California, Leading from Behind
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online California has given us three new truths about government. One, the higher that taxes rise, the worse state services become. Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc. And three, the more existential the problem, the more the state ignores it. […]
Is Trump Our Napoleon?
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Comparing great things to smaller ones, is Donald Trump, in spirit, becoming our version of Napoleon Bonaparte? For a decade and a half Napoleon wrecked Europe. He hijacked the platitudes of the French Revolution to mask his own dictatorship at home and imperialism abroad. Yet today, two centuries after […]
Liberal Nihilism in a Nutshell
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with overwhelming popular goodwill and solid majorities in both houses of Congress. He chose not to translate that political heft into passing “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e., open borders and amnesties) or more gun control. He opposed gay marriage. He warned that he could […]
Our Superstitious President
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia President Obama talks a lot about the scientific method. On climate change, he has often invoked the idea of a great divide between those on the progressive left, such as himself, who believe in “settled science” and thus a looming man-caused climatological disaster, and those, presumably on the Neanderthal […]
Transitioning to the Post-Obama Era
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017? Next year the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in […]
Bitter Clingers 2.0
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Clingers 1.0: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has […]
The Scorching of California
How Green extremists made a bad drought worse. By Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal In mid-December, the first large storms in three years drenched California. No one knows whether the rain and snow will continue—only that it must last for weeks if a record three-year drought, both natural and man-made, is to end. In […]
The Decline of Modern Germany
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services Germany’s political stability and economic sway have until recently earned Chancellor Angela Merkel unprecedented global influence and power. Postwar Germany has become the financial powerhouse of Europe and a model nation. Give credit to German hard work and competency for the country’s continuing economic miracle. Less appreciated […]
‘Playing into the Hands of ISIS’?
American elites take a perverse view of what ISIS is really after. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online ‘Playing into the hands of ISIS” is the new Beltway mantra. The finger-shaking by the administration and its supporters warns Americans not to give in to their supposedly natural biases against Muslims. Never mind that […]
How the Public Can Boycott Campus Fascism
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online How is one to address the ethical implosion on campus, from pampered student bullies to timid professors to invertebrate presidents? We forget that the campus is a contradiction in terms. American higher education fears the consequences of its own ideology—from its exploitation of part-time Ph.D. faculty to […]
Yesterday’s Giants, Today’s Dwarves
The Left’s highly selective application of today’s standards to yesterday’s heroes. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The latest round of condemning the past on the moral criteria of the present started with banning the Confederate flag from public places. Now it is on to airbrushing away progressive old white guy Woodrow Wilson, […]
Erdogan’s Turkey is a Dubious Ally
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services Turkey often appeals to the West for support, given its longtime membership in NATO. Now, Turkish leadership is in a shouting match with Russia’s provocative president, Vladimir Putin, over Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet in probable Turkish airspace. Each country has accused the other of helping […]
Mass Murder and Identity Politics
Too many Muslim immigrants are angry rather than grateful toward their new country. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Why would Ms. Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan but lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia, want to come to the United States? She obviously hated the United States and its values, […]
PC Suppression of Public Concerns Fuels the Trump Phenomenon
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The more analysts try to figure out Donald Trump’s appeal, the more they sound baffled. Pundits cite Trump’s verbal sloppiness and ridiculousness as proof that he must soon implode. But Trump sees his daily bombast as an injection of outrage for a constituency now hooked on someone […]
Obama Has Just Begun
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online How much damage can he do in his last year of office? Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation. But, counterintuitive as it seems, that […]
The Upside Down Campus Protester
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media The Path to Ignorance One common denominator characterizes almost all unrest on college campuses: the demands to create more “-studies” courses (black, Latino, feminist, gay, etc.) and thus to hire more -studies professors. An empiricist from Mars might observe that the chief beneficiaries of the protests are -studies […]
End College Football
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media College football players are gladiators of sorts. On the one hand, they are vastly underpaid for the risks they take as well as the profits they generate for the university and the scores of jobs they subsidize. On the other, in terms of college protocols, they are pampered […]
Politics and What Remains of the English Language
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications. “Intersection” How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here’s an example: “Joe Blow is a social […]
The Fiction of ‘Truth’
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services We live in a weary age of fable. The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled “Truth.” But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his “60 Minutes” producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning. In reality, […]
Recent Unrest on Campus
Progressive Faculty and Administrators Deserve All of the Blame for the Unrest By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The recent wave of student protests is aimed at liberal professors and administrators. Current student anger eerily fits the pattern of most left-wing unrest, from the cycles of the French Revolution to the campus riots […]