Historian’s Corner

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 […]

Victor Davis Hanson As a classics student at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens some 45 years ago, in the latter 1970s, I was assigned to excavate at ancient Corinth. There I learned a lot about strata and how to detect the rise and fall of Myceneans, the Greeks of the Dark Age,

Victor Davis Hanson A February 3rd huge train derailment recently sent fire balls high into the sky over small East Palestine, Ohio (ca. 5,000 population), in the heartland of the rustbelt of post-industrial America. I guess the current administration would call this small-town clinger/deplorable/chums/dregs country, to paraphrase the past usage of Obama, Hillary, and Biden.

Victor Davis Hanson The game itself was well-played and exciting. But the entire spectacle is heading into a strange and ultimately suicidal territory. Before the National Anthem, there was sung and observed the “Black” national anthem of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It is a wonderful song, but no substitution for our common, shared National

Victor Davis Hanson I consider myself an alien from outer space, as far as a lack of knowledge of the supposedly premier Super Bowl halftime entertainers. I usually skip the game and especially the half-time show. This year for some reason I didn’t. I have no real idea who “Rihanna” (Robyn Rihanna Fent) is, other

Víctor Davis Hanson Jill Biden apparently is studying the career of another progressive icon, First Lady Edith Wilson. Edith (also a younger second wife to her widowed husband) went from First Lady to de facto President from October 1919 to March 1921, after Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke that left him bedridden. Jill has

Victor Davis Hanson I know the definition of Leftism is inconsistency—from Eco-Czar John Kerry’s carbon-spewing private jet to the climate change/rising seas, race-mongering Obamas housed in a gated, segregated, and seaside Martha’s Vineyard estate or Hawaiian beach mansion. I know dozens in Menlo Park who laud teachers’ unions and detest homeschooling and charter schools but

Victor Davis Hanson Was San Francisco the crown jewel, the logical result of the progressive project, our inheritance from the politicking of Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, and Diane Feinstein? Where now are all the multimillionaire leftists who were never subject to the realities of their own disastrous ideology? Do any of

Victor Davis Hanson While Britain was fighting for its empire in out-of-the-way places like Afghanistan (1839–42; 1878–80; 1919), the inner core of London was Dickensian—crime ridden and impoverished. I thought of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and David Copperfield juxtaposed to the horrendous end to the First Afghan War (1842), in which an entire army and retinue