Angry Reader 03-22-2021

From A Not Angry Reader:

Dear Professor Hanson,

I am not an angry reader. I am an eternally grateful reader who only hopes to see this on your “Dear Angry Reader” page so that I know you read my note.

In your latest podcast you state that Rush Limbaugh is irreplaceable. Perhaps. I don’t know. (I do hope that someone, sometime is able to step up to that mantle and carry on.) What I do know is that your own voice has become my weekly Zen. Your sound, pragmatic and infinite wisdom has, during these increasingly unsettling and scary times, become my verbal Prozac.

As a writer, I have for decades saved hardcopies of my favorite writings for fear that I won’t be able to find them again, and I want a foolproof way to reread and share them. But lately I have started printing out your columns and filing them away out of fear that the Left will somehow succeed in its rabid quest to cancel any and all dissenting voices. I want to make sure I (and someday my children) always have access to yours.

While Rush was certainly one-of-a-kind, I hope you know how essential your own voice is to so many of us and how much comfort your writings and weekly podcasts provide.

I sincerely thank you.

Jennfer L.

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Dear Not Angry Reader Jennifer L.

I wrote about Rush here in a syndicated column: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/we-have-lost-an-american-genius/

We Have Lost an American Genius | National Review www.nationalreview.com

I first talked to him 20 years ago right after 9/11, and then only periodically until about three years ago when we began texting and emailing almost daily. And I visited him when I had occasion to speak in Palm Beach. He was one of the kindest and most earnest people I have met. And he did more for the conservative cause than all of us academics together. His loss is irreplaceable.

Who knows what the Left will do in its censorship jihad? 

You are right: it is wise to have hard copies of things we value since they seem to have a tendency to vanish, as books are now treated like tweets or postings that suddenly just disappear.

This Trotskyization reminds me also of the Serra Mall small street outside my office at work: one day it was there, the next it was cancelled and renamed. It was if the current Stanford student body (the student parking lot resembles an Audi/BMW/Lexus/Mercedes car deanship lot) is the moral superior to an impoverished, 18th century Catholic priest who originated the California mission system and sought to introduce agriculture to California and provide comfort and help to travelers.

Note his cancellation was due to his occasional use of corporal punishment to native Americans in age when all, both indigenous and colonialist, were often far more violent. Yet when his record is compared in toto to the morality of the times, he stood above most in his compassion.

Note that Stanford students selectively demanded incorrect street names to be changed, but not “Stanford” itself—funded by a brilliant 19th-century “robber baron” who wrote disparagingly of Chinese, whose labor was critical to Stanford’s railroad projects. That hypocrisy is a morality tale that reveals the Left’s opportunism: cancel the easy, but not the names that lead to career advancement. According to their own progressive logic of judging the past by the present, we would still have Serra Mall street, but they would now graduate from Chumash University.

Thank you for your kind note.

VDH