One Ford Narrative Too Many
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness In the end, the Christine Blasey Ford accusations collapsed. With them went the last effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court. After thousands of hours of internal Senate and FBI investigations of Kavanaugh, as well as public discussions, open questioning, and media sensationalism, Ford […]
Angry Reader 10-04-2018
From An Angry Reader: it is painful to see or read your columns. I usually ignore them;today’s on Nunes was pathetic. Mr. Hanson,you are a fraud and in a just world you’d be condemned to occupy a spot in that special place down below where it’s always hot… Delusional is a good word to describe […]
The Campus Comes to Congress
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The polarizing atmosphere of the university has now spread to Congress. During the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, we witnessed how college values have become the norms of the Senate. On campus, constitutional due process vanishes when accusations of sexual harassment arise. America saw that […]
America’s New Jacobins
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution Maximilien Robespierre and his Jacobin “Committee of Public Safety’ highjacked the late 18th-century French Revolution. As supposedly more authentically radical revolutionaries, Jacobins did away with their supposedly less radical first-generation Girondists, who themselves had helped to liquidate the French monarchy and many of the Ancient Régime. What followed Robespierre’s […]
Mattis Is More Valuable Than Ever
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Michael O’Hanlon presented recently a persuasive argument why Defense Secretary James Mattis should stay on the job for at least the duration of Trump’s first term in order to finish his current initiatives — apparently in response to unsubstantiated rumors that Mattis’s reputation has grown among some anti-Trump establishment circles […]
Fallout from the Kavanaugh Hearings: A Permanent Cloud?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Conventional wisdom suggests that, if confirmed, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh forever will be “smeared” and stained by past frenzied unfounded allegations of sexual assault. Yet the opposite just as well may be true. As a Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh would have withstood every imaginable smear and slander and yet […]
Angry Reader 10-02-2018
From An Angry Reader: Dear Dr. Hanson, I am an angry reader. I am angry because my two candidates for Senator from the state of California are both evil and/or just plain stupid. Who should I vote for? Or should I sit that choice out? I’m leaning to the latter. Yours, Dave Payton ———————————————————— Dear […]
Epitaph for a Dying Culture
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and their endless sequelae have ended up as an epitaph for a spent culture for which its remedies are felt to be worse than its diseases. Think 338 B.C., A.D. 476, 1453, or 1939. The coordinated effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. […]
Kavanaugh’s Testimony Was His Joseph N. Welch Moment
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Christina Ford’s testimony did not alter, positively or negatively, the facts of her allegations. She still cannot adduce where or when the alleged assault of 36 years prior occurred, or how she arrived at, or departed from, the alleged, but unnamed, location of the assault, or how many people […]
The Truths Behind Our Current Political Turmoil
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Are there any guiding principles that can make sense of the sensational news that now overwhelms the senses seemingly every hour? What is common to blaring headlines about the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings, an anti-Trump “resistance” buried deep in the permanent bureaucracy, and the improper behavior by […]
We Are Living Nineteen Eighty-Four
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are living it right now. Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its “resistance” is undermining an elected president. The FBI, CIA, […]
Obama Won
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness By traditional metrics, Barack Obama’s presidency was mostly a failure. The economy, in a new first, never hit annualized growth of 3 percent. His signature domestic policy—Obamacare—caused chaos. Millions lost their coverage and doctors, and paid far more in deductibles and premiums. The stagnant recovery after the 2008 recession […]
Oh, What a Tangled Web
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review The likely justification of the Republican majority for agreeing to a rehearing of the Kavanaugh nomination was political, not legal: Senate Republicans apparently worried that in-party potential No-voters on Kavanaugh, such as Senators Corker, Flake, or Collins, might become emboldened by an outright refusal to hear Professor Ford’s narratives […]
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, […]