Author: victorhanson

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

Recall the desperate early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in early Spring 2020. Researchers worried that the Spanish flu of 1918 that cost millions of American lives could be a possible model. The Imperial College of London released a projection of over 2 million deaths in the U.S. alone if government failed to take action. The government’s top advisor, Anthony Fauci, recommended a strategy of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to “bend the curve.” However, the highly infectious nature of the disease meant that they could offer only a temporary respite.

Adding to the gloom was the scientific community’s pessimism concerning the prospects for an early vaccine. Past history suggested that vaccines required years to get through regulatory approval — and then an additional year or more to scale-up for the millions of doses needed. Four months into the pandemic in the Spring of 2020, the most optimistic observers projected that we were well more than a year away from a viable vaccination program.

Contrary to earlier expectations, two vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) were approved in December 2020, and the first doses were administered less than a week later. These advances occurred under the auspices of Operation Warp Speed, a joint government, business, and military venture. Its unique feature was to guarantee purchases of experimental vaccines as they proceeded through regulatory approval in order to scale-up quickly the successful ones.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

“Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expediencies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people . . . ”

—Damon Young, New York Times contributor

“Over the past year, I have, of course, still had to interact with white people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about whether they would succeed in reelecting a white-supremacist president. But white people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less, only deal with whiteness when I want to . . . White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them.”

—Elie Mystal, The Nation      

Racism is the deductive bias against, and often hatred of, an entire racial group. It is often birthed by dislike of particular individuals of a given group that supposedly justifies, by extension, disliking or indeed hating all of them. The popular reaction against this widespread toxic pathology shown African Americans birthed the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, the resistance to Jim Crow, and the modern Civil Rights movement.

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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

From an Angry Reader,

“Keep your shit views to yourself.  You disgust me – go kiss trumps ass somewhere else.  The armed insurrection was leaderless and officer Sicknick only was “allegedly” murdered?  ??! You’re delirious you sick fuck”
— Deb Chapple  

Victor Davis Hanson // Week In Review

We do not know when we hit peak wokeness—only that no constitutional republic can long exist in a climate of McCarthyite fear and anti-racism racism. I wrote about this crux for next week’s American Greatness (“Anti-Racism Racism”) in a long essay that will appear on Monday. It refutes the idea that a white supremacist ideology stifles all the aspirations of the non-white, and explains why the current racialization of dialogue and weaponization of debate have a bad history.

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

LAST WEEK IN ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, CHINESE diplomats dressed down Biden Administration Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the Chinese broadsides. 

Apparently, as elite Americans readily confess to inherent white supremacy and racism—highlighting the complaints of BLM and Antifa—the Chinese are happy to agree that such admittedly toxic Americans should not dare to criticize China’s racist policies. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Throughout the Trump years and in particular during the 2020 COVID pandemic crisis, the nation was lectured by the Left “to follow the data,” as the Democrats proclaimed themselves the “party of science.” As sober and judicious children of the enlightenment, they alone offered the necessary disinterested correctives to Trump’s supposed bluster and exaggeration—and to his anti-scientific deplorable following (often dismissed by Biden as dregs, chumps, and Neanderthals).

In truth, leftists and Democrats have become the purveyors of superstition. Their creation of a fantasy world is not because they do not believe in science per se, but because they believe more in the primacy of ideology that should shape and warp science in the proper fashion for the greater good. What prompted Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, or Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hysterically and wrongly to forecast widespread demographic or climatological catastrophe in just a few years was not ignorance of science per se, but a desire to massage science for our own good.

The Godheads of COVID-19

The medical pandemic godhead of the Left has been octogenarian Dr. Anthony Fauci. His twin chief public relations explainer has been liberal darling New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Both were always supposed to be on top of “the science.” 

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Victor Davis Hanson // VDHPodcast

Victor discusses America’s new class warfare, the foreign-policy consequences of our Feeble POTUS, the Biden Administration’s getting out-manipulated by Red China and Russia…..