In this Friday news roundup, Victor Davis Hanson talks with cohost Sami Winc about current events: Ukraine, Ketanji Brown Jackson, The COVID wind down, the Iran deal, and enclaves of knowledge in American education’s Dark Ages.
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Love it.
Please explain WHY this Supreme Court nominee has to be confirmed. I thought the point of the exercise was to determine if a candidate was qualified. The only qualifications she had to have was that she was a woman (whatever that is!) and Black. She is a Trojan horse for the left. Why can’t this BE stopped. I look to your wisdom to help me understand why everything that is against our Constitutional Republic is treated like a ‘freight train’ coming toward one little person tied to the tracks. What is our Constitution for, if not to support equality and inalienable rights and freedoms? Thank you and please stay safe. There just aren’t enough wise leaders out there anymore! D
Dr Hanson:
Dr Boyce Watkins has the Black Business school where he trains blacks to start their own businesses. He doesn’t like the traditional school system because he thinks that it is for white people. He is very interesting. Have you heard of him? He does want to create a school system for Blacks. he does favor excellence.
😃😃😃😃😃Another grifter. Black excellence is the embarrassing term they use to cover failure. Only 18% of black 4th graders read at grade level. The percentage goes down as they get older. They beat up teachers and each other at school. Kill each other at school and everywhere else.They cant kill each other fast enough. And everyone else. This has been going on for decades. Billions spent on programs. Removing math because they cant pass dumbed down proficiency tests. No longer giving Ds and Fs. No suspensions or expulsions. Blaming white people for their failure and the grifters love it. They know there is no solution. Its hopeless. Just a way to make money. Watkins wants to get his hands on taxpayer money, which comes predominantly from evil white people. Blacks are selling their people out. Always have.
Douglass, Washington, Du Boise, King, Malcolm X all disagreed, but they didn’t sell their people out. “White” folk have produced Donald Trump and Joe Biden as their great titans. We are living in an age of lesser men and those on the bottom feel the effects exponentially worse.
Giving in to putin is not the answer.
Saying…we destroyed halfl a country..is wrong…PUTIN DID THAT!
Saying zalinsky has to give up…is also WRONG!…Ukraine did not attack anyone!
The answer is with putin…either he stops or the fight goes on …The world backs Ukraine and putin fights on using threats and using the cowardice of other nations…
Saying….”We would execute this plan..but we’re afraid of how putin responds'”…is not gonna work..
Assistance to Ukraine must continue and escalate until Russia blinks..No matter how putin responds..the world MUST PRESS ON!!!
Absolutely! We cannot live with such a man going forward and the Chinese need to see that too! How many more will die in the future if Putin doesn’t get driven out now? Let the Ukrainians decide when there has been enough death (bless their sweet hearts!). God love the Ukrainians! And (please!) God let your judgement of Putin come soon!
When you claim that today’s students are ignorant of the Western canon of knowledge, they reply that it is not worth learning or that there are other canons from other parts of the world that are more appropriate to the cultural heritage of our newest peoples.
How do you reply to the “dead white males” argument, Mr.Hanson?
Often, students don’t realize that there aren’t enough qualified professors to teach the other canons in a responsible manner. Saint John’s has managed to offer a master’s in Chinese Classical Thought, but that’s a rare, rare exception. It’s also hard to determine what other “canons” are out there since many cultures don’t orient themselves around “canonical texts”. There’s also a good argument to be made for high schools and undergraduate programs to teach the western canon in US colleges because that is where the majority of the students have been raised and plan to live. Nothing prevents them from taking a major or minor in the thought and history of a non-western culture (in theory, see above) or doing so in a graduate course. Advocates of the Western classics often believe that Chinese schools should make the Chinese classics their curriculum for the same reasons.
Finally, the Western canon is multi-racial, multicultural, and multi vocal just by virtue of the vast time and geographic space it covers. The west is a hazy plurality that can incorporate modern Russia and Japan or Roman Syria and the Macedonian Punjab.
Dr. Hanson: I understand the concern for escalation but you didn’t even speak to a future after allowing Putin a victory! Putin might live another 20 years and such an egotistical person will continue to threaten us with his Nuclear weapons each time he wants something (he wants that land bridge to Moldova…then Moldova and more). You speak of the West spending Ukrainian lives; the Ukrainians will decide that question (How many more people would die in such a future if Putin gets a victory?). We must give Ukrainians more lethal weapons; they have more than shown they can make good use of them. How is your position not essentially appeasement of Putin? Isn’t appeasement one of the critical issues of World War II? You have written that it took 65 million lives to adjudicate a question that was self-evident at the beginning of World War II; that Germany, Japan and Italy had no chance. How will China threaten the West in the future when it wants things to be a certain way whether we speak of stealing real estate (Taiwan) or dictating (behind the scenes) what a country will or will not do on certain issues? The minimal end of this should be (Ukraine decides how many lives) Russia literally driven back by the Ukrainians to the 2014 borders and Russia’s daily missile attacks rendered inert by defensive batteries. But the best end would be Russia driven totally out of Ukraine and War Reparations; the West should not let up on sanctions until War Reparations.
Our new Dark Age isn’t as promising as Western Europe after the Gothic coup that removed Romulus Augustus. Where are our Augustines, Boethiuses, Venerable Bedes and Jordanes? Could a collapsed Western infrastructure produce Frankish Steel or gem-work? Rap artists are adept at composition in performance and have a varied and regional poetic diction, but who will weld that with writing to produce Beowulf, The Battle of Malden, The Fight at Finn’s Burgh, or the short verse that became source material for Norse prose Sagas and the Finnish Kalevala? We certainly don’t have the furious optimism and energy to produce a Song of Roland. The Dark Ages are a fusion of whatever got out of Boethius’ skull before Theodoric popped it and the vigorous ascendant cultures of Northern Europe. We’ve got the cool stuff, but where’s the vigor to fuse it with to create a new culture?
There are also large gas deposits off the coast of Ukraine.
that Russian desires that Ukraine will not give up.
Fortunately, Putin has exposed the fact that Russia’s conventional forces are poorly motivated and aren’t very well trained or equipped. Their logistics are basically a joke. The west mechanized their army during WWII, and it appears they learned next to nothing from it. They have a severe imbalance of fighting forces over logistics to support those forces, resulting in a large army of poorly maintained equipment. Lots of rusty tanks, and APC’s with rotting tires and too few trucks and helicopters to support them in areas where they don’t have access to rail depots or where building pipelines to supply fuel and water is impractical. I think Putin will ultimately be forced to settle for such gains as his forces have made up to this point.
Kamala Harris is not child-like. That has connotations of innocence, whimsy, wonder. She is childish. She is immature. She is an overgrown adolescent, which is no surprise, because her worldview is immaturity expressed as a political philosophy.
The idea of creating charter schools for black kids is akin to the actual examples of black schools that were founded in the wake of Reconstruction, and which existed right up until the Johnson administration, and the progressive Great Society. Go look at the history of the Dunbar School in Washington DC.
Leftists/progressives would dismiss this example, though, as a case of white-savior-ism, since the efforts to educate former slaves and their children after emancipation was driven by whites from New England. They were driven by their faith to help blacks integrate into American society, and they understood that education was a key.
Dennis Prager puts it this way, Professor: the Left destroys everything it touches. I think it’s a particularly insightful observation.