Historian’s Corner

Victor Davis Hanson In the world of Petronius, cynicism rules. No one is who he professes to be—not bankrupt poets and pretentious intellectuals, not virtuous widows, not innocent youth. All are Epstein schemers of a sort of like our internet influencers and nobodies who become somebodies with vast audiences in the millions. Petronius’s cosmos (like […]

Victor Davis Hanson The century between AD 96–180 is perhaps analogous to our American era of 1890 to 1990 (from the Gilded Age through World War I, World War II, and the Cold War), which saw a century in which America de facto ruled the world, defeated its enemies, and achieved an unimaginable level of

Victor Davis Hanson The formal end of the Roman Republic in 27 BC came when the Roman Senate acclaimed the 37-year-old final survivor and winner Octavian as “Augustus.” He alone had won out after 22 years of deadly civil war (from the 49 BC crossing of the Rubicon by Julius Caesar to the final defeat

Victor Davis Hanson Recently, Diana West wrote a number of people and posted a long demand for an apology, on the grounds that I had disseminated a photo, a video title, and in my own short video had smeared her. None of that was true. See below her demands interspliced with my own answers in

Victor Davis Hanson Here is the crux of the matter of the Bolton Raid. Did or did not Trump or his team dig up reasons to go after enemy Bolton that otherwise would not have justified an investigation of any other official under similar legal doubt? To answer that we will have to await definitive

Victor Davis Hanson The Internet is afire with all the snarky comments that former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton three years ago offered on leftwing TV, following the August 8, 2022, FBI raid on Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago: 1) He insisted that all of Trump’s claims about declassifying documents were a “complete fiction” and

Victor Davis Hanson The Palisades fire rebuild is still anemic, stalled with all sorts of state and local mandates and zoning blocks. Only in California would an ancient and historic neighborhood go up in flames due to the DEI incompetence of letting reservoirs remain dry, allowing hydrants to sit out of commission, prohibiting cleaning of

Victor Davis Hanson California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been all over the media recently, with the usual head bobbling, hands wildly gesticulating in the air, and nervously rocking sideways on his feet. For some reason, he thinks he has found a winning issue that will propel him to the 2028 Democratic nomination. Currently, in most

Victor Davis Hanson Those final years as a family farmer are seared into my mind still. I remember the hand-to-mouth existence of canning food, rarely leaving the farm, and turning off lights constantly to save on the power bill. Yet I also remember our farm as a fortress, a bulwark against the modern world that

As far as the new sort of rural settlements divorced from farm-ownership, gang activity and break-ins are now as common as the territorial graffiti that identifies every concrete standpipe along these rural roads. The trees and vines do not know it, but they now apparently belong to the turf of rural gang bangers, who tag