The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour · Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Beier, & Anthony Swinehart
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.
Strategika #68: Crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean
Turkey In The Eastern Mediterranean Crisis
Please read a new essay by my colleague, Soner Cagaptay in Strategika.
Three wars that Turkey is currently involved in, namely in Syria, Libya, and the South Caucasus, suggest that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s foreign policy has settled into a new phase. Erdoğan is building a “mini Empire” by—often—simultaneously fighting and power- brokering with his Russian homologue, and to this end the Eastern Mediterranean provides ample opportunities for him.
It’s Not The Energy, Stupid!
Please read a new essay by my colleague, Zafiris Rossidis in Strategika.
In 2020, with the strong presence of American, Russian, French, Greek, Turkish, Egyptian, Italian, and even German warships, the Eastern Mediterranean has become one of the most militarized seas in the world.
Crisis In The Eastern Mediterranean
Please read a new essay by my colleagues, Barry Strauss in Strategika.
The Eastern Mediterranean, like the Middle East, is a tough neighborhood. The current standoff over natural gas rights among Greece, Turkey, and their respective allies is only the latest example.
The Unapologetic Bias of the American Left
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Some yearn for the ancient monopolistic days of network news, the adolescent years of public radio and TV, and the still reputable New York Times—when once upon a time the Left at least tried to mask their progressivism in sober and judicious liberal façades.
An avuncular Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Jim Lehrer, or Abe Rosenthal at least went through the motions of reporting news that was awkward or even embarrassing to the Left. Their agenda was 1960s-vintage Great Society liberalism, seen as the natural evolution from the New Deal and post-war internationalism. Edward R. Murrow, the ACLU of old, and Free Speech Movement at Berkeley—these were their liberal referents. Those days are gone.
Yet even during the Obama years, when studies showed the president had received the most slanted media honeymoon in news history, overt media bias was, at least, as hotly denied as it intensified. There were still a few ossified, quarter-hearted efforts now and then to mention the IRS scandal, the surveillance of Associated Press reporters, the various scandals embroiling the Veterans Administration, General Service Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Secret Service. But even that thin pretense is over now, too.
Rejecting Objectivity
What ended liberal dissimulation about slanted reporting is a new pride, or rather an arrogance, about bias itself. The new liberated defiance is something like, “We are biased. Damn proud of it. And what exactly do you plan on doing about it?”
Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict adds to Putin’s headaches, West’s worries
An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill
The last thing Vladimir Putin needed is another hotspot in Russia’s “near abroad” — Russia’s term for the 14 republics that once were part of the old Soviet Union, along with the Russian Republic.
In 2014, Putin boasted of an ambitious imperial restoration project; his plans included a “New Russia” encompassing parts of Ukraine and Belarus, along with a Eurasian Union (including, among others, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan) that eventually would grow to rival the European Union.
That was then. Now, Putin sees his vision fading as popular unrest and armed conflicts take hold in the former-USSR territories he had scheduled for restoration.
Putin’s vision of USSR restoration has suffered immense setbacks and continues to absorb damaging blows to his once-ambitious plans: The 2008 Five-Day War removed Georgia permanently from the Russian orbit. The 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russia’s occupation of Eastern Ukraine poisoned Russian-Ukrainian relations and finally established Ukraine as a nation independent of Russia.
Read the full article here
A Few Cracks in the Progressive Wall
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
The contemporary progressive agenda — of, say, an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren — has rarely appealed to 51 percent of the American electorate. Most polls show opposition to Court packing and the abolition of the Electoral College.
Voters don’t seem to like the Green New Deal. They oppose fracking bans, late-term abortions, open borders, and illegal immigration. Medicare for all and health care for illegal aliens aren’t winning issues. Usually the Left hammers these causes in primaries and then for six months denies their earlier support during the general-election campaign.
Still, these agendas endure because the Left has been as adroit in operating the levers of American cultural, economic, and social influence and power as it has been unsuccessful in obtaining popular political support for its elite-driven policies.
The media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, corporate boardrooms, the arts, public schools, higher education, the entertainment industries, Hollywood, the foundations, and professional sports exercise clout unseen at any time in American history.
2020 Election Chinese American Town Hall
Please watch this video which features Professor Hanson speaking on the 2020 election
Destroying the Institutions We Inherited
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
In the 21st century, hallmark American and international institutions have lost much of their prestige and respect.
Politics and biases explain the lack of public confidence in organizations and institutions such as the World Health Organization, the Commission on Presidential Debates, the Nobel Peace Prize, the Pulitzer Prizes, and the Academy Awards.
The overseers entrusted with preserving these institutions all caved to short-term political pressures. As a result, they have mostly destroyed what they inherited.
The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is the first person without a medical degree to hold that position. Why? No one really knows.
The Case for Trump: Victor Davis Hanson Makes The Closing Argument
Ricochet Podcast Featuring Victor Davis Hanson
With a little over three weeks to go before the election, we thought it would a good time to have a heart to heart discussion with our good friend Victor Davis Hanson. the Classics professor, the military historian, the farmer, the cultural observer, and the author of The Case For Trump, his best selling book that came out in 2017 and was re-issued earlier this year. It’s the most cogent case we’ve seen for the re-election of the President. In this one on one conversation, Peter Robinson takes Victor through all the reasons to cast a vote for Donald Trump and challenges Victor with a few reasons not to pull the lever for him. It’s an enlightening and informative hour and should be required listening (if we do say so ourselves) for all voters, especially those who are still undecided. Have at it.
California’s Illogical Reparations Bill
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
California’s state legislature just passed, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed, Assembly Bill 3121 to explore providing reparations to California’s African-American population — 155 years after the abolition of slavery.
Apparently, when California’s one-party government cannot find solutions to current existential crises, it turns to divisive issues that have little to do with the safety and well-being of its 40 million citizens.
California has the highest gas taxes in the nation, even as its ossified state highways remain clogged and dangerous. Why, then, does Sacramento kept pouring billions of dollars into the now-calcified high-speed-rail project?
When fires raged, killed dozens, polluted the air for months, consumed thousands of structures, and scorched 4 million acres of forest, the governor reacted by thundering about global warming. But Newsom was mostly mute about state and federal green policies that discouraged the removal of millions of dead and drought-stricken trees, which provided the kindling for the infernos.
The Full Crowley
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
In the second presidential election debate between President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on October 16, 2012, CNN moderator Candy Crowley sensed that Obama, coming off a dismal initial September 26 debate, was again floundering.
Romney was driving home the valid point that the Obama Administration had inadequately prepared the American mission in Benghazi for likely terrorist attacks. And such laxity resulted in a horrific attack and the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.
Yet in the wake of the attacks, Team Obama denied that the killing of four Americans was indeed an act of terror. Instead, it fed the public a transparently but politically correct false narrative of a spontaneous riot in reaction to a video posted by a purported right-wing Egyptian residing on American soil.
Yet in the debate, Obama retorted: “The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.”