Why Westerners Make Inviting Targets for Terrorists
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online China has a long record of persecuting its Muslim minorities. Russia has brutally suppressed the separatist movement of the predominantly Muslim Chechens with bombing and shelling. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered airstrikes against Syrian Muslims without much worry over collateral damage. India has zero tolerance for Islamic […]
Trump’s Sloppy Populism
by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas Donald Trump’s success has been the most perplexing phenomenon of this election cycle. Why on earth has this New York vulgarian resonated with a full third of Republican voters? Trump’s appeal taps into a middle-class fear of American decline: crises from trade and immigration to debt and foreign […]
Europe at the Edge of the Abyss
America can still avoid sharing Europe’s fate. But only if we take action. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Because of what Europe has become, it now has few viable choices in dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. Its dilemma is a warning to Americans that we should turn away from a similar path […]
The Apology Tour of Our Next President
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media In Havana recently, President Obama talked of the similarities between Cuba and the United States, as if a constitutional republic of some 240 years and a thuggish and murderous communist dictatorship were kindred souls. In Argentina, Obama both tangoed and then apologized for the […]
The Hypocrisy Behind the Student Renaming Craze
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services University students across the country — at Amherst, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UC Berkeley and dozens of other campuses — are caught up in yet another new fad. This time, the latest college craze is a frenzied attempt to rename campus buildings and streets. Apparently some of […]
Ten Commandments for Our Next President
A good rule of thumb is to look at what Obama has done, and then do the opposite. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 1. Do not deflect blame onto others. Take personal responsibility when foreign policies implode — and at least a few will. Read Churchill’s speech after the fall of Tobruk. […]
Hillary Vs. Trump: Godzilla Vs. King Kong?
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media When and if it comes down to a vote for one of just two candidates in the remaining Republican primaries, a majority may still vote for Ted Cruz, which at this point I think is the far wiser course. In November, like most conservatives […]
The Buck Never Stops Here
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services In a cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, President Obama offers astonishing scapegoating for his own foreign policy disasters.According to Obama, the deterioration of the ISIS wasteland that is now Libya was not due to improvident administration bombing followed by a hasty departure, but […]
Time to Calm Down about Trump
Trump is crude and politically clueless, but no more so than the Clintons, Sanders — or Obama. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Donald J. Trump thus far has not shown that he has the level-headedness to be president. He has no political ideology and could just as well govern to the left […]
The Weirdness of Illegal Immigration
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media Set aside for a moment all the controversies over illegal immigration—the wall, deportation, amnesty, Donald J. Trump, “comprehensive immigration reform,” etc. Instead, contemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in […]
Can Our Colleges Be Saved?
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services The public is steadily losing confidence in undergraduate education, given that we hear constantly about how poorly educated are today’s graduates and how few well-paying jobs await them. The cost of college is a national scandal. Collective student loan debt in America is about $1.2 trillion. Campus […]
Republicans in Chaos
The GOP’s implosion was entirely avoidable, if anyone had read the signs. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Well before Donald Trump entered the race, there were lots of warning signs that the Republican party was on the road to perdition. After the marathon 20 debates of 2012, with the ten or so […]
The Origins of Trump Nihilism
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media During the most recent Detroit debate, even a reformed “inclusive” and “presidential” Donald Trump still was crass and vulgar. (Has a candidate ever crudely referred to the size of his phallus, and in our sick world is that a Freudian admission of doubt, or […]
Log Cabin Candidates
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services Which presidential candidate was born the poorest? Whose log cabin birthplace was the most ramshackle? Hillary and Bill Clinton are worth well over $100 million, largely due to years of leveraging their government service to pull in astronomical speaking and consulting fees from Wall Street, foreign investors […]
Donald Trump: How to Fight Him
What Cruz and Rubio need to do now. Both Donald Trump and his opponents are up against the constraints of time. Trump wants to run out the clock; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio want overtime. Trump does not want any more Texas-debate–style fights with Rubio and Cruz, and yet he still has four more debates […]
Obama: The Lamest Duck
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media President Obama is boxed in a state of paralysis—more so than typical lame-duck presidents. His hard-left politics have insidiously eroded the Democratic Party, which has lost both houses of Congress and the vast majority of the state legislatures, state elected offices, and governorships. Obama […]
The Tough Choices of Overseas Intervention
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban. As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then […]
Iraq: The Real Story
Donald Trump’s account of the Iraq War is all wrong. Why aren’t his Republican opponents saying so? Donald Trump constantly brings up Iraq to remind voters that Jeb Bush supported his brother’s war, while Trump, alone of the Republican candidates, supposedly opposed it well before it started. That is a flat-out lie. There is no […]
Weimar America
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media 2016 is a pivotal year in which accustomed referents of a stable West are now disappearing. We seem to be living in a chaotic age, akin to the mid-1930s, of cynicism and skepticism. Government, religion, and popular culture are corrupt and irrelevant—and the […]
The Return of Appeasement, Collaboration and Isolationism
Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services World War II broke out when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. A once preventable war had become inevitable — and would soon become global — due to three fatal decisions. Most infamously, the Western European democracies had appeased Hitler during the late 1930s in hopes […]