Part Four: Steps 9-10 Erase Customs and Traditions Ending a nation requires discrediting its past. Start with Year Zero reinvention. That is, 1776 and 1787-9 are no longer our foundational dates. Instead 1619, a made-up date supposedly when the first African-American slave stepped onto North America, marks the foul birth of the now despised country, […]
Part Three: Steps 6-8. VI. Trash the Productive Class Why are frackers considered not just polluters, but near criminal enemies of the planet? Thanks to them, abundant natural gas has reduced US carbon footprints in a manner that exceeds those nations in the Paris Climate Accord. Thanks to them, the US has no strategic interests
Victor Davis Hanson // The Blade of Perseus Joe Biden could easily have stayed quiet about his intentions in Afghanistan—or at least leave the enemy in some doubt. He might have maintained US air facilities to support Afghan forces, and kept the major cities secure as they were between 2017-20 under Trump, who himself
Part Two: Steps 4-5 IV. Ruin the Currency The work of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economists, and the pragmatic tough policies of Paul Volker broke modern American inflation 40 years ago. We know what causes it and why—printing money in lieu of commensurate increases in population, productivity and national wealth for short-term
Part I: Steps 1-3 I. Destroy the Law Joe Biden has simply destroyed federal immigration law. He broke his oath to execute faithfully our statutes by allowing literally hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated, untested, and illegally entering foreign nationals to storm the southern border. By fiat, Biden simply erased away any demarcation between Texas and
Victor Davis Hanson // VDH’s Blade of Perseus Part Two: The Phoenix Trump? August is not January. In politics even a week is a lifetime. Mirabile dictu, Trump’s banishment from social media, means far less of his scattergun tweeting. His memos were rarer, his thoughts better composed. Although the media monopolized the public image of Trump,
Victor Davis Hanson // VDH’s Blade of Perseus Part One: Trump, RIP? In January-February 2021, Trump’s future was problematic. He was kicked off social media. And without his accustomed megaphones, Trump for the first time in years was unable to reach supporters and the public at large. Thus, the hate-Trump media filled the void and
Victor Davis Hanson // VDH’s Blade of Perseus One reason why I remain optimistic about the impending end of wokism and the failure of the cultural revolution is that the dangers they pose are unsustainable. And by that I mean that they require such dissimulation, that the load of lies eventually will snap the spine
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers History is replete with examples of societies in crises that either imploded or were destroyed, through internal and external forces—as well as those that met such dangers and endured. Life or Death? Controversies remain over why the Western Roman Empire broke apart by the end of the 5th-century AD,
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers Part Two Item: For the millions of Americans who lived through inflation and stagflation from 1974-1983, why would we ever wish to return to all that? We more or less avoided both the last forty years by being semi-profligate rather than whole-hog profligate. Now and then we saw a