Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Just appearing this week in the news are stories that our elite colleges have sent out letters of admissions. White applicants at many universities have been accepted at historic lows of about 28 percent (of a population base of 68-70 percent), despite the supposedly cherished tradition of ‘proportional representation.’ 

Will the most aggrieved at the new racialist discrimination and reduced slots be the suburban, bicoastal white liberal professional classes? They put a high premium on the quality and branding of their children’s education? Did the Left, then, strangle many of its own? 

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Any nation’s well-being—as Americans know from their own illustrious history—hinges on only a few factors. Its prosperity, freedom, and stability depend on its constitutional and political stability.

A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military.

Perhaps most important, however, is a first-rate, inductive educational system. Of course, nothing is possible without general social calm, often dependent on a reverence for the past, along with present secure borders. 

The ability to produce or easily acquire food, fuel, and key natural resources ensures a nation’s independence and autonomy.  

Unfortunately in the last few months all of those centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have now been put into doubt. 

Read the full article

Victor Davis Hanson // Internet Interview with Urs Gehriger

While the American media swoon over President Joe Biden, historian Victor Davis Hanson is ringing the alarm bell. He warns that the radical Left has captured the White House and is on the march. Former President Barack Obama promised a fundamental transformation of American democracy. Now, from behind the desk of the Oval Office, his former vice president is fulfilling that pledge and “is trying to divide America by race.”

What a difference a new president makes — on the America media. Next week marks President Joe Biden’s one hundredth day in office, and the fourth estate is rapturous with praise. Under the 78-year-old Democrat’s leadership, America’s reputation in the world is soaring; humanity has returned to Pennsylvania Avenue; and the “former president who shall not be named” is a distant figure mercifully banished to his palm lined fortress in “COVID America.”

Historian Victor Davis Hanson disagrees.

In his vivid retelling, Biden is no less than a modern, political “Dr. Frankenstein.” Among the horrors Biden has wrought is “an illegal immigration monster that is now it’s out of control.” Hanson argues that the Swamp veteran is cynically playing “the ‘race card’ to divide America” and entrench the Democrat party. On foreign policy, Hanson warns: “Our friends can’t count on us, and our enemies don’t fear us.”

READ MORE…..

From An Angry Reader:

Vic, I read your opinion piece today in my local Naples Daily newspaper and I had to wonder why the paper published this absurd piece of crap. Didn’t they realize that only right-wing crazy assholes work at the Hoover Institute!

I apologize as I realize right-wing and crazy assholes are synonymous. Your article is full of lying bullshit. Are you sure TRumphole didn’t write this for you?

I mean really you accuse President Biden has not kept our laws, but you say nothing about the whiner who got his fat dumb ass kicked by Joe. You attack immigrants for your typical stupid claims while again say nothing about Americans who refuse masks, maintain social distances and Bitch about vaccine passports!

You’re a fucking asshole and I’d defalcate not in the street but in your so could spew more shit!

Sincerely,

Bill McMaster a former CIA analyst and manager

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Dear Aggrieved Angry Reader Bill,

Your analytical and managerial skills result in a high Angry Reader score: no detail or evidence to support your venom, plenty of profanity and crudity (crap, assholes, bullshit, ass, shit, Bitch, f——g, the neologisms (TRumphole), the strange vocabulary (defalcate [“embezzle”] for “defecate”), the usual misinformation (Hoover Institution, and general incoherence (“and I’d defalcate not in the street but in your so could spew more shit!”). All that earns an 8.5 on the Angry Reader scale. If your Angry Reader rant is a really the work of a former top CIA official, then perhaps it is valuable to readers in explaining the careers of some of its hierarchy such as John Brennan.

As for your argument, there is none. So I’ll quickly reply to the silliness. Newspapers select op-eds they purchase from syndicators to spark discussion. In some sense your rant is a form of discussion, so their intent was realized. I would imagine that if you went online and tabulated Hoover fellows’ campaign contributions there were more donors to the 2020 Biden than to the Trump campaign.

I’m not sure what you call “right-wing”; 15 years ago the Democratic Party advocated legal only and diverse, meritocratic, and measured immigration, but then again Obama himself ran in 2008 on secure borders, opposition to gay marriage, and a balanced budget. Please cite where I “attack immigrants.” Opposing illegal, massive, and non-diverse immigration is not an attack on “immigrants” but support for legal immigration. I imagine I live in an area with a far higher immigrant population, both legal and not, than in your own region.

While it is certainly true that red-states were more reluctant to impose complete lockdowns, you could at least try to make the argument that Florida and Texas fared far worse, case- and death-wise than locked down states like similarly sized New York—well aside from the greater economic, social, and cultural damage to New York than in Florida and Texas. But, of course, you cannot. I don’t see how the infection and lethality rates in Michigan, Massachusetts, or Connecticut are arguments for the blue-state, complete quarantine paradigm.

As far as vaccinating, there are two groups who so far show some resistance to it; one are conservative traditionalists who feel it impinges on their freedom or do not trust government assurances of safety. But the other are minority groups, especially African-Americans who likewise are statistically hesitant.

So there is no real political pattern here that you insinuate. I have always supported vaccination (and was vaxed the moment my age group was eligible), wearing masks where reasonable, and keeping a distance from others while indoors at the zenith of the epidemic. I wish BLM, Antifa, and LA Laker fan base had followed such guidelines when they violated all those protocols—ironically often supported by some health care officials who signed petitions claiming the protestors had good medical reasons to violate the quarantine leveled on all others.

Lots of Americans have immune challenges and health issues. They have good medical reasons not to be vaccinated. And the idea that we would reduce them to second-class citizenry is not feasible or desirable. The likelihood that herd immunity will be achieved with 80-85 percent of the population vaccinated or with antibodies will allow small populations with either medical or religious reasons to avoid vaccination not to pose an existential threat to others, especially when a new generation of pharmaceuticals are on the horizon that offer hope in rendering symptomatic COVID-19 to flu or cold status.

Sincerely,

Victor Hanson, a former farmer and CSU professor

An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill

The U.S. media initially burst out in applause at the “sweeping” and “tough” sanctions the Biden administration imposed on Russia on April 15 under the title of “Imposing Costs for Harmful Foreign Activities by the Russian Government.” Targeted are activities that “undermine security in countries and regions important to United States national security; and violate well-established principles of international law, including respect for the territorial integrity of states” (meaning Ukraine).

The Biden justifications for the sanctions are the presumed Russian interference in the 2020 elections, Russia’s hacking and cyberwarfare, the disinformation activities of the Russian military, and other hostile acts not enumerated.

One additional sanction justification has been dropped, embarrassingly, at the last minute. The U.S. intelligence community can no longer assert with sufficient certainty that Russian forces offered rewards to Taliban fighters for killing U.S. soldiers. The sanctions document declares: “Given the sensitivity of this matter, which involves the safety and well-being of our forces, it is being handled through diplomatic, military and intelligence channels.” In other words, “Never mind” — although these supposed Russian rewards played a substantial role in the 2020 election campaign.

The Biden sanctions also prohibit U.S. financial markets from dealing with primary issues of Russian sovereign debt. This action will raise the cost of public finance to the Russian state.

Read the full article here

There is no need to go over all the details of the recent #MeToo wave. Most supported the initial disclosures. Who could defend Weinstein, or the sexual narcissist Matt Lauer with his electric button-locked office, who parlayed his position into serial asymmetrical sexual trysts while he broadcast his progressive fides to the world?

Soon major (thus liberal and leftist) Hollywood stars and key politicians were under a cloud, from Garrison Keillor and Charlie Rose to Al Franken and Joe Biden. The nadir was the Kavanaugh hearings. The Left jumped the shark and tried to convince America that a long-ago, teen-aged Kavanaugh had been a veritable rapist because an unhinged witness lied serially (e.g., Christine Blasey Ford really was coached, she did routinely fly on airlines, etc.). 

Decades after the supposed crime, with no proof and no corroboration, Ford became the godhead of a political smear campaign to stop a conservative from joining the Supreme Court.

The logical trajectory of mainstreaming the confused accuser Ford led to accepting the insanity of snake-oil peddler Michael Avenatti, the current felon, and former Trump-hating would-be Democratic nominee and CNN/MSNBC star. 

And so #MeToo sputtered out—to the point that the leading women of the Democratic Party yawned when candidate Joe Biden was accused by Tara Reade of having crudely and brutally sexually assaulted her decades earlier. 

Reade even produced some corroboration in contemporary communications about the assault, in a manner nonexistent with Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh. At one point in the primary, Kamala Harris vaguely announced “I believed them” in reference to the army of young women who had claimed candidate Old Joe had squeezed many, blew their hair, nuzzled and felt them. No matter. The Left soon killed off  #MeToo that it had birthed—and began to lament their own prior demolishment of the buffoonish Senator Al Franken.

Biden’s exemptions were supposedly now based on principle, namely that being handsy or worse in one’s past cannot years later be redefined as non-consensual or worse (usually in asymmetrical fashion used against the partner who became the more famous or wealthy). 

In truth, #MeToo could afford to lose the monstrous Weinstein, but not Joe Biden or a long ago apparently rehabilitated Bill Clinton, and not “our side” journalists like Glenn Thrush, Tavis Smiley, and Mark Halperin. And so #MeToo now is relegated to the partisan ash heap: it is still useful to go after Republicans or conservatives but makes no claims that women out of the past have any right to bring down progressives.

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part 2: The First Russian-Under-Every-Bed Frenzy (prior to Adam Schiff)

The Depression and the January 1, 1942 alliance with the Soviet Union had peaked American communist membership at 75,000. The treasonous Alger Hiss mentality in the State Department—the Soviets would be progressive postwar partners while the British imperialists faded and were thankfully forced to relinquish their colonialist empire—occasionally led to outright espionage (the Rosenbergs really were guilty), leading to the loss of atomic secrets, a preference for Mao over Chang Kai-shek, and excusing the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. 

In the midst of the public confusions that we had won the war over Hitler but might have lost the peace to Stalin, Democrat Harry Truman ordered loyalty oaths and tried to root out from government communists “sympathizers” and party members. 

By 1950, a less aristocratic Robespierre-like figure, Sen. Joe McCarthy began accusing hundreds of elites in government and entertainment of communist party membership and betrayal of their own country. He was occasionally not wrong, but never distinguished youthful naïveté from mature subversion of America, or whether it was or should be illegal to be a communist or express communist sympathies. 

No matter. After some of Hollywood’s best were sidelined and blacklisted (not all of them sympathetic characters), McCarthy enjoyed overwhelming public support, including that of William F. Buckley, and from time to time an embarrassed but silent Dwight Eisenhower. The sweep of communism abroad into Asia, Africa and Latin America fueled McCarthy’s conspiracy charges.

Then bloated with his lists of “traitors,” McCarthy went after George Marshall, the U.S. Army, the CIA, and the likes of Lee Grant, Orson Welles, and Edward G. Robinson. His own drinking, bombast and sidekick Roy Cohn (a closet homosexual who hounded dozens of others on sensational charges of closet homosexuality) turned off the American middle: McCarthy’s accusations grew, but his proof thinned.  

By 1954, Ike, the grandees of the Republican Party and the establishment had become fervent anti-communists and now found McCarthy a dangerous liability. Edward R. Murrow—with sometime TV audiences of 60 million—demolished McCarthy in a famous “See It Now” in-depth report: “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy.” While Murrow had his own demons, no one could deny his courage and resonance and he quickly turned public opinion against McCarthy.

Soon Joe met his own Waterloo in the 1954 Senate hearings when Army counsel Joseph Welch (who himself had no problem in making a homophobic slur/joke about Roy Cohn) destroyed McCarthy’s credibility as he finally famously uttered, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Applause followed. 

And the Red Scare began to end.