Historian’s Corner

Victor Davis Hanson Debt and its twin inflation destroy civilizations. Ancient coins were sometimes called “redheads” as the raised impressed silhouettes of grandees stamped on “silver” coins were the first to have their silver veneers worn away revealing the “red” bronze beneath. Our paper money is similarly becoming less and less valuable, the more we […]

Victor Davis Hanson No civilization can continue if its bedrock values and institutions are eroding—especially if the effort to save them is considered worse than their destruction. When we look to the civilizational decline of the Greek polis, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or of Europe in the 1930s we learn that erosion is

Victor Davis Hanson Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided up Poland. Germany invaded first from the north, west, and south, the Soviet Union subsequently from the east. By early October the war was over. A victorious Germany concluded that while its forces had learned much about

Victor Davis Hanson Remember, woke, as the Soviets showed us, is an elite obsession. Those in the Soviet Union that damned housewives for wanting more bread in their near empty stores vacationed in seaside dachas. So too our woke commissars. John Kerry needs his carbon-spewing private jet to combat the climate change caused by hoi

Victor Davis Hanson When Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley bragged that he was focusing on “white rage,” Americans assumed that he had time for such distractions because the army would secure Afghanistan, the air force would keep our skies free of Chinese spy balloons, and the military in general had plenty

Victor Davis Hanson 5. The Ukrainian Impeachment call. Donald Trump did not stop approved shipments of offensive weapons to Ukraine in exchange for investigating the Bidens. He simply delayed arms shipments that the Obama-Biden administration had strictly prohibited. Indeed, he ultimately sent them. Trump had good reason to be suspicious of the Ukrainian government given

Victor Davis Hanson 3. The Pangolin/Bat Myth Almost immediately after the arrival of the coronavirus, the public, some brave scientists, and intelligence officers were convinced that the engineered virus escaped the Wuhan lab because: 1) The Chinese suppressed most information about the lab’s work on the virus. 2) There were virulent attacks on those who

  The Left has canonized a number of outright untruths. There are three characteristics of their mendacity. One, the lies are either issued by leftwing government officials or adopted from lying universities, social media, or the corporate world. Two, the lies involve the most vital aspects of American society—its foreign policy and national security, its

Víctor Davis Hanson Over 100,000 Americans are dying from opiate overdoses per year—mostly fentanyl coming across the southern border. China ships to the cartels the raw product. They refine it and stamp it into pills for export solely to the U.S., deliberately using shapes and sizes to make their export seem similar to other less