Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // The Patriot Post

The new AT age — “After Trump” — began on either Election Day, Nov. 3, or on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20. But either way, reality as we had known it for four years has been abruptly reinvented.

Pfizer had hinted that a vaccine could be ready in late October. Then, mysteriously, it wasn’t. Then, stranger still, it appeared — a few days after Election Day.

Suddenly, after Joe Biden’s inauguration, Illinois, Michigan and other blue states eased some of their lockdown restrictions to get their economies back on track despite little change in COVID-19 rates.

During the Trump Age, the president was supposedly responsible for every death from COVID-19. Now, the media reports that career scientists and health administrators in the federal government, especially at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were largely to blame for past slow testing, and were tardy and lax in apprising the nation of the infectious threat.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Riotous rogue Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were properly and widely condemned by conservatives. They were somewhat reminiscent of the mobs of fanatic leftists and union members that a decade ago stormed the Wisconsin state capitol at Madison, or the unpunished hundreds of rioters who created havoc on Washington, D.C. streets during the Trump 2016 inauguration. We expect the Capitol stormers will be punished, and not in the lax fashion of the latter two groups that were not. 

Within a few days, the talking points were finalized that all of Donald Trump’s supporters deserved blame for the violence. That riot, the Trump defeat, and the loss of the Senate have greenlighted left-wing talk of “deprogramming,” “de-Baathification,” “re-educating,” and “reprogramming” half the country to ensure they think correctly and act properly from now on—the exact methodology of such brain rinsing apparently to be announced later. 

So we are beginning a great reprogramming of America. The construction of Trump and all of his supporters as abettors, terrorists, seditionists, and traitors is certainly proving useful. After the Capitol conundrum, we have seen over the past two weeks a coordinated and synchronized effort by Amazon, Twitter, and Google to destroy Parler, a small conservative-friendly rival to their social media and internet monopolies. More of such humanitarian taking care of business will follow—all as preemption for the most leftwing agenda in a half-century now rolling out. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The newly formed President’s Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report. The group was chaired by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn. The vice chair was Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the commission.)

The unanimously approved conclusions focused on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the historical challenges to these founding documents, and the need for civic renewal. The 16-member commission was diverse in the widest sense of the word. It included historians, lawyers, academics, scholars, authors, former elected officials, and former public servants.

Whether because the report was issued by a Donald Trump-appointed commission, or because the conclusions questioned the controversial and flawed New York Times-sponsored 1619 Project, the Left almost immediately criticized it.

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Victor Davis Hanson // The Bill Bennett Show

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Donald Trump was impeached again on Wednesday, a week before leaving office in one of the great travesties of modern politics.

Here are reasons why the exercise proved a farce.

One, impeachment was never intended by the founders to become a serial effort to weaken a first-term president. But this latest try will mark the third failed attempt of Democrats in Congress to remove Trump before his allotted tenure.

The first Democratic impeachment effort of December 2017 fizzled. The second impeachment of December 2019 succeeded but predictably failed to obtain a Senate conviction.

This third try will likely not result in a Senate conviction, either.

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Victor Davis Hanson // The New Criterion

Sparta’s check of imperial Athens in the inconclusive so-called First Peloponnesian War (460–445 B.C.) foreshadowed a remarkable subsequent twenty-eight-year growth in Lacedaemonian power and influence. At the war’s end, Sparta had established itself as the only impediment left to an increasingly Athenian Greece.

Fourteen years later, a second, and far deadlier, Peloponnesian War broke out. The continuing, hard-fought Spartan upswing was capped off by her dramatic victory at the Battle of Mantinea (418 B.C.), which saw Sparta prevail over Athens—Sparta’s chief Peloponnesian rival—and surrogate Athenian allies. That battle mostly ensured that Sparta would not lose in any renewal of the stalemated Second Peloponnesian War.

The Spartan surge between 446 and 418 B.C. is the theme of Paul A. Rahe’s fourth volume on Sparta’s history, its culture, and its rivalries with democratic Athens, entitled Sparta’s Second Attic War.1 His envisioned hexalogy will eventually cover three centuries of Spartan growth, dominance, and gradual decline. The final two books will presumably be devoted to the last fourteen brutal years of the Peloponnesian War (a proposed volume 5, 418–404/3 B.C.) and the post-war decades of Sparta’s unilateral but shaky dominance, and her eventual decline (volume 6, 403–362 B.C.).

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

To understand the events of Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny’s near-fatal poisoning and his Jan. 17 return to Russia, you must know that there are two Navalnys: Navalny No. 1 is described by Kremlin-controlled media as a CIA agent, corrupt, a hater of Russia, a loud-mouthed liar; Navalny No. 2, according to his admirers, is a heroic fighter against the corruption of Russia’s ruling class, a proponent of democracy, the best hope for a civilized Russia.

If you ask an elderly Russian living on a state pension, he or she will identify Navalny as the first personification. If you ask a young Russian college graduate living in a city, he or she will favor the second version.

With a rapidly aging Russia, some two-thirds of Russians believe in Navalny No. 1. This goes a long way to explain why Russian dictator Vladimir Putin believes he can get away with poisoning Navalny and, now that that failed, jailing him for an extended period.

Let’s begin with Navalny’s dramatic return to Russia after five months of life-saving treatment and convalescence in Germany.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Two days after the 2020 election, a defiant Kathy Griffin retweeted the notorious picture of her holding a prop that looked like the bloody head of a decapitated Donald Trump. Earlier last year, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted out a call to his followers to destroy Israel. Both tweets passed the censorship rules of Twitter’s 20-something judges in San Francisco.

In contrast, Trump has been banned for life from Twitter and barred indefinitely from Facebook. Twitter said in a statement that it excluded Trump “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

The president had called for thousands of his followers to assemble at a massive Washington, D.C., rally protesting the results of the election. Splinter groups broke off from the massed protesters. Some stormed into the halls of Congress. Social-media platforms canceled Trump after he urged his followers — albeit “peacefully and patriotically” — to go protest at the U.S. Capitol, where the mayhem followed.

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Victor Davis Hanson // The Patriot Post

Amid the current hysteria of toppling statues and renaming things, we keep mindlessly expanding the cancel culture.

We are now seeing efforts to ban classics of Western and American literature. These hallowed texts are suddenly being declared racist or sexist by preening moralists.

Or, as one Massachusetts high school teacher recently boasted on social media, “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!”

Proud?

Over 20 years ago, John Heath and I co-authored “Who Killed Homer?” We warned that that faddish postmodernist race, class and gender theories — coupled with narrow academic specialization — was killing the formal discipline of classics in universities.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876.

What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.

Demonizing Our Past

In just a year, thousands of memorials and icons have vanished. Names have changed, words are banned. Careers were ruined. As new totalitarian rules were enshrined, old freedoms became despised.

Yet most of the country sat in lockdown quiet, as it was told that it, and its history, were toxic and culpable—and by whom exactly? Moralists like Labron James? Steve Kerr? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

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