Victor Davis Hanson I turn on my computer and often receive from two universities all sorts of the latest campus news. But the news is different than it was pre-Covid/George Floyd riots. “The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act” is now some 32 years old. And it is increasingly […]
Victor Davis Hanson In reading and listening this holiday week I encountered nothing really other than outright lies. I was sitting on a farm buffeted before Christmas by near record cold temperatures and after Christmas by near record precipitation. Yet almost weekly we receive stories about California’s “permanent drought” of hot/dry weather and an environmental
Victor Davis Hanson What have the American armed forces often failed at? Democracies and consensual societies grow large bureaucracies for several reasons. And often stasis sets in, and ossified clerks and calcified careerists resent the talented outsider and the maverick, not-by-the-book loudmouth. And a result, brilliance is resented and smothered, and America is no exception
Victor Davis Hanson In sum, American war production was characterized by mass quantities, reliability, pragmatism, and affordability. What good did it do Panther tanks that they could blow apart Shermans at great distances if their hours of maintenance to hours of deployment were the inverse of Shermans? So what if the Tiger or Tiger II
Victor Davis Hanson Innovation It is no accident that the big-ticket, new weapons systems in World War II were American-made, or ironclads designed from the hull up with powerful guns, like the Monitor and its two state-of-the-art 11-inch Dahlgren turret guns, first appeared in the U.S. That is not to say friends and foes did
Victor Davis Hanson In reviewing America’s long wartime record, what does the United States do well, and what not—and what can we learn from both successes and failures? Production and Mobilization If America is often lax in maintaining deterrence during peace—cf. the disarmed era between 1870–1914 or 1920–1940—it is phenomenal at the 11th hour in
Some time ago Wikipedia posted a strange character assassination paragraph in its biography of me. It should by now be taken down, but only after repeated and earlier failed attempts to persuade them it is defamatory, incoherent, untruthful, and simply a lie. Here is the offending paragraph as originally posted by Wikipedia. Democratic Party Criticism
Victor Davis Hanson The third psychodramatic day that rendered great dividends was the buffoonish January 6th riot at the Capitol. Somehow the Left turned a few hundred out-of-control idiots, some replete with cow horns, painted faces, and sloganeering signs into a cabal of sophisticated revolutionaries seeking to storm the Capitol, hold it, and prompt a
Victor Davis Hanson Soon the affluent woke went even further in their hubris. More statues were toppled, more names changed, more dangerous laws passed. Somehow in the mass madness of iconoclasm even the statues of Cervantes and Frederick Douglas were to be desecrated, along with monuments along Washington’s National Mall. The common denominator apparently was
Victor Davis Hanson Imagine this counterfactual—what if a President Donald Trump had released Viktor Bout from a U.S. prison? He is the convicted, notorious international arms dealer, who had supplied sophisticated weapons to help kill Americans abroad. And further imagine he gave up Bout in exchange for just one white, male, conservative athlete, known for