Victor Davis Hanson “Town” was an ambiguous term—necessary for commerce but otherwise an incubator of drink, drugs, and wastrels. When I got my license at 16, and I would say to my grandparents “I think I’ll drive into town,” Lila, my crippled aunt who lived her life in the living room, would say, “But stay […]
Victor Davis Hanson We in the West, and indeed globally, are engaged in a great experiment. Around 2,500 years ago, the ethos of our civilization originated with a middling class of agrarians. Now they comprise about one percent of the farm owners in the nation—and less than that of the general population. Most of our
Victor Davis Hanson 4) Democrats seek to ensure there are few wealthy, and in general to restrict the power of the rich. But to accomplish such a gargantuan moral task, Democrat leaders and their friends must be rich—both to understand the mind of the wealthy and to acquire the means to limit all others from
Victor Davis Hanson Here are the current guiding principles of the Democrats in general, and particularly the growing hard-left base—and indeed are emblematic of the leftwing mind across time and space. 1) There is no such thing as “the law.” It is fluid. Its legal validity depends on what the Left considers to be moral.
Victor Davis Hanson The syllabus I taught in a “Humanities of the Western World” class in 1985 at CSU Fresno was far out of reach of the students by my last year in 2004. The Old Guard faculty in their sixties, whom I met at age 30 in 1984, whom in my arrogance I thought
Victor Davis Hanson I took a drive this week from rural Central California to the Stanford Campus, in a manner I have done for 50 years since my student days. In the over three-hour drive, I remembered what the state was like in 1975 compared to 2025. It was not a pretty contrast, despite the
There was never in truth any evidence that the Iranian military was competent. Tehran knew and hid that truth when it began arming terrorist surrogates like Hezbollah and Hamas to do its own dirty work. Again, Iran performed pathetically (but bravely nihilist) in the Iran-Iraq War. When its ships buzzed American naval vessels in the
Victor Davis Hanson For nearly half a century the West has feared the lunatic theocracy in Iran. Jimmy Carter helped create the phantasma of a dangerous, unpredictable, and venomous regime. But how did such an image become entrenched in the West? Carter was humiliated in 1979–80 by his continued refusal to warn the Iranian revolutionary
Victor Davis Hanson Mexico seems clueless about the current asymmetries and the huge benefits it has been accruing at U.S. expense, as if these benefits are somehow its birthright. Currently, some $63 billion in remittances are sent to Mexico from mostly Mexican immigrants, the majority believed to be here illegally. And many of that cohort
Victor Davis Hanson When riots broke out in Los Angeles after ICE tried to serve warrants on a variety of illegal aliens, most of whom were believed to be either criminals or engaged in criminal activity, mobs assumed that we were all back to the “summer of love” that exempted violence of 2020. But, of