Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Eeyore could continue, but what we are witnessing is unapologetic nihilism. We are engaged in a suicidal impulse to delight in primaeval tribalism, to destroy the entire concept of merit—and to erect in its place a Sovietized system largely overseen by middle-aged,  privileged white people and minority elites, who as bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, media functionaries, and academics dream up these apartheid systems, apply them to less well-off others, and then traverse around the very consequences of their own ideologies.

I am not cynical, but I do expect that homeless camps will not pop up next to Silicon Valley prep schools (as they do near Seattle public schools), that the walls of Montecito and Malibu were better erected than the pre-Trump rickety border fence, and that the pilots of John Kerry’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s private jets were and will be selected only on the basis of meritorious records of flying, period.

Where does it lead? A vast Lord of the Flies nation, worshiping a Boar’s Head, with victory going to the strongest tribe? 

Fortified hamlets and pockets similar to the world of Augustine in the 4^th Century AD, outside Hippo Regius? 

Our major downtowns now the weedy streets and rubble-filled agoras of the abandoned heartland city-states of Roman-era Greece, as described by Pausanias and Plutarch? 

The medieval keep and the peasantry hugging its outside walls?

A return to 1970s and early 1980s, popularized by Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and Escape From New York? 

Or the Time Machine’s Morlocks and Eloi?

Or just our same old, same old juxtaposition of the pre- and post-modern slow decline, in which the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of the tribe. But then again as the great economist Adam Smith warned us, there is a lot of ‘ruin’ in a successful state to bank on, as we consume the inherited gifts from the hard work, investment, and sacrifice of our betters now long dead—and maligned for their generous inheritance to us.

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

A multiracial democracy of the 21^st century has abruptly begun worshiping superficial appearances, as it announces that everything from the order of vaccinations and farm aid to cash vouchers for the poor and dorm selections will be determined by race, in utter violation of the U.S. Constitution that is increasingly despised, especially its Bill of Rights. (Have you noticed that the Left now feels about the First Amendment the same way it always despised the Second?)

The ultimate premise of disparate impact is not proof of ongoing systemic racism and discrimination, but rather the fumes of racism from the pre-Civil rights era: a white generation, which grew up during affirmative action, supposedly exercises unearned privilege, as a non-white generation claims the prejudices shown its parents, but more likely its grandparents, justify reparatory action for themselves—as class vanishes entirely in the matrix. 

The result is predictable: multi-millionaires like Oprah and Megan Markel nurse their hurts on air, presumably and indirectly, inflicted by the culture of those devious deplorable mechanics in Elko and car salesmen of York. 

I suggest we end the term “white people.” Better is: “certain” white people—given those of the middle and lower classes have little in common with white elites. In a reductionist sense, so much of the hatred of the Left is a thinly disguised attack not on “white people”, but on supposedly less hip, not cool and hardly “successful” white people whom the left brands as deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, clingers, Neanderthals, and dregs, to quote our three illustrious and tolerant wise men and women, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. 

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Our finally irony this week? Who is the White Privileg-ist of all? Hunter Biden, of course. 

What inner-city denizen, what white Deplorable from Butte would be given a pass if he left his crack pipe and substance in his rental car? Or was given an age and drug conviction waiver to enter the Navy—only to be quietly asked to leave for drug use? 

Or who from his twenties onward was gifted by the swamp administrations of both parties with serial billets in make-work job on boards and bureaucracies? And what clinger or “chump” would become a multimillionaire, by peddling his family’s name to the highest bidding foreign government or domestic corporation? 

And who among us has violated gun registration laws, as well as prostitution, drug, and pornography statutes with complete exemption? Who has lied repeatedly in public about his transgressions, and had his now president-father lie to the country that his son was a victim of “Russian disinformation”, the sort of fables that a murderous Putin now remembers as his troops muster on the Ukrainian border?

We do not know the precise percentages of attribution within Hunter Biden’s world of privilege: Was his last name 80 percent of the con? Did being pampered, male and white account for the other 20 percent?  

Yet how can any woke movement still exist when the President’s son, whose transgressions the President serially lies about, is the epitome of all the supposed pathological perks which the president has pledged to end?

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

What will be the future of the mass hysteria spawned last summer? No one knows. 

But its destination, if unchecked, will be ethnic tensions and sectarian strife at best akin to those in Brazil and India—or at worst Lebanon, Syria, and Rwanda. 

Until just a few years ago, racial differences, according to polls, were more or less receding. Intermarriage between racial groups is at historic highs. 

But by 2014-2015, with the birth of Black Lives Matter, its courting by the Obama Administration, and the emergence of the electronic social media mob and cancel culture, such progress seems to have ended. We have ceased seeing race as increasingly incidental, rather than essential to who we are. 

READ MORE….

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

No free society can long survive in such a climate of untruth when its media is an Orwellian ministry of truth, and the entire population is nursed on mendacity. We are now suffering through “Hunter’s laptop” psychodrama. Everyone knew in October 2020 that it was genuine—and dangerous to Joe Biden’s campaign. (A drug-crazed child of entitlement who leaves a crack pipe and his substance in a rented car is quite capable of not claiming his laptop, replete with incriminatory photos and embarrassing chit-chat with the now President of the United States).

So the media not only squashed the truth, but went after the purveyors of the truth. And now? We are reduced to a sick spectacle of Hunter, plugging his family memoir amid toady journalists, clumsily lying still.  The excuse of Russian disinformation goes down the memory hole, and Team Biden scrambles to ensure there are no incriminating quid pro quos on those 100,000 emails and texts. 

A FBI, which erased the phone records of some of the Dream Team, and lots of texts of the Page-Strozk trysts, can surely help out here. And if not, it can rehire Crowdstrike, Inc. or Hillary’s Justin Cooper and his hammer.

So who are the reporters who suppress the truth about the Biden laptop, concoct Russian collusion, assure us that the January 6 was a preplanned “armed” insurrection, where “five” people were violently “killed” (fill in the blanks by whom), and scan the day’s news to highlight or suppress stories based on their woke utility? 

What social-economic landscape created these people? Which university climate prepped them? What values nursed them? What ethical rules guide them? What do they want from the fabrication of lies? What or whom are they scared of? Why do they despise a country that enriched them and made them the most leisured and affluent generation in history? 

Is the answer to their self-loathing, Dirty Harry’s “Because they like it”, or Virgil’s “They can, because they think they can”? or in the end maybe Kamala Harris’s “They’re not gonna stop!”

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

BLM and the Great Awokening will follow the same pattern as the Jacobins and McCarthyites. The Left quickly made its points that occasionally and wrongly police use undue force against black suspects. But it then simply went mute when it was a matter of ascertaining whether unarmed apprehended blacks are systematically dying in greater numbers in police custody than are unarmed whites, or at least disproportionally so given the relative number of blacks and whites respectively arrested each year. They are not. 

The greatest killer of unarmed African-American men remains tragically other armed African-American males, often in a gang or during the commission of another crime.

From A Polite and Ernest Semi-Angry Reader:

Dear Mr. Hanson,

I am a senior woman from Michigan, snowbird over the winter in Florida. I am so sad these days that anything written by either side is vituperative, mean spirited, and anger provoking. Your 10 new rules by radicals could have had a much nicer tone. Frankly, I think you are way off base by taking such an exaggerated view of all your beefs. It irritates the left and inflames the right. Ugh. I would appreciate it if you would rewrite that article with a gentler approach.

I have grown up respecting the two party system, and want it to survive in the most healthy fashion. My husband and I have great friends on both sides of the aisle, but it is not easy these days to have a civilized conversation, so we just avoid anything political. That is very sad, because growing up in a “mixed” family, we had wonderful disagreements, and we chewed on lots of issues without drawing blood.

Hopefully that will happen again. Please help that happen.

Respectfully,

Anne Roberts

———————————————————————————————————————

Dear Polite and Earnest Semi-Angry Reader Anne,

I don’t think my 10 rules are “beefs,” but simply descriptions of a new America, in which debt is not really considered debt; whether laws are enforced fully depends on the social/cultural context; and wokeness is a new religion. Do you disagree? If so, please explain where and why. When we owe $25 trillion in national debt and borrow $5 trillion over 2 years do you think it is more important to warn the country about the danger of insolvency or to keep silent so as not to “irritate the Left” or “inflame the Right”?

You and I grew up with a conventional two-party system, I in a Democratic household of the JFK brand.

The 8-hr work-day, Social Security, civil rights, disability insurance, meritocratic admissions to preclude racial prejudice, secure borders to ensure entry-level good wages, fair housing—all this was the Democratic Party until the 1970s/1980s. And even in the 1990s a radical child of the 1960s, Bill Clinton, could at times be reasonable (see the Democratic 1996 convention platform on illegal immigration and speeches on it by the like of Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer.) He was responsible with Newt Gingrich in working out a way to reduce budget deficits.

But we have now two new parties: a hard left socialist/progressive movement that appeals to the very, very wealthy, the corporate elite, woke minorities—versus a middle class, populist working-class party that wishes to retain traditions and customs and seeks to appeal by class rather than racial interests. The former Party has created the cancel culture, the boycott culture, and the transformation culture. It is at war with the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The ACLU is not the ACLU of the 1960s but something quite different. The Left, not the conservative party, wants to alter the Constitution and ancient customs, by ending the 9-Justice Supreme Court, the filibuster, the states’ laws concerning national voting, a 50-state nation, and far more—largely because it feels its agendas do not win 50 percent support, whether the Green New Deal, open borders, reparations, or changes to the Constitution.

In my experience, conservatives usually don’t bring up politics, or like to argue; theirs is more a live and let live attitude. In most families with political tensions, the more leftward demand “discussions” and seek to prompt political debate, and see politics as more important than friendships.

Politics is part of life not an end in itself. Traditionalists don’t hunt down officials at their homes to “get in their faces” or metaphorically “bring a gun to a knife fight.” So I don’t think your admonition is quite as symmetrical as you think. Look at the campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney; both were reduced to caricatures of greedy, white capitalists. Trump was a creation of pent-up anger, it is true, but the anger was that of taking punches in a world where the Left had weaponized Wall Street, Silicon Valley, professional sports, academia, foundations, Hollywood, entertainment, and the corporate boardroom, etc. What is the political message you receive before a NBA game, or from a new Hollywood movie, or within a new commercial, or in a college president’s letter, or from Facebook’s rules?

I do think we can all avoid unnecessary animus. I try not to attack any writers/thinkers in personal terms and avoid naming them wherever possible, but do insist on replying to those who engage in attacks. Otherwise, the untruth is never addressed, much less corrected.

I wish a return to the old bipartisan give-and-take, but whether we like it or not, the country is moving in one direction of massive debt, larger government, less personal freedom, more tribal tensions, open borders, less meritocracy, and less civility—and most important, as I pointed out, a general decline in knowledge, given the watering down of K-12 curricula. Consensual government will not work when citizens do not know much at all of their nation’s origins and history, and feel their country is sinful and innately flawed at its beginning.

I appreciate your kind advice, but beg to differ this time. I try to give rational spirited critiques that can remind people of what is going both well and poorly. Simply hoping for the good times to return if we all forget our differences won’t work. If history is any guide, the smiling ostrich with his head in a hole will only empower those who have very focused and quite dangerous agendas.

Respectfully,

Victor Hanson