Listen to the weekend edition with Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc. Topics include a discussion of fascism in the 1930s, the polls on Trump’s approval, Trump goads Jerome Powell, Kristi Noem’s glam, Harvard and tax exemption, and nemesis touches partisan lawyers.
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Two topics:
Vis-a-vis Harvard wanting to keep its $2 Billion, I have read (so please correct me if I am mistaken) that Harvard charges the federal government 69% overhead on work if performs under government contracts but 0-15% to private institutions for work for them. Shouldn’t the U.S. get Harvard’s best arrangements?
Your pleasant interlocutor asked you how we could treat our allies so poorly. I have a question: If anyone ACCUSED European countries of being American allies, would there be enough evidence to convict?
I note in passing, on this Holy Saturday, AD 2025, that Jesus of Nazareth was often told to ‘Stay in your lane!’, so you’re in good company.
As far as Mussolini goes, he made a mistake in allying himself formally with Hitler. He didn’t have to; Hitler would have been satisfied with a benevolently neutral Italy (Shirer writes about this in “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”), which still would have threatened France and Britain in the Mediterranean. You can argue that Mussolini was succumbing to megalomania, as Hitler was, and it clouded his judgement.
It’s a counterfactual, a what-if, but you can make an argument that had Mussolini chosen the same route as Franco, he and his regime would have survived the war intact, and perhaps even handed off to a Fascist successor.
For more on fascism and its connection to the modern Leftist movement, and Progressivism here, read Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”. It’s a very good history of the origins of fascism, its relationship to other Leftists worldviews, and to our own progressive movement and the Democrat party.