By Victor Davis Hanson // Town Hall California State Route 99 is the north-south highway that cuts through the great Central Valley. And it has changed little since the mid-1960s. A half-century ago, when the state population was about 18 million — not nearly 40 million as it is today — the 99 used to […]
By Victor Davis Hanson // Town Hall Pessimists often compare today’s troubled America to a tottering late Rome or an insolvent and descending British Empire. But medieval Europe (roughly A.D. 500 to 1450) is the more apt comparison. The medieval world was a nearly 1,000-year period of spectacular, if haphazard, human achievement — along
By Victor Davis Hanson // Town Hall | The Greeks gave us tragedy — the idea that life is never fair. Terrible stuff for no reason tragically falls on good people. Life’s choices are sometimes only between the bad and the far worse. In the plays of the ancient dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles, heroism
A man hoists a sign during a rally of about 100 of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s Latino supporters outside Anaheim City Hall on Aug. 28. (Los Angeles Times) By Victor Davis Hanson // Los Angeles Times About 18 million of California’s 40 million residents are registered to vote. Most polls show Hillary Clinton leading Donald
A world without boundaries is a fantasy. By Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal Borders are in the news as never before. After millions of young, Muslim, and mostly male refugees flooded into the European Union last year from the war-torn Middle East, a popular revolt arose against the so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give
America’s successful melting pot should not be replaced with discredited salad-bowl separatism. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history. The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls, and myriad other African, Asian, and European communities spoke Latin, cherished
The state is sinking, and its wealthy class is full of hypocrites. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online There was more of the same-old, same-old California news recently. Some 62 percent of state roads have been rated poor or mediocre. There were more predications of huge cost overruns and yearly losses on high-speed
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media There are an estimated 300 or so jurisdictions — entire states, counties, cities, and municipalities — that since the early 1980s have enacted “sanctuary city” laws, forbidding full enforcement of federal immigration law within their jurisdictions. Most of these entities are controlled by Democrats
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media I grew up listening to stories of turn-of-the-century rural Central California from my grandfather Rees Alonzo Davis (1890-1976). He was the third generation of the Davis family to have lived in my present house—great nephew of Daniel Rhoades, who had walked into the High
By Victor Davis Hanson // Works and Days by PJ Media Set aside for a moment all the controversies over illegal immigration—the wall, deportation, amnesty, Donald J. Trump, “comprehensive immigration reform,” etc. Instead, contemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in