Author: victorhanson

From An Angry Reader:

Victor,

So what are you and your powerless conservative “thought leader” ilk going to do about our Revolution?

Keep writing your pathetic articles stating the obvious, keep bloviating on your self satisfied talk shows, keep preaching to your social distanced conservative choir as they sing themselves to sleep.

I hope you feel comfortable in your safe space describing the shock and awe as your country slowly melts away. 

That is why our Revolution will win: we are organized, we are advancing, we are fighting for what we know is our truth, while all you obsolete right wing relics just sit there alone pontificating with your myths.

-Chad

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Dear Angry Reader Chad Abel,

I admire your candor in confessing you at least believe you are a serious revolutionary, whatever that means today in our leisured and affluent society. Your revolutionary comrades have strange tastes, though—storming the Million Dollar Mile in Chicago to grab Gucci trinkets, trying to roast alive working-class police barricaded in a precinct under siege in Portland, toppling or defacing statues of Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglas, or injuring 700 police.

We agree you are “organized,” perhaps “advancing,” and certainly “fighting” against the usually unarmed and vulnerable. But there is nothing “true” about any of you. Your forte is for the mob to kick and injure the elderly, the scared, and the defenseless already on the ground, not to storm into the working-class suburbs or the rural towns of Utah or Texas to take on your apparent natural enemies. You talk glibly, but your revolutionaries are so poorly educated that they deface the World War II monument and the Lincoln Memorial—was your message that Nazism and Japanese fascism or Confederate slave-owning were all preferable to the icons you defaced?

Oddly, you seem to know a great deal about what I write and watch where I appear; but if they provide you such anger to produce a puerile rant like this, then why become so fixated and obsessed? Why not instead write for your followers and go to CNN or MSNBC to share your zeal?

The country is challenged but it is not “melting” away—yet. And you should hope it does not when you are in extremis. Everything you hate is what you depend on: when you need surgery, or antibiotics, or to drive a car, or to use a computer, or to enter a building, or to board a plane, you are ignorantly drawing on the dividends of a sophisticated society that you neither understand nor contribute to, but always come home to when in need.

The “Revolution” is parasitical, from its narcissistic, self-obsessed selfies, to its ridiculous Antifa-chic black garb and fashionable riot gear, to the whiny nasal screams of your comrades when you occasionally spit too much and swear too often in the face of a policeman who decides to push back—sending your comrades into fetal positions screaming about the unfairness of it all.

No, yours is not a revolution, but the bored angst of a pampered class, bored from being locked up in quarantine and in hock for thousands of dollars in student loans for educations that were empty, and angry more at yourselves than your often incoherently targeted enemies.

If you were born a bit earlier, you would be swallowing goldfish, cramming into a telephone booth, or in the mud at Woodstock, because you are bored pranksters and pampered parasites, not revolutionaries.

-Victor

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

So we can expect the following from our postmodern state government. There are the now-normal raging wildfires in the coastal and Sierra foothills. And they will be greeted as if they are not characteristic threats of 500 years of settled history, but leveraged as proof of global warming as well as the state’s abject inability to put them out.

When the inept state can’t extinguish them as it has in the past, it suggests that it’s more “natural” to let them burn. Jerry Brown’s team told us that the drought’s toll — millions of dead trees and tens of millions of acres of parched grass and calcified shrubs on hillsides — provided a natural source of food and shelter for bugs and birds and thus need not be grazed or thinned or harvested. And so the wages of drought could be in a sense good for an “ecosystem” that otherwise proved to be green napalm for the people of foothill communities.

We can expect power outages, because we don’t believe in releasing clean heat to make energy. Note that we do not mind people heating up in their 108-degree apartments without power. The planet is always more important than the non-privileged people who inhabit it.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

If nothing else, the architects of the 2020 Democratic Convention appeared to be ignorant of irony. Either that, or they know irony so well and cared so little that they wished to ram it down the throats of the few who watched the nightly taped speeches—as if to say, “We’re hypocrites and proud of it—and what are you going to do about it?”

It all reminded me of China’s now-defiant implicit response to its Wuhan lab virus, “Yeah it started here. And yeah we spread it. And yeah, we—the world’s premier racists and xenophobes—called you racists and xenophobes. And yeah, we let the coronavirus get loose, and blamed you for inventing it. So exactly what are you going to do about it?”

There is one rule that should guide all of Bill Clinton’s post-presidential speeches. He must never use the word “Oval Office” in reference to its ethical or professional requirements during his own tenure. The second he does, the natural response is to equate that hallowed location with the scene of his tawdry sexual escapades with a young intern—what the Left under other circumstances would call, at best, a “power imbalance” or “a hostile workplace climate,” and at worst sexual assault, full stop.

Read the full article here

The following article is from my colleague, Paul Roderick Gregory, in The Hill

Aleksei Navalny, the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation headquartered in Moscow, is one of the last-standing political opponents of Vladimir Putin. His tightly researched, well-documented reports on the corruption of high-level Kremlin officials have been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side. Not only that, but Navalny has engaged in regional and local politics in a manner that could diminish Putin’s control over the vast Russian Federation.

The morning of Aug. 20, Navalny was on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow when he began to experience extreme pain and disorientation. The flight was diverted to Omsk, where he was transferred to the local hospital in a coma. Omsk doctors hooked him up to a ventilator and listed his condition as comatose, critical but stable.

According to Navalny’s travel companions, he did not eat prior to the flight but, in the airport, drank hot tea. (Navalny drinking tea in the airport and later screaming on the plane are both documented on film.)

Various reports from the hospital maintained that Omsk doctors were not allowing Navalny’s wife and his personal doctor to see the patient, despite Russian laws that guarantee such rights. For days, hospital officials refused to discharge Navalny for an air transfer arranged by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel for treatment in Europe.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

President Trump recently ordered a 12,000-troop reduction in American military personnel stationed in Germany. That leaves about 24,000 American soldiers still in the country.

A little more than half of the troops being withdrawn will return home. The rest will be redeployed to other NATO member nations, such as Belgium, Italy, and perhaps Baltic and Eastern European countries.

German chancellor Angela Merkel is said to be furious. She claims that the redeployments will “weaken the [NATO] alliance.” German commercial interests chimed in that the troop withdrawals will hurt their decades-old businesses serving U.S. bases.

Perhaps, but Merkel surely cannot be surprised. Six years ago, all NATO members pledged to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Yet only eight of 29 so far have kept their word.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The nation has never seen an election like this. A mysterious virus from China has terrified the country, killed perhaps 180,000 Americans, and is now weaponized as a political asset to neuter the president. Half the country is still in de facto quarantine. Governments — national, state, and  local — for the first time have induced an artificial but severe recession.

The country is convulsed by riots, looting, and urban violence, but with the novelty that many governors and mayors have either turned a blind eye to the anarchy or contextualized it as a legitimate reaction to social injustice.

Joe Biden has been incommunicado for nearly four months, so much so that the Democratic Party believes that his vice-presidential running mate may well be the next president much sooner than later. And the media seek to shield Biden from himself by aborting normal journalistic scrutiny — on the unspoken surety that he is not cogitatively able to conduct a normal campaign and, indeed, in one unguarded moment of confusion and bewilderment, might well sink the entire 2020 progressive agenda.

The result is a virtual candidate, with virtual issues, and a virtual campaign. How then can we adjudicate what issues will matter?

Read the full article here

Yael Halon // Fox News

Michelle Obama urged Democrats to take the high road at the virtual Democratic National Convention Monday night amid an ongoing investigation into her husband’s “corrupt” administration, Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Tuesday.

“When she says ‘We go high when they go low,’ she’s talking right now when her husband’s administration has weaponized the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, and is the subject of a massive investigation by [Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham],” Hanson said.

Watch the interview here

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Trumpist conservatism is usually defined as not free, but fair trade, strict enforcement of immigration laws, an end to optional interventions that will not likely, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, result in U.S. interests or strategic calm for a purported troubled region, and a belief that industry and manufacturing are not brick-and-mortar anachronisms, but the creators of what we cook on, sit on, live in, drive, and work in; our non-virtual world that everyone relies on and yet takes for granted as so passé. 

Read the full article here

Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told “The Ingraham Angle” Monday that the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has parallels to other mass movements throughout history, including the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution in Communist China.

Watch the interview on Fox here

Ed Driscoll // PJ Media

Most people today assume that our understanding of WWII is largely complete, thanks to the enormous quantity of books, TV series such as ITV’s classic 1970s documentary The World at War, the myriad of documentaries that aired in the early days of the History Channel cable TV network, and the unending series of movies produced by Hollywood, particularly when compared to its predecessor, WWI. But classicist historian and fellow PJM columnist Victor Davis Hanson does yeoman’s work unpacking the events of 1939-1945.

Starting with the plurality in the title, Hanson’s 2017 book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won emphasizes the disparate nature of the War’s myriad battles. Hanson also explores the enormous difference in mindsets between the leaders of the Axis and Allied powers. He makes plain their difference in desired outcomes right on page three, when he notes, “The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians.”

Curtis LeMay Repurposes the B-29

The Allies were also able to improvise and adjust tactics far more easily than the Axis, Hanson writes:

The same asymmetry was true at sea, especially in the Battle of the Atlantic. The Allied leadership made operational changes and technological improvements of surface ships and planes far more rapidly than could the U-boats of the Kriegsmarine. America adapted to repair and produce aircraft carriers and train new crews at a pace inconceivable in Japan. The Allies—including the Soviet Union on most occasions—usually avoided starting theater wars that ended in multiyear infantry quagmires. In contrast, Japan, Germany, and Italy respectively bogged down in China, the Soviet Union, and North Africa and the Balkans.

Read the full book review here