Words Matter

Victor Davis Hanson Here are a few institutions that have quite outlived their age. Tribal Graduations Consider 40 percent of California’s population now identifies as Latino, predominately Mexican American. Fifty percent of current BAs in the California State University system this year were awarded to self-described Latinos. That paradox brings up the question, why are

Victor Davis Hanson As a general rule, the Left eventually destroys everything it touches. It sees all institutions as ideological fodder, to be warped and twisted, as a necessary means to serve higher political ends. Think of an institution that started out in theory as at least neutral, apolitical, and benign, and then ponder how

Victor Davis Hanson About $40 million and 22 months later, after the birth of the “Russian collusion” special counsel, Robert Mueller shrugged that he found no proof of “collusion.” No matter, James Clapper still claimed that Donald Trump was a veritable “Russian asset,” despite being tougher on Vladimir Putin than both the Bush and Obama

Victor Davis Hanson We were told by Dr. Fauci that no way, no how did the coronavirus originate as a gain-in-function, engineered virus in the Wuhan Level 4 Lab. Few believed that—given there were no prior examples of Covid-infected animals prior to human cases. And the Chinese government had stonewalled all investigations of the original

Victor Davis Hanson When I was young in the late 1950s, all 5–8-year-olds customarily had a rendezvous with a surgeon or GP “to take your tonsils out,” regardless of the absence of any prior chronic sore throat or infection. (NB: I had forgotten that painful operation at six in 1959—until in 2006 I had inhaled

Victor Davis Hanson There is a narrative that half the country is paranoid, prone to conspiracy theories, and generally nuts, in the off-the-grid, January 6th sense. But in some sense why not, given the lies that have been promulgated? Here I do not mean the usual political serious and even life-changing untruths such as gas

Victor Davis Hanson One characteristic of wokism is the promotion of the mediocre on the basis of ideological correctness—a formula to attract incompetent careerists and toady opportunists. One characteristic of National Socialism that we rarely emphasize was its destruction of merit. “Jewish physics” translated into the expulsion of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in Nazi

Victor Davis Hanson The outbreak of ideological madness is not new to the 21st century. The historian Thucydides in the third book of his history (written sometime from ca. 420–390 B.C.) paused from his general account of the war to chronicle a cycle of ideological-driven violence on the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu) during the

Victor Davis Hanson What caused a near septuagenarian to have a near death experience with a ridiculous bee (or wasp?), one who had been suffering from “Covid euphoria”—the syndrome of finally getting over long Covid and feeling invincible while exaggerating normal health into a sort of divine deliverance and jubilance—suddenly to return to square one?