and author of Mexifornia, a book that romanticizes the California of old, when whites were a large majority of the state’s population. Davis Hanson (sic) talked about […]
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From An Angry Reader: Dear Prof. Hanson, I read your analysis of Trump’s electoral prospects with some interest: https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/14/anti-trump-bourbons-learning-forgetting-nothing-time-2020/ Since I’m a centrist Democrat, I will emulate your advice about Trump’s tweets – namely, I will ignore the barb-filled bromides you level against Democrats. (Which may greatly satisfy you and/or your audience emotionally, but […]
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 […]
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From An Angry Reader: I have heard your act numerous times, mostly on the John Bachelor show, and I find it tiresome. You really need to spend more time on your “idyllic” farm and not venture out into reality. Times change, places change, and people change, but you will not change or cause […]
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From An Angry Reader: If you publish my letter on your website, it may best be placed in the “Angry Reader” category. I only agree with you 10 percent of the time, but I’m not angry. You are one of the two or three best conservative commentators, in my view. Three questions and one observation: […]