How to Make It Home in California: Rules for the Modern Odysseus
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness I drove back from San Francisco not long ago to the rural San Joaquin Valley. It is only 200 miles. But in fact, it can feel like Odysseus trying to get back home to Ithaca from Troy. Walking to the car in San Francisco was an early morning obstacle […]
VDH UltraAngry Reader 02-04-2019
From An Angry Reader: Are your fake-right fellows at NRO going to issue a grovelling apology to the CHILDREN they attacked at Covington Catholic High School? They were so eager to attack white children that they didn’t even bother watching the video before condemning them. This is why we hate you. ____________________________________________________________________ Dear Very Angry […]
Stalin Gets Another Hollywood Pass
Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in Defining Ideas The December 17 Oscar short-listing of Marianna Yarovskaya’s Women of the Gulag in the documentary-short category created a stir in the world-wide Russian intellectual community. Yarovskaya, a dual citizen and a graduate of both Moscow University and USC, is the first Russian woman to be […]
Trump and the Latino Vote
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Trump would not have to change his policies to capture 40 to 50 percent of the Latino vote (which is quite different from “Latino” spokespeople on television and the Jorge Ramos crowd), as opposed to simply articulating them: 1) The “new” Democratic party not only show signs of a […]
Angry Reader 02-01-2019
From An Angry Reader: Dear Dr. Hanson, I am most definitely an “angry” reader, but in no way angry with your writing! I respect and value what you have to say, and read virtually everything you post on the Internet. Thank you for all you do. I address you because you always have a view […]
Much Has Changed for the Better Since 2016—Not That Trump Will Get Credit
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The news obsesses over the recent government shutdown, the latest Robert Mueller arrest and, of course, fake news—from the BuzzFeed Michael Cohen non-story to the smears of the Covington Catholic High School students. But aside from the weekly hysterias, the world has dramatically changed since 2016 in ways we […]
On Assimilation
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The idea of rapid assimilation, integration, intermarriage, and Americanization was once melting-pot clear. Immigrants arrived in the U.S. eager to find something better (whether economically, politically, culturally, or socially) than what they left behind. So they accepted the premise that the general core of American customs, traditions, and protocols, […]
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 […]