What Obama doesn’t understand about human nature. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Deterrence makes someone not do something. A parent promotes good teen behavior not just by providing cars and smartphones, but also by the explicit specter of graduated punishments that an adolescent does not wish to repeat, and thus chooses instead […]
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online California has given us three new truths about government. One, the higher that taxes rise, the worse state services become. Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc. And three, the more existential the problem, the more the state ignores it.
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Comparing great things to smaller ones, is Donald Trump, in spirit, becoming our version of Napoleon Bonaparte? For a decade and a half Napoleon wrecked Europe. He hijacked the platitudes of the French Revolution to mask his own dictatorship at home and imperialism abroad. Yet today, two centuries after
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with overwhelming popular goodwill and solid majorities in both houses of Congress. He chose not to translate that political heft into passing “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e., open borders and amnesties) or more gun control. He opposed gay marriage. He warned that he could
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia President Obama talks a lot about the scientific method. On climate change, he has often invoked the idea of a great divide between those on the progressive left, such as himself, who believe in “settled science” and thus a looming man-caused climatological disaster, and those, presumably on the Neanderthal
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017? Next year the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in
By Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Clingers 1.0: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has
How Green extremists made a bad drought worse. By Victor Davis Hanson // City Journal In mid-December, the first large storms in three years drenched California. No one knows whether the rain and snow will continue—only that it must last for weeks if a record three-year drought, both natural and man-made, is to end. In
By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services Germany’s political stability and economic sway have until recently earned Chancellor Angela Merkel unprecedented global influence and power. Postwar Germany has become the financial powerhouse of Europe and a model nation. Give credit to German hard work and competency for the country’s continuing economic miracle. Less appreciated
American elites take a perverse view of what ISIS is really after. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online ‘Playing into the hands of ISIS” is the new Beltway mantra. The finger-shaking by the administration and its supporters warns Americans not to give in to their supposedly natural biases against Muslims. Never mind that