Victor Davis Hanson // National Review All great empires of the past created deep states. The permanent bureaucracies and elite hangers-on adapted as imperial conditions dictated. Imperial Spain’s El Escorial outside Madrid, the courts of Renaissance Venice, and Byzantium’s Constantinople, or the thousands who lived at 18th-century Versailles, were all thronged with court functionaries. They […]
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to come out as gay, and then to advocate lesbian issues in and out of sports. But suddenly the icon seems out of step with
Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in The Hill The agreement that President Donald Trump is offering Kim Jong Un carries uncertain rewards and considerable risk for Kim. Trump’s offer is based on the false assumption that Kim wants a prosperous country from which he and the people of North Korea can benefit.
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Californians brag that their state is the world’s fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods. Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Read recent essays on China. Visit think-tank public symposia. Hear out military analysts. Talk with academics and media pundits. Listen to Silicon Valley grandees. Watch Senate speeches and politicians interview on television. The resulting new groupspeak is surreal. If one excises the word “Trump,” what follows is a seemingly
For the record, I recently spoke with @NewYorker’s @IChotiner per his request for a discussion on my recent book. The published piece was “edited and condensed for clarity”; however, the editing was done so in a way that omits the chronological accuracy of our conversation and the vast majority of what was said, which I
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness There have been so far about three general reactions to the concocted Jussie Smollett psychodrama. One, and the most common, has been apprehension that Smollett’s lies will discredit future real incidents of hate crimes against gays and minorities. This could be a legitimate concern, given the tensions within a
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review No one in Washington called Donald J. Trump a “god” (as journalist Evan Thomas in 2009 had suggested of Obama) when he arrived in January 2017. No one felt nerve impulses in his leg when Trump talked, as journalist Chris Matthews once remarked had happened to him after hearing
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.” Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions had so warmed the planet
Victor Davis Hanson // Hoover Institution As the 2020 election nears, there is as yet no coherent Democratic response to the Trump agenda. If Trump himself is unpopular and polarizing, his agenda is for the most part in sync with a majority of Americans who like the 3% annualized GDP growth; near-record peacetime unemployment; record