Historian’s Corner

Victor Davis Hanson Foreign Policy There have been plenty of foreign policy disasters over the last 60 years since the Vietnam Era. But even in our failures, there was no inherent intent to destroy ourselves and to deliberately harm efforts to improve our security and stature overseas. Not now. Why are we experiencing one of […]

Victor Davis Hanson Crime We have experienced high crime in the past, especially following the racial tensions and hippie “let it all hang out” unreality of the 1960s, and the erosion of norms and general breakdown as fantasized in the Escape from New York/Death Wish/Dirty Harry days of the 1970s and early 1980s. But once again, as

Victor Davis Hanson Americans feel like they awoke one morning in 2023 trapped inside a Kafka novel. We thought we were normal, but in this new, radically changed America, we cannot identify any familiar referent. We ourselves, believing that we are still “normal” and wedded to protecting and carrying on the American experiment, are somehow

Victor Davis Hanson I wrote on X about the three blind mice college presidents (Gay of Harvard, Kornbluth of MIT, and Magill of University of Pennsylvania). Recently, one blind mouse has tentatively resigned under pressure, Liz Magill, former dean of the Stanford Law School and lately president of the University of Pennsylvania. An introductory note and warning:

Victor Davis Hanson Almost daily, western news agencies quote “15,000 civilian deaths” caused by the Israel Defense Forces. They once at least used to qualify “according to Hamas authorities.” Now they don’t even do that much, but employ “Palestinian authorities,” as a euphemism for Hamas liars. How does Hamas know the roughly exact number of

The leftwing media is shrieking about the impending “end of democracy” given the looming “Trump dictatorship” they fear. Characteristic of their scenarios is that they never follow up to cite extralegal actions Trump took while President. Let’s examine areas where dictatorial behavior might have appeared to confirm their charges and predictions: 1) Did Trump ever

Victor Davis Hanson The Left cannot govern, but its unpopularity often proves no bar to its acquisition and retention of power. Due to the media collusion/disinformation melodramas, COVID-19, the lockdowns, the ensuing George Floyd riots, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and vast change in most states’ balloting laws, the Left came into power in 2021 and controlled

Victor Davis Hanson A common theme in writing about the Middle East is the separation between Hamas and the population of Gaza. Polls are quoted that show prior to October 7 Hamas was increasingly unpopular, allegedly because it was corrupt and had hijacked billions of dollars of foreign and international aid to divert it to

Victor Davis Hanson Much of the nation was shocked at what followed on campus after October 7. Professors on campuses throughout the United States were not shy in expressing their joy on hearing that Jews were murdered—“exhilarated” in the words of one Cornell professor. Some professors called for identifying and then following Jewish children, some

Victor Davis Hanson The support for the Hamas murderers of October 7 and visceral hatred of Israel displayed by the likely majority of the campus student body and faculty of our most elite institutions have put into jeopardy the entire Democratic coalition. Who actually is screaming, “Beat the fu—ing Jew” at UCLA? Or barricading Jewish