Victor Davis Hanson // The Classicist
Author: victorhanson
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.
The Many Crises of Our Chaotic New World
Biden Mocks Ancient Wisdom
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Human nature stays the same across time and space. That is why there used to be predictable political, economic, and social behavior that all countries understood.
The supply of money governs inflation. Print it without either greater productivity or more goods and services, and the currency cheapens. Yet America apparently rejects that primordial truism.
The United States has borrowed about $29 trillion in debt—about 130 percent of its annual gross domestic product. The government will run up a $2.3 trillion annual budget deficit in 2021—after a $3.1 trillion deficit the year before.
A Child’s World of Animals
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part Three
At 10 or 11, we graduated to do more of the shooting—with more of the same repetitious caveats, “Never shoot a bird on the wire.” I shot instead cottontails with another of my dad’s ancient guns, a 1890 Winchester .22 pump. I brought the carcasses to my grandfather around 5 PM on weekends. He paid a dollar for each, and skinned two or three. And my sainted grandparents fried them for dinner.
Once at 13, I shot a pregnant possum and collected the babies that emerged alive. No need to go on. But after that I quit shooting for six months.
Then I began noticing quite abruptly that rabbits shrieked when hit—if you listen. They cry out in a shrill human-like voice. After that I quit hunting them altogether and have never shot one since. I later cursed myself for shooting any of them, even when they devoured the shoots in the young vineyard. So I mostly liked all the animals or at least liked them enough not to kill them.
Continue reading “A Child’s World of Animals”Words That Don’t Matter
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
From time to time, I’ll try to update our contemporary American vocabulary.
Diversity/Diverse
This noun and its adjective have lost all currency. Ostensibly, diversity assumes that variety in general is better than uniformity. In some cases, perhaps it is, although the Japanese, for example, might argue their homogenous society avoids many of the problems in contemporary America. And after all our original motto of uniting states into the union was e pluribus unum, not ex uno plures.
Continue reading “Words That Don’t Matter”A Child’s World of Animals
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part Two
Was my Dad a militarist? Hardly. He was a farmer and junior college administrator, who hated war and swore to me once when I turned 18 and waited for my lottery number: “No one in this family ever volunteers and no one is ever going to refuse the draft.” I nodded.
We crawled, ran, and ran through acres of grapevines, plum trees, and majestic walnuts—squirrels, possums, hawks, crows and snakes everywhere. The town was still almost three miles away. If we saw a turtle or perch caught in the pipeline, as he washed down from the Sierra, we were told to “Put the poor fellow back where you got him.”
Continue reading “A Child’s World of Animals”Biden vs Republicans: The next 100 days and beyond
Mikio Sugeno and Alex Fang // Nikkei Asia
Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
Q: You have called the Biden presidency “the most radical first three months of a presidency since 1933, the most divisive and certainly the most dangerous.” Can you elaborate?
A: Biden’s policies of de facto open borders, blanket amnesties, cancellations of pipelines and fossil fuel leases, planned radical increases in corporate, income, and capital gains taxes, identity politics and Green New Deal rhetoric, along with his appointments and resets in the Middle East, are the most left-wing agendas since [Franklin D. Roosevelt]. Their common denominators are utopian globalism, redistributionism, criticism of America’s founding, traditions, history, and values, and identity-politics tribalism.
The world looks to the U.S. to be overtly supportive of its friends and rock-solidly unfriendly to its enemies. The Biden administration instead is interested in pan-global climate change, identity politics and world governance in a way far beyond even the [European Union], and this could be quite dangerous to [Asia], where nations like China, North Korea and Russia have no such naive assumptions and constantly remind their proximate neighbors that the U.S. is in decline economically, torn apart culturally and can’t be counted upon.
Q: Biden pledged in his inaugural speech to unite the country and to heal the division. Do you believe he can do it? If not, is there someone in either party who can unite the country?
A: The better question is whether he wished to unite anyone rather than simply profess ecumenicalism.
Nothing in Biden’s past senatorial record, his rhetoric or his conduct gives any evidence of such outreach. His first 100 days are truer to his character: those who want voter IDs as required in most states are “Jim Crow” racists; those who after being vaccinated doubt the need for masks outdoors are “Neanderthals”; those who want legal and measured immigration are “nativists.”