Victor Davis Hanson 5) Do ideologues try to destroy the ancient system of governance and create new replacements designed to give them power that they could not otherwise obtain through elections? Determine the following: Which group, party, or cabal is clamoring to make the following radical changes, despite lacking almost no public support for such […]
Victor Davis Hanson 4) Does the government punish or spy on citizens and journalists as a form of political harassment or in an effort to suppress information in the private sphere on partisan grounds? In 2012, the Obama Attorney General, Eric Holder, ordered taps on 20 phone lines of Associated Press reporters to monitor their
Victor Davis Hanson 3) Does the government pick and choose which laws to enforce in order to punish enemies and reward friends, and advance the political narrative? Do officials lie under oath with impunity? Note further that all three intelligence heads under Barack Obama had lied under oath: CIA Director Brennan did twice to Congress,
Victor Davis Hanson 1) Does the government use the administrative state to advance its own political agendas and to punish its enemies? In 2013, a top IRS lawyer, Lois Lerner, confessed that she and other members of her team had wrongly denied non-profit status to various conservative groups in order to weaken conservative opposition to
Victor Davis Hanson 1) Does the government use its powers to interfere in elections and often unite with toadish private enterprises to ensure electoral victories? Barack Obama assembled the heads of the CIA and the FBI and the director of National Intelligence and ordered them to ignore their own bureaus’ assessments that there was no
Victor Davis Hanson Leftists now daily claim we are under a Trump “dictatorship” run by “fascists” and “Nazis”—and then when asked to give specific examples of Trump’s “fascism,” they grow mute. So how do you calibrate the slide from democracy guided by constitutional republican principles into autocracy? Note first that the first American dictator will
Victor Davis Hanson Start with the premise that with few exceptions, the Europeans despise Trump but need the U.S. military to protect them from both Russia and any potential anti-Western nuclear power with ballistic missiles. They cannot square that circle. Their hearts want to subvert the Americans, but their heads tell them the end of
Victor Davis Hanson China, in dire need of oil, and Russia, awash in oil that it cannot so easily sell, have some but not all similar agendas on the Iran War. They share an overriding directive: whatever is good for the U.S. is bad for them. So, they support Iran in the war, but both
Victor Davis Hanson Many once hard-core podcasters/internet influencers/politicos and MAGA loyalists have broken with Trump, ostensibly because they have termed the 60-day air campaign over Iran (13 fatalities) a “forever” or “endless” war. A core of influential MAGA apostates (for example, Steven Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Megan Kelly, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, etc.)
Victor Davis Hanson Item: Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) on that propaganda news that some Iranian ships claim that they broke through the American blockade, a move intended to bankrupt the terrorist regime, the senator in response posted on social media, “Awesome.” Item: Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist, remarked in an interview that while he