Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The nba should be delighted. Its once American sport is now globalized. Its talented players, who have redefined the very game itself, are the best by far in the world.

Many have become cultural icons, and a few are now billionaires. Indeed, the players are very rich, the owners far richer. The league’s geniuses weigh in with lectures on culture and politics. And the NBA’s public relations are Machiavellian in their ability to make corporatism seem hip.

That said, a number of proverbial NBA chickens are coming home to roost.

No one quite knows how much money the National Basketball Association, its individual teams, and the players all make off playing, and merchandising their multifarious brands, in China.

Some estimates suggest that the NBA’s various Chinese markets reach $6 billion in profits and more — not surprising, given 1.4 billion new potential consumers.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Cultural revolutions are insidious and not just because they seek to change the way people think, write, speak, and act. They are also dangerous because they are fueled by self-righteous sanctimoniousness, expressed in seemingly innocuous terms such as “social activism,” “equality,” and “fairness.”

The ultimate aim of the Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist is raw power—force of the sort sought by Hugo Chavez or the Castro dynasty to get rich, inflict payback on their perceived enemies, reward friends, and pose as saviors.

Cubans and Venezuelans got poor and killed; woke Chavezes and Castros got rich and murderous.

Leftist agendas are harder to thwart than those of right-wing dictators such as Spain’s Francisco Franco because they mask their ruthlessness with talk of sacrifice for the “poor” and concern about the “weak.” 

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

Yakutia is a vast swath of permafrost in far eastern Siberia. Its capital, Yakutsk, the world’s second coldest city, lies just south of the polar circle. Yakutsk was built by Gulag labor for its diamonds and gold. Its current governor, Aysen Nikolaev, belongs to Putin’s United Russia party. The fortunate Nikolaev also has a lucrative seat on the board of Russia’s largest diamond mine, which is located in his state. 

Loyal governors are supposed to deliver for Putin when it counts. For example, they were expected to deliver an overwhelming vote for the July 1 constitutional amendments that will allow Putin to serve two more terms until 2036. 

Russia’s governors did indeed deliver for Putin, and they did so by hook or by crook. The last public opinion polls prior to the referendum had 41 percent voting for the amendments (24 percent undecided). By the end of voting on July 1, 79 percent had supposedly voted for the amendments. 

Yakutia had the largest percentage of negative votes – at 41 percent– among the federal regions. With more than twenty million falsified votes nationwide, as estimated by Russian election experts, Yakutia’s real vote likely was for rejection – a rebuke for local officials and for the Kremlin. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The National Football League celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. This should be a time of self-congratulation for the brutal sport, which has no similar counterpart outside the United States.

The NFL’s megaprofits dwarf those of other professional sports in the U.S. The Super Bowl, not the World Series, is America’s national sports event.

The league survived all sorts of crises in the past. It was one of the first professional sports to integrate its teams, doing so in the 1920s. But the integration unfortunately ceased, and the NFL didn’t reintegrate until the mid ’40s, becoming one of the last sports leagues to embrace fully a racially blind meritocracy.

The NFL successfully absorbed the rival American Football League in 1966. So far the NFL has avoided federal safety regulations that could curb the incidence of physical trauma inherent in the sport.

The league’s owners are a cross-section of America’s most successful entrepreneurs and old-money families — many of them politically well-connected.

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Listen to the interview here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The Jacobin Left is just now beginning to get edgy. 

A few of its appeasers and abettors are becoming embarrassed by some of the outright racists and nihilists of BLM and the Maoists of Antifa — and their wannabe hangers-on who troll the Internet hoping to scalp some minor celebrity. 

The woke rich too are worried over talk about substantial wealth, capital-gains, and income taxes, even though they have the resources to navigate around the legislation from their wink-and-nod brethren. Soon, even Hunter Biden and the Clintons could be checking in with their legal teams to see how much it will cost them to get around the Squad’s new tax plan.

The lines are thinning a bit for the guillotine. And the guillotiners are starting to panic as they glimpse faces of a restless mob always starved for something to top last night’s torching. Finally, even looters and arsonists get tired of doing the same old, same old each night. They get bored with the puerile bullhorn chants, the on-spec spray-paint defacement, and the petite fascists among them who hog the megaphones. For the lazy and bored, statue toppling — all of those ropes, those icky pry bars, those heavy sledgehammers, and so much pulling — becomes hard work, especially as the police, camera crews, and fisticuffs thin out on the ground. And the easy bronze and stone prey are now mostly rubble. Now it’s either the big, tough stuff like Mount Rushmore or the crazy targets like Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Donald Trump is trying to break through a 2020 wall. 

By January 2019, after over three years of failed efforts to impeach him, sue him, indict him, impoverish him, and destroy him, the Left had failed. The economy was booming. Trump’s tweets were mostly bragging about his accomplishments. And the Left was dumbfounded that both impeachment and Mueller, in Nietzschean fashion, had only made Trump stronger.

Then came an unexpected trifecta catastrophe—plague, a quarantine-induced recession, and a leftist cultural revolution in the streets. Suddenly, the Left saw all of that as a gift that might succeed where its own self-constructed melodramas had failed.

By late May, Trump’s polls had dived. 

His enemies declared this time he was really, actually, truly finished. NeverTrumpers hit the media to boast they were finally redeemed. 

The discredited pollsters of 2016 reemerged, this time even convincing once-burned, never-again Las Vegas bookies that Trump was toast. Leftists, depressed over the progressive implosion in the Democratic primaries, now rebranded Joe Biden as a useful septuagenarian. He could carry them to victory before being pushed aside. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Every cultural revolution starts at year zero, whether explicitly or implicitly. The French Revolution recalibrated the calendar to begin anew, and the genocidal Pol Pot declared his own Cambodian revolutionary ascension as the beginning of time.

Somewhere after May 25, 2020, the death of George Floyd, while in police custody, sparked demonstrations, protests, and riots. And they in turn ushered in a new revolutionary moment. Or at least we were told that — in part by Black Lives Matter, in part by Antifa, in part by terrified enablers in the corporate world, the new Democratic Party, the military, the universities, and the media.

What was uniquely different about this cultural revolution was how willing and quickly the entire progressive establishment — elected officials, celebrities, media, universities, foundations, retired military — was either on the side of the revolution or saw it as useful in aborting the Trump presidency, or was terrified it would be targeted and so wished to appease the Jacobins.

This reborn America was to end all of the old that had come before and supposedly pay penance for George Floyd’s death and, by symbolic extension, America’s inherent evil since 1619. As in all cultural revolutions, the protestors claimed at first at that they wanted only to erase supposedly reactionary elements: Confederate statues, movies such as Gone with the Wind, some hurtful cartoons, and a few cranky conservative professors and what not.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

A TikTok video that recently went viral on social media showed a recent Harvard graduate threatening to stab anyone who said “all lives matter.” In her melodrama, she tried to sound intimidating with her histrionics.

She won a huge audience, as she intended. But her video also came to the attention of the company that was going to give her an internship later this summer, Deloitte, which decided it didn’t want to add an intern who threatened to kill strangers who said something she didn’t like.

This wouldn’t have been much of a story. But then the narcissistic Harvard alum posted a very different video — one that showed her weeping in a near-fetal position.

She fought back tears while complaining about how unfair the world had been to her. Her initial TikTok post had earned cruel pushback from the social-media jungle she had courted. Deloitte, she sobbed, was mean and hurtful. And she wanted the world to share her pain.

The Harvard grad instantly became an unwitting poster girl for the current protest movement and the violence that has accompanied it. What turns off millions of Americans about the statue toppling, the looting, the threats, and the screaming in the face of police is the schizophrenic behavior of so many of the would-be revolutionaries.

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From An Angry Reader:

Subject: Fox News appearance

Hi, As I watched you on McCallum’s show sort of hesitantly and with some confusion discuss your claims about Biden’s cognitive state, my mom’s dementia came to mind. I recommend you take the usual battery of tests to determine where you are on the spectrum…and perhaps refrain from discussing this topic (just in terms of low credibility). Good luck! CVS.

Cathy Scott

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Dear Angry Reader Cathy Scott,

You need to quantify evidence of my dementia—with wrong referents, incorrect data, or inability to answer a question.

If I sounded hesitant on that interview it might be because I was scheduled to debate a Biden supporter and after my opening statement, his connection he said went dead and we waited for his response that did not come—a hiatus which in turn prompted the host to reset the interview and, after a pause, have me go on with another answer.

But again, my argument was not based on my own perceptions.

As I pointed out, I simply echoed what 20 percent of Democratic voters have expressed in polls, what Democratic handlers take for granted when they urge Biden to stay right where he is in his basement and do only occasional scripted interviews, why Democrats view the Vice Presidential nomination as a de facto presidential nomination and a way to advance a leftist candidate into the White House who would have otherwise never have advanced through the primary elections, or as the formal head of the ticket in a general election, and the now large corpus of bizarre Bidenisms that range from strange stories about Corn-Pop to moments of dead silence, to confusion as to where he is and to whom he is speaking, etc. Had the other debater’s sound connection not belatedly resumed, I would have finished by noting that Biden also has a long-chronicled habit of touching, squeezing, and blowing on the hair of women, some pre-teen, violating their personal space, and in general earning the ire of a number of women who resent his creepy omnipresence—a topic that for some reason is taboo in his case. VDH.

Victor Hanson