The Iran Failure Has Many Fathers
The dangerous belief that words alone can transcend an eternal truth of human nature. by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Everybody knows the deal with Iran is a disaster. Why is equally obvious: Iran will get $150 billion to spend on weapons and its terrorist proxies, will keep its enrichment facilities, will continue to […]
Progressive Elites Ignore Human Nature at Everyone Else’s Expense
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Human nature is unchanging, predictable — and can be dangerous if ignored. Five-time deportee and seven-time felon Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an unauthorized immigrant, recently was arrested in San Francisco for the murder of an innocent passerby, Kate Steinle. The alleged killer told a local TV station that he […]
Want Him to Enforce Laws That Would Have Kept Kate Steinle Alive? Governor Jerry Brown Thinks You’re a ‘Troglodyte’
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Last March, California Governor Jerry Brown declared that those who wished existing federal immigration law to be enforced — in the manner that would have saved the late Kate Steinle from a five-times deported, seven-times released felon illegal alien – were: [A]t best … troglodyte, and at worst […]
The Four Horsemen of a Looming Apocalypse
Our Four Major Threats: China, Iran, Russia, ISIS-They could all be confronted. But by the Obama administration? by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The U.S. and its allies are faced with four major threats, and they are as diverse and yet as akin as the proverbial apocalyptic horsemen. Vladimir Putin has a tsarist […]
THE PRESIDENT’S LOOKING-GLASS ISLAMIC WORLD
Obama may have forgotten about “war with Islam,” but war with Islam has not forgotten about him. by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine President Obama recently gave a speech at the Pentagon about our efforts against ISIS that confirmed he has little awareness of the real world our enemies inhabit. The talk reprised the […]
Disregard for the law is America’s greatest threat
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Barbarians at the gate usually don’t bring down once-successful civilizations. Nor does climate change. Even mass epidemics like the plague that decimated sixth-century Byzantium do not necessarily destroy a culture.
Is the World Becoming Fed Up?
Faster, please: A great pushback is awakening here and abroad, but its timing, nature, and future remain mysterious. by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media Given European socialism, and given its therapeutic culture that assumes morality is relative and situational, it is quite stunning — especially to the Greeks — that suddenly debts are to […]
What Obama Has Taught Us
Obama has built a legacy, all right: appeasement, staggering debt, racial animosity by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online President Obama last week spiked the ball on the Supreme Court’s decisions to legalize gay marriage and to ratify the Affordable Care Act. Yet it is difficult to see quite how Obama had much to do […]
We Are All Californians Now
California Drought — Bad Policy, Poor Infrastructure By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online California is in the midst of a crippling four-year-old drought. Yet the state has built almost no major northern or central mountain reservoirs since the New Melones Dam of 1979. That added nearly 3 million acre-feet to the state’s storage reserves – a […]
ISLAM THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
The latest volume of J.B. Kelly’s essays shows how little we’ve learned about the Middle East. by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas From the 1960s to the late 1990s, John Barrett Kelly was one of the most influential advisors, writers, and commentators on the Middle East. In 1980 his book Arabia, the Gulf, and […]
Progressive Mass Hysteria
Democracies have been fickle for 2,000 years, but the Internet makes it worse. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online One of the most harrowing incidents in the Athenian historian Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is the democratic debate over the rebellious subject state of Mytilene on the distant island of Lesbos. Thucydides uses […]
Hillary Gump
Forrest Gump usually had a positive role to play at the hinges of fate; the equally ubiquitous Hillary Gump’s cameos have made history far worse. by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media The fictional and cinema hero Forrest Gump somehow always managed to turn up at historic moments in the latter twentieth century. But whereas […]
Greek Default
For almost six years Greece has been on the cusp of financial disaster. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online For almost six years Greece has been on the cusp of financial disaster. Its Northern European and international creditors have extended loans, suspended interest payments, and forgiven some debt.
America: One Nation, Indivisible
The Confederate battle flag is far from the only worrisome symbol in America today. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Everyone is weighing in on the horrific murders in Charleston and blaming the mindset of the mass murderer on wider social pathologies. After the airing of the racist crackpot ideas of the unhinged Dylann […]
California: Running On Empty
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media The air in the San Joaquin Valley this late-June is, of course, hot and dry, but also dustier and more full of particulates than usual. This year a strange flu reached epidemic proportions. I say strange, because after the initial viral symptoms subsided, one’s cough still lingered for […]
The New World Map
by Victor Davis Hanson // TMS Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria, and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler’s new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history.
Goodnight, California
I offer another chronicle, a 14-hour tour of the skeleton I once knew as California. 8:00 AM I finally got around to retrieving the car seat that someone threw out in front of the vineyard near my mailbox. (Don’t try waiting dumpers out — as if it is not your responsibility to clean up California […]
The Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine In theory, Middle East Studies programs are a good idea. One of the biggest impediments to countering modern jihadism has been the lack of historical knowledge about the region and Islam. But even the attention and urgency that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have not led to […]
Sexism and Racism Are Leftism
In our time, sexism and racism have become the province of the rich. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Discrimination by sex and by race are ancient innate pathologies and transcend particular cultures. But the American idea of sexismand racism in the 21st century — unfailing, endemic, and institutional discrimination by a majority-white-male-privileged culture […]
Progressive Academics Shocked That Their Creatures Turn on Them
When the cult of sensitivity begins to eat its children. by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of […]