From An Angry Reader:
Professor Hanson,
I am not really angry. I apologize for the subject line but I guessed that it would get my email read.
My primary complaint…..
Your last “angry reader” entry is 2/28/20.
I know you are busy, but some of us would love it (and buy it) if you had a book form of telling us about your responses to the people who didn’t think very much before they wrote to complain at you (or, just put more responses up regularly). I actually printed years of your responses to share.
My father (US Army in the Philippines) and my father-in-law served in WW2. Melinda’s (my wife’s) father earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his service (Ken was on the USS Trout before it was sunk). Your book, which I have passed on to another, explained the magnitude and importance of the service they gave and amplified the meaning of their service for us. Thank you so much for that.
As an average American, living all my life in the Bay Area, I truly wish there were people like you, with their brain on fire, who would give their time to guide the masses through their mazes (which is what I perceive that you do anyway), as “politicians” dedicated to improving the lives of the people who pay their wages. What our country needs is intelligent leadership. And now, it seems, that even Birx, Fauci, and certainly Trump, read your columns or pieces and respond as if they thought what you said. You have to appreciate that! And they all know where the thinking came from.
Please help them and us all in the process. Your columns are absolutely great but you should have a cabinet post or advisory position where they could absorb reality more frequently, I think. I bet that Trump is smart enough to do that (if he hasn’t already).
Chris Almeida
Newark, CA
p.s. While looking at stuff to write this and not sound too stupid, I found that I could take online classes at Hillsdale and I will do that.
Thanks again!
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Dear Not at All Angry Reader,
Thank you for your kind words and the service of your family in the country’s defense. One must discover where one’s talents can help and where they would not. In my small case, I accept I would be a poor politician and a worse public official, but, in terms of commentary rather than historical work, had some role to play as a skeptic of the current progressive agenda.
It took about 6 days to weaponize the entire virus disaster to the point where Trump is now veritably running against the virus and presented with a political paradox that if he lockdowns the country much longer, he becomes Herbert Hoover who intentionally destroyed the economy; and yet if he opens it up, he is a murderer with blood on his hands. Stranger still, such politicization of the epidemic is so hotly denied by those who did it in order to project their culpability on others who call them out.
In the old days, conservatism and liberalism were sort of bookends; the former reflecting human nature, the latter a naive confidence that with enough money and kindness we could change human nature. Not now. Liberalism is dead, progressivism killed it and the hard left of the 1960s is in control. It is intolerant and has nursed an entire new generation on the campuses who are abjectly ignorant but strangely arrogant in such vacuity.
The epidemic brought this out, both the left’s intolerance of debate and dissent, and its inability to accept that science is a constantly changing and evolving discipline as more data correct, modify, adapt, prove, and reject prior theories, and is not a tool of supposedly sophisticated and university credentialed elite.
We should believe PhDs and MDs much of the time, but when they tell us that anti-viral masks are superfluous and drain resources from the medical professionals, then the masks are sort of helpful, and then that they should be worn by all, we can legitimately conclude that their certainty about the virus is misplaced.
Sincerely, Victor Hanson
Selma, CA