Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
2024 proved to be the year of the reemergence of many once and unfairly pilloried public figures.
Elon Musk weathered nonstop attacks on his X social media platform. Furor escalated over his newfound 2024 Trump advocacy—even as he ended 2024 with his iconic Tesla brand still the best-selling car in six states and the most popular electric vehicle in the entire nation.
Tesla’s rising stock prices ensured by year’s end that Musk was by far the richest man in the world with a net worth of well over $400 billion. His recyclable SpaceX Super Heavy starship rocket booster mesmerized the nation as it returned to the launch pad to be caught by a huge mechanical arm.
After January 6, 2021, the media swore that Donald Trump was supposedly washed up. He left office with a 34 percent approval rating. Over nearly the next four years, Trump would face 91 felony indictments and be liable for over $400 million in assorted fines.
Now he is a reelected president. Former oppositional world leaders traipse to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval even before his tenure begins. His erstwhile critics at home are scurrying about in disarray.
The Trump-hating media who swore Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle” are mostly discredited and are, for now, still bleeding audiences. And Trump’s chief political adversaries, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Obamas are increasingly either unpopular or irrelevant—or both.
Yet one unremarked-upon return is that of former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who, after 20 years of representing Central California in Congress, retired on January 1, 2022, from the House to become CEO of the newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, tasked to oversee its social media platform, TruthSocial.
Nunes has regained public attention over the last two weeks after Trump appointed him to become chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees the conduct and performance of America’s intelligence agencies.
And once more he too is the target of tired residual left-wing venom, as a “pugnacious Trump loyalist” in the words of the New York Times.
Like almost all former chairs of this nonpaying advisory board, Nunes keeps his full-time job. His old critics claim he has conflicts of interest, given he serves Trump in both a private and public capacity.
Of course, these complaints come from those who saw no conflict of interest when Vice President Joe Biden flew to China with his son on Air Force Two to shake down foreign communist oligarchs and apparatchiks by using his office to enrich, tax-free, the Biden family syndicate. And no one alleges that Nunes ever became rich, in the fashion of the two Pelosis, who leveraged privileged congressional insider knowledge to make “wise” investments.
But more importantly, why would Trump not pick Nunes to enact the board’s mission statement to oversee “the Intelligence Community’s compliance with the Constitution and all applicable laws, executive orders, and presidential directives?”
After all, he shattered the Democratic hoax of Russian-Trump collusion between 2015 and 2018, even as his lead investigator, Kash Patel, the next FBI Director, was himself an object of FBI surveillance.
As Nunes once pointed out, why did Obama’s non-intelligence officials, like UN Ambassador Samantha Power, seek to unmask dozens of names of U.S. officials, most of whom were political opponents?
So, who could Trump better trust to oversee the intelligence and investigatory bureaus than someone who knows all too well the descent of these agencies into Trump-Derangement-Syndrome-inspired chronic dissimulation and illegal surveillance?
After all, the former CIA Director John Brennan, the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and the former interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe all, by their own admissions, lied under oath either to Congress or federal investigators. Former FBI director James Comey pled amnesia or ignorance 245 times before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committee.
Trump himself, remember, was the object of a vile and fabricated hit “dossier” of Christopher Steele. Nunes proved Steele was a Democratic Party-paid opposition research functionary and an erstwhile FBI informant. Should not Trump have good grounds to want a known bulldog as an overseer of the suspect intelligence agencies?
Do we remember the “51 former intelligence officials?”
Some were hardly “former” at all, given they still had enjoyed contracts with government intelligence agencies. On the eve of 2020, they blatantly “misled” the nation that Hunter Biden’s laptop, authenticated at the time by the FBI, had all the “hallmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation.
Such unapologetic election interference by our best and brightest—including former CIA Directors Leon Panetta and John Brennan—may well have played a role in the outcome of the 2020 election.
But what perhaps infuriates the left most is Nunes’ resiliency and ability to sluff off its chronic hysterias. Again, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he revealed to the nation that Christopher Steele’s accusations were little more than gossipy fabrications from a discredited ex-British spy—at a time when the media and the Democrats in Congress had cited his “research” chapter and verse in near-biblical fashion.
Moreover, Nunes showed that Steele himself was hired by Democratic interests through the use of various paywalls—the DNC, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS—to help ruin the 2016 Trump campaign, on the false and ridiculous charge of colluding with the Russians to throw the election. His team further found that the dossier of Steele, again a one-time paid informant of the FBI, was used in part to obtain an FBI lawyer-forged FISA warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page.
At the time, candidate and then President Trump was under unprecedented attack. At his inauguration, riots broke out. Madonna publicly declared to a crowd that she thought about blowing up the Trump White House.
Trump was branded a Russian “puppet” who should be removed just days after his swearing-in. Indeed, according to a Foreign Policy article by one Obama administration leftover official, the left was supposed to depose him quickly, either by impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or a military coup.
So those were certainly surreal times, at least until Nunes’s committee issued a controversial memo that laid out most of the skullduggery but only earned him unprecedented media venom.
Only years later, with the issuance of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigative report, the conclusions of the House oversight committee investigations, and the reportage of a few bold journalists, did the public fully confirm there was never anything to the “Russian collusion” charge, other than a Clinton, and then administrative state, effort to destroy Trump by any means other than an election.
In those crazy times of 2017-2020, the media buzzed with predictions that special counsel Robert Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-star” lawyers would consume Trump and his supporters.
Nunes himself was written off as a California dairy farmer way over his head, with legacy media headlines blaring, “Trump-Russia Investigation: A Former Dairy Farmer, Rep. Devin Nunes Leads Historic Probe!”
The media sought to contrast Nunes with supposedly brilliant, Harvard-law-trained Adam Schiff, the then-minority party’s highest-ranking member on the Nunes committee. Schiff would supposedly devour the chairman—in what the media would boast would become a war between a supposed yokel from the Central Valley pitted against an Ivy League pro. Years later today, Schiff’s prior insistence on a real Trump-Russian collusion effort in 2016 and his persistence that the Steele dossier was factual remain even more laughable. A farmer might editorialize that its takes far more savvy and resilience to run a dairy farm than it does to graduate from Harvard.
When Trump appointed Nunes the head of TruthSocial, the same sort of hick/rustic stories reemerged about Nunes. He was now again supposedly “over his head,” as the blinkered rustic trying to make it in the cutthroat world of sophisticated social media.
We were told TruthSocial would meet the same fate as Parler. That ascendant 2020 start-up conservative alternative was sabotaged by the left-wing Twitter monopoly that had conspired to ban Trump and partner with the FBI to suppress news unfavorable to Biden’s 2020 campaign.
It was left to the trifecta of Apple, Google, and Amazon to destroy Parler by denying its critical application platforms to the general public.
Over the last three years, the media gleefully reported, erroneously, that TruthSocial was nearly bankrupt, hemorrhaging users, piling up operating debt, without operating capital, and losing a critical merger bid. They high-fived the TruthSocial 30-month war with the SEC—one of the most drawn out and politicized in its history—which, in likely partisan fashion, had sought to delay or block TruthSocial’s partnership with Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC).
As in the case of the Russian collusion hoax, the media was both predictably hostile and wrong, as it serially predicted that Nunes and Truth Social would fail from its very beginning. For nearly three years, it sounded the same “walls are closing” doom and gloom hysterics where it had left off with ‘Russian collusion.”
We were assured that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter meant that the huge social media platform would veer right and preclude any need for TruthSocial. For over three years, headlines in scare caps assured, as did a Bloomberg autumn 2022 screed, that “The Walls Are Closing in on Trump’s TRUTH Social.”
At about the same time, a giddy Washington Post boasted that “Trump once reconsidered sticking with Truth Social. Now he’s stuck.” And still, the chorus continued a year later with New York Magazine blaring the same narrative, “Trump’s Truth Social Is an Unmitigated Failure.” And on and on.
Certainly, when Musk purchased Twitter, renamed it the free-speech platform X, endorsed Donald Trump, and welcomed banned conservatives back to the now-reinvented old Twitter, it questioned the original reason-to-be of TruthSocial.
Yet despite media obituaries, 2024 ends with the Trump Media & Technology Group’s stock price at some $35-37. In October, the company’s worth soared to an incredible $10 billion in market capitalization—albeit a figure representative of speculative interest rather than the size of its profits or market share.
Still, unlike the old Twitter, TruthSocial had little overhead and ran a tight ship. It reportedly has some $700 million in cash on hand. And it enjoys something no other platform can quite rival—the near-exclusive domain of the President of the United States, 8.4-million of his followers, and over 600,000 investors. Most of the media’s sensational stories about its massive operating losses were never borne out by its officially released filings.
Tens of thousands of Americans have invested in TruthSocial because of what it stands for and their faith in Donald Trump. In that sense, they confound Wall Street orthodoxies about the magnitude of company size and profitably in gauging stock prices.
There is a sort of nemesis theme to all these hubristic Nunes hit stories: the clueless bumpkin from a California dairy who turns out to have exposed one of the great scandals of political malfeasance in modern history, or the fumbling ex-farmer driving the ridiculous Trump media platform into, at one recent point, a $10 billion net worth—and multibillion-dollar profit for Donald Trump.
Critics are right that the TruthSocial stock is astronomically “overvalued”, but seem clueless as to why that is and why it may remain more or less so.
It is a well-run company, and its inseparable brand, Donald Trump, is no longer the media’s Satan but increasingly a widely admired, resilient, and indomitable figure, traits that even his exhausted enemies grudgingly concede.
So, looking back at the years of insanity, where now are all the officials and pundits who swore that Nunes was either incompetent or sinister?
Ryan Lizza, who in 2018 published a bizarre hit piece for Esquire by bird-dogging Nunes’s parents on their dairy in Iowa, was fired for sexual misconduct from The New Yorker. He was recently embroiled in a messy, he-said/she-said courtroom psychodrama—replete with charges and countercharges of blackmail, theft, and physical intimidation—with his erstwhile fiancé, the peripatetic Olivia Nuzzi.
The dissimulator quad of Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe has receded into irrelevancy, only occasionally reemerging in half-hearted fashion to reassert their stale first-term Trump accusations.
No one believes the pompous Schiff memo was more accurate than the Nunes brief it attacked.
No one vouches for the bogus Steele dossier, or that Steele himself was a skilled and professional ex-intelligence agent, or that Hunter’s laptop was cooked up in Moscow, or that Carter Page was a Russian spy working to subvert the 2016 election.
No one trusts that Samantha Power had legitimate reasons to request the unmasking of nearly 300 Trump officials, many of them her political enemies, or that the FBI did not collude with social media to suppress news unfavorable to Joe Biden in 2020, or that the intelligence agencies initially were accurate in parroting the official line that the COVID virus was birthed by a bat or pangolin.
Yet the disillusioned public also wants to know what these intelligence agencies did not do when they were otherwise so busy hunting down fantasy conspiracy theories and knee-deep in domestic partisan politics.
Did they warn us that the entire U.S. effort in Afghanistan was about to collapse, in the greatest humiliation of the U.S. military in a half-century, as it abandoned over $50 billion in weapons to terrorists?
Did they have a clue about what Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah were up to before October 7?
Did they ever sense that Vladimir Putin was about to stage a massive attack on Kyiv on February 24, 2022?
Did they ever have any hint about what two near-successful Trump assassins were up to?
Did they ever honestly report what exactly was going on at the Wuhan virology lab and to what degree our own health officials were complicit in it?
And how does China keep producing state-of-the-art ships, warplanes, drones, and weaponry that seem eerily to resemble or replicate original American designs?
As in the case of the newly appointed reformist directors of the wayward FBI, Pentagon, or National Institute of Health, so likewise the intelligence agencies need and should welcome the civilian oversight of Devin Nunes and his new board—to ensure they start doing what they were tasked to do and not continue to do what they were not.
I’m sure a dairy farmer knows manure when he encounters it.
I wonder if Devin Nunes has enough TruthSocial stock to buy the Fresno Bee and fire opinion writers.
why would you waste money on a dying newspaper – he will use Social to respond to these libs in good time
The dildo of consequences seldom arrives lubed. A lesson the left will hopefully experience frequently & immediately
Beautiful.
ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The dildo of consequences. LMAO.
I’m going to borrow this one.
But, but, but, professor, only democrats are premitted to have conflicts of interest in hiring. Much like the democrats propensity for spewing falsehoods, only they can be guiltless while hypocrically demanding the right be hung (metaphorically; maybe)!
As a fan of Devin Nunes from his days in Congress, even I have to offer a bit of advice regarding this column. I found it quite long and often redundant. To twist a phrase “I believe the professor doth promote too much”!
A good professor is also a teacher that knows his students. Without personal touch, the best teaching involves repetition.
I’ll take the Good Professor’s wisdom over JLynn’s any day including his intelligence quotient!
–JB
Jlynn, I didn’t want this column to end and was truly, truly disappointed when it did. As always people have a wide array of opinions on so many things, which is just the way life is. But in the US, a stealthy campaign has been ongoing and very successful at depriving the masses of the hard truths surrounding the burgeoning and ever-more-powerful non-elected Deep State bureaucracy and one of the few very good writers, Mr. Hansen, has been steadfast in his columns to illuminate these usurpations of our Freedoms; I don’t know how he keeps it all organized in his head because I can’t come close to doing it, and so even though I think I’m fairly well informed… and live in central California… and had a daughter graduate from Fresno State, I had no idea that Devin Nunes was involved in many of the things Mr. Hansen laid out in this column – which is embarrassing – yet knew there had to be some tremendous positives about him, otherwise Big Media and all (luckily shrinking) cohorts would’ve never been directed to only mention Dunes’ name with outrage. So I read this column twice to help me remember all this (again, embarrassing to admit) new information.
He simply stated what needed to be said… the truth. All would do well to read it.
The mainstream media have been lying for years. It just took the events of the past 8 years for them to show their true nature. They were virtually unchallenged before Trump’s first term.
They will never recover, nor should they. They face extinction as newer, more trustworthy media take their place.
Pease continue the ‘promotons’!
VDH .. off topic, but this interview is good concerning Jan 6th and DEI in the military. I’m a classmate of the interviewee, did not know him but can relate to graduates like him.
Trump Appointee Reveals What’s Wrong with the US Army
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfSWBvGtQJ8
Thank you. Humble man that provides insights as to the inner workings of military & interactions with government officials. Very clear about DEI & how it infiltrated West Point. Indicates enough to know where stands on Jan 6.
I choose to believe DJT is good. The history of his actions point solidly to support that belief, no matter how much muck is thrown at it or how many untruths are told about it.
2025 begins a new chapter after a terrible, multi-faceted attack on our nation from within and without. We live in interesting times. That can be a real bummer.
I look forward to what comes next and I strongly hope we’re up to the task. There’s a pretty good team in the locker room but it’s still hard staying in the bleachers. Go Team!
I’m with you Mike. Good half time coaching! Let’s roll!!! (Todd Morgan Beamer, 9/11/2001)
All the best for you in 2025. Mark
Thank you Victor! In reference to a previous comment, i prefer lots of the truthful statements advanced in your article as opposed to lots of slanderous lies we are constantly subjected to by our progressive, marxist “friends”.
Having said that, the contrast of wise dairy farmer versus the shameful Harvard elite was most welcome!
+1 The Legacy Media is either complicit, incompetent, or both.
How about we pursue basic, widespread DOJ corruption?
Twenty six DOJ attorneys erased their Federal smartphones after the Mueller (Weismann) investigation wrapped up.
Why aren’t they all indicted? Simple law breaking and collusion Joe Six Pack can understand. They should also be immediately fired for gross negligence.
Furthermore, tap the NSA for all the erased data; or expose its hand-in-glove coverup.
Constitutional truth seekers love the criticism of the demo deceiver left. So bring on your foolish negative slander. Thank you – for it is inspiring, exhilarating, invigorating and confirmation that truth seekers are on the right path toward making America great again.
If traitors are rooted out, this may temporarily increase the national unemployment rate.
“All of President Trump’s cabinet and key appointments carry the same outlook toward the surveillance state. They fundamentally believe the system is needed, the DHS system holds national security value, and the capacity within the DHS system is only a problem when corrupt political operatives are in charge of it. If good, virtuous and moral people are in charge, the DHS surveillance system is okay.
I have talked to many of them, key people including Devin Nunes for perspective, and I can say directly that President Trump’s team believe the system is good and necessary, it was just controlled by bad actors.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2024/12/25/unfortunately-the-trump-cabinet-will-likely-expand-the-surveillance-state/#more-267626
Changing only the people will not solve the problem long-term. The Patriot Act and subsequent spying laws on American citizens must be repealed. And the automatic collection and storage of all communications of American citizens by American telecommunications and high-tech corporations (passing them on to the intel agencies) must be outlawed,. That means that Alphabet and many other high-tech spying operations go belly up, but that would be a net positive when measured against finally restoring our Fourth Amendment rights.
We DO need some mechanism to allow data collection on all non-citizens and on citizens who show strong evidence of doing harm (or planning to do harm) to our country.
But not this flawed FISA Court process.
To understand the politicization of the FBI, etc. Look only the the corrupt history of Chicago politics to understand how former President Obama operated while in and out of office.
Very interesting podcast w/ Nunes today.
The DJT Co, led by Nunes, is making excellent progress!
This quote from above bothers me … “The dissimulator quad of Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe has receded into irrelevancy, only occasionally reemerging in half-hearted fashion to reassert their stale first-term Trump accusations.” It bothers me specifically because a grand total of “51” of these intel officials that should be watched VERY Closely, as their likely scheming in the darkness, outside public visibility, truly treasonous and most likely never to be held accountable.
Slough off, not sluff off.
VDH – I always look ahead with great anticipation of your publications whether via email, text, podcast, Fox News, etc. Long time follower, having been introduced to you via Neal Boortz. Please keep up the good work. I am 87 years old and your thoughtful, well researched, and presented writings and opinions are much appreciated. BYW, I received your book “The End of Everything” for Christmas. This completes my collection of all your books to date.
DJT will more than likely NOT retaliate against his persecutors.
But knowing that they are “ sweating blood “ is satisfying to me.
Guilt is a heavy burden.
If Trump will not investigate them and punish them, they will continue to do so.
“At the time, candidate and then President Trump was under unprecedented attack. At his inauguration, riots broke out. Madonna publicly declared to a crowd that she thought about blowing up the Trump White House.”
I hope and pray that the violence-prone left is quiet right now because they have realized that it will do no good to act out against a tenacious & resilient Trump, and the will of the majority of Americans, but I don’t think that is the case.
I have a feeling that the Communist-Globalist-Jihadist democrats, led by Obama, have plans that will be implemented on or about January 6th or 20th, or, they may wait until shortly after President Trump settles into the White House.
President Trump MUST have all residence and office area he will occupy swept carefully & completely for not only surveillance devices, but also hidden weapons (bombs, booby-traps, etc.) that could be used against him and his family, friends, administration members, and allies.
I vaguely remember a woman, who posted often on Twitter many years ago, walking around DC to video unusual things and happenings, showing a video of a large & unexplained & equally inexplicable excavation close up next to the White House. What could THAT possibly be? SWEEP THE AREA THOROUGHLY IN AND AROUND WHERE POTUS TRUMP WILL LIVE & WORK. PROTECT OUR PRESIDENT FROM HARM.
Enemies of our Republic and DJ T are not going away. ‘Truth is proving to be a powerful weapon. Let us all be thankful for those who seek to serve our nation with honor. Many people in positions of influence are being exposed. Thankful for VDH .
Thank you, Professor Hanson!
Perhaps it’s a bit premature, but I’m already savoring the just comeuppance for so many fronts.
As+regards+the+monitary+value+of+Truth+Social%3A+name+recognition%2C+injustice+during+the+2020+election%2C+and+savy+business+catapulted+it+into+the+market.+Besides%2C+the+entire+body+of+the+NASDAQ%2C+in+general+is+impossible+to+valuate.+Who+better+than+Trump+to+monitize+name+recognition%3F+This+man+is+more+like+President+Andrew+Jackson+than+any+other%2C+right+down+to+being+wounded+in+action%2C+and+political+comeback+after+defeat.+May+God+bless+America.