The Progressive Race to the Bottom
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The old Democratic party championed the working classes, wanted secure borders to protect middle-class union wage earners, and focused generous federal entitlement help on the citizen poor. Civil rights were defined as equality of opportunity for all. That party is long dead. An updated Hubert Humphrey or even Bill Clinton would […]
Attack of the Techno-Lynch Mob
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Covington Lie offered the perfect occasion for the electronic mob to pounce—after temporarily licking its wounds following the BuzzFeed fake news hysteria. And it did so without shame or even much regret after the fact, as Jason Leopold, the BuzzFeed fabulist, ceded center stage to a kindred serial prevaricator, Nathan Phillips. The […]
The Issue Is Not Roger Stone’s Lurid Personal Life but Equality under the Law
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The issues of special Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone have nothing to do with his personal life. His sexual habits should be of no concern to anyone. And what is so funny about the Internet jokes about (a still presumed innocent) Stone enjoying rape once he’s in prison? […]
Angry Reader 01-23-19
From An Angry Reader: Re: IMPEACH TRUMP Dear Sir: I just read your article in the opinion section of the Albuq. Journal today. I guess I want to ask you if you approve of the President of our Country, the role model for our children, going out there every day lying, cheating, and manipulating everything […]
Should the FBI Run the Country?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario. Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against […]
The Mueller Squirrel Case
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump. Like almost all of Mueller’s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against Veselnitskaya had nothing to do with his […]
Strategika Issue 56: The Defense of Europe
European Defense Please read a new essay by my colleague, Angelo M. Codevilla in Strategika. Europe was never a full partner in its own defense. The very question—Will Europe ever fully partner with the U.S., or will the European Union and NATO continue to downplay the necessity of military readiness?—is no longer meaningful as posed, because […]
Trump’s Re-Election Chances May Be Better Than You Think
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness What are Donald Trump’s chances for re-election in 2020? If history is any guide, pretty good. In early 1994, Bill Clinton’s approval rating after two years in office hovered around a dismal 40 percent. The first midterm elections of the Clinton presidency were an utter disaster. A new generation […]
The New, New Anti-Semitism
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The old anti-Semitism was mostly, but not exclusively, a tribal prejudice expressed in America up until the mid 20th century most intensely on the right. It manifested itself from the silk-stocking country club and corporation (“gentlemen’s agreement”) to the rawer regions of the Ku Klux Klan’s lunatic fringe. While […]
The Game of Pseudo-Authenticity
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Americans always have been prone to reinventing themselves. We now live in an age of radical social construction—a sort of expansive update on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American notion of becoming anyone one pleases. One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a […]
The Ironies of Illegal Immigration
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Estimates suggest that there are eleven million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens. A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having […]
Can Higher Education Be Saved?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review America is schizophrenic about its major universities and, to a lesser extent, its undergraduate colleges. On the one hand, higher education’s professional schools in medicine and business, as well as graduate and undergraduate programs in math, science, and engineering, are the world’s best. America dominates the lists of the […]
Actually, 2018 Was a Pretty Good Year
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The year 2018 will be deplored by pundits as a bad year of more unpredictable Donald Trump, headlined by wild stock market gyrations, the melodramas of the Robert Mueller investigation, and the musical-chair tenures of officials in the Trump Administration. The government is still shut down. Talk of impeachment […]
An Epidemic of Erasures, Redactions, Omissions, and Perjuries
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Imagine the following: The IRS sends you, John Q. Citizen, a letter alleging you have not complied with U.S. tax law. In the next paragraph, the tax agency then informs you that it needs a series of personal and business documents. Indeed, it will be sending agents out to […]
It Was Always about the Wall
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review There was likely never going to be “comprehensive immigration reform” or any deal amnestying the DACA recipients in exchange for building the wall. Democrats in the present political landscape will not consent to a wall. For them, a successful border wall is now considered bad politics in almost every […]
The Departure of Mattis and Engagements in the Middle East
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The near-destruction of ISIS in a matter of months (losing 99 percent of its landed caliphate), the restoration of sound defense budgeting, a reestablished sense of deterrence, and stable recalibration with allies were the signature achievements of James Mattis. And it seems a mistake not to have him finish […]
The Liberal Arts Weren’t Murdered — They Committed Suicide
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The great culture wars on the campuses of the 1980s were largely lost by traditionalists. And the question then became not if but when the liberal arts would die off as a result. What is strange nearly 40 years later is that the apparent outrage over what was clearly […]
The Globalist Mindset: They Hate You
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back? The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline? Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers? The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates? The British masses against both the […]
Comey Continues to Display His Lack of Credibility
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Fired former FBI director James Comey is at it again. Last week, Comey testified before members of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. In a single appearance, Comey, on 245 separate occasions, while under oath, stonewalled questions with “I don’t know,” “I don’t […]
The Dangers of Asymmetry
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review It is strange how suddenly a skeptical Wall Street, CEOs, and even university and think-tank policy analysts are now jumping on the once-taboo Trump bandwagon on China: that if something is not done to stop China’s planned trajectory to global hegemony, based on its repudiation of the entire post-war […]