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.

Progressives Bearing Gifts

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Donald Trump in 2016 did not only run against the planted rumors of the fake Steele dossier, 90 percent negative media coverage, his own boisterous past, and the “Access Hollywood” tape. He also was campaigning against Hillary Clinton—and the nation’s quarter-century weariness with the Clinton scandals, crimes, money-grubbing, and hypocrisies.

For a quarter of the country, independents especially, a vote for Trump was not a referendum on a Democrat or Republican, or even love or hate for Donald Trump, but rather reflected a “Never Hillary” desire to be done with the very name Clinton.

So, too, in 2020 Trump will not be running only on his own record, or even his person but also against a living and breathing alternative candidate, one that both offers a precise antithetical agenda and displays a concrete personage.

Considering all of that, during the last week, Trump has been given great gifts in a way no one might have imaged just a month ago.

Read the full article here.

Angry Reader 02-05-2019

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From An Angry Reader:

You, sir, are a traitor,

To call the FBI and the representatives of the United States “Bolsheviks” when the POTUS you seek to defend consistently lies about contacts with GRU officials; whose chief strategist Stephen Bannon claimed to be a Leninist because he was advocating the destruction of the establishment, you are a hypocrite and a liar. You are enabling the dissolution of American institutions. You are a traitor to the cause of liberty. Go fuck yourself.

Sincerely,

Ken Rabe

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Dear Unhinged Angry Reader Ken Rabe,

You score a 9 on the unhinged Angry Reader scale: ad hominem invective—check; personal slurs—check; obligatory profanity—check; rants without facts—check.

I did not call the FBI and Congressional Representatives “Bolsheviks”; what I did say was the procedure and protocols of any government officials who assume that a person is guilty first, and then hunt for crimes second, to prove the deductive assumption was Bolshevik like—in the fashion of Stalin’s NKVD head Lavrentiy Beria.

And it is.

Robert Mueller was tasked to find Russian collusion, not to convict Donald Trump or his subordinates of process crimes or violations of statutes going back decades.

Unfortunately what we are witnessing is the leveraging of a vast array of characters on the premise that Mueller will find the crime to prove his targeting was right, threaten to lock them up for ages or bankrupt them, and then offer them exemptions of various sorts if they can claim wrongdoing on Trump’s part—any sort of wrongdoing, given that he has no evidence of his original mandate to find whether Trump or anyone else engaged in collusion with the Russians to warp the 2016 Election.

If Mueller was empirical, he would have long ago discovered that Hillary Clinton, behind 2 firewalls, used campaign funds to hire a foreign national agent to cobble together Russian sources, mostly unfounded and unverified hearsay, to create a smear dossier to be circulated among Obama-officials and thus leaked to the media in time to erode Trump’s campaign before the election—and after to stall his presidency.

I am trying to alert the public that institutions like the IRS, DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA, and NSC have all been weaponized, and in part discredited and eroded due to politicization during 2015-16.

Hiring a foreign national to influence an election is a crime; leaking classified documents is a crime; lying under oath to Congress is a crime; deluding a FISA court is a crime; unmasking surveilled names and leaking them to the media is a crime; destroying subpoenaed evidence is a crime; lying to federal investigators is a crime.

Yet many of our top officials with impunity engaged in all that and more on the theory that their end of stopping Trump justified any means necessary.

Reading your letter is predictable because it confirms that you have no sane argument and are left only with the refuge of four-letter words.

You, sir, are sad.

Sincerely,

Vic Hanson

Remodeling America

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

By mid 1793–4, the radical Jacobins had successfully completed their hijacking of the French Revolution.

Jacobinism

They openly enacted agendas that might have seemed impossible in the heady days of 1787. Long gone were the pretenses of the original idealism when the revolution abolished feudalism, issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and wrestled with turning the Ancien Régime of Louis XVI into some sort of constitutional or parliamentary monarchy analogous to what had emerged in Great Britain.

Soon executing the clerisy en masse was logically followed by Jacobins guillotining thousands of surviving aristocrats and fellow revolutionaries for supposed counterrevolutionary sympathies.

Most of the leaders of the Jacobins were themselves finally guillotined, largely because their ascendant revolutionary zeal could end only in a sort of cannibalism — given that no revolutionary could possibly meet their accelerating purist demands. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was similar, though he slaughtered millions, not thousands.

Read the full article here.

Progressives pulling a bait-and-switch with ‘Medicare for All’

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Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in The Hill

Politicians are known to misrepresent themselves to get elected, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is supposed to be an exception. It is said that he has remained true to his socialist convictions through thick and thin.

Surely, such a dedicated socialist can truthfully explain what socialism is. If not he, then Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.), the influential newcomer to Congress and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), could lend a hand. She must know what socialism is if Bernie won’t speak up.

Prepare for a surprise. Sanders has consistently claimed that his socialism is a Scandinavian-type welfare state. He assures voters that his socialism is comprised of free medicine and education and a fair distribution of income, nothing more, nothing less.

Ocasio-Cortez rattles on about giving things away free and that capitalism is rotten. If pressed, she turns to recipes and social-media tips.

Read the full article here.

How to Make It Home in California: Rules for the Modern Odysseus

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

I drove back from San Francisco not long ago to the rural San Joaquin Valley. It is only 200 miles. But in fact, it can feel like Odysseus trying to get back home to Ithaca from Troy.

Walking to the car in San Francisco was an early morning obstacle course dotted with the occasional human feces and lots of trash. The streets looked like Troy after its sacking. Verbal and physical altercations among the homeless offered background. The sidewalks were sort of like the flotsam and jetsam in the caves of the Cyclopes, with who knows what the ingredients really were. Outbreaks of hepatitis and typhus are now common among the refuse of California’s major cities.

The rules of the road in downtown San Francisco can seem pre-civilizational: the more law-abiding driver is considered timid and someone to be taken advantage of—while the more reckless earns respect and right of way. Pedestrians have achieved the weird deterrent effect of so pouring out onto the street in such numbers that drivers not walkers seemed the more terrified.

Read the full article here.

Angry Reader 02-04-2019

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From An Angry Reader:

Are your fake-right fellows at NRO going to issue a grovelling apology to the CHILDREN they attacked at Covington Catholic High School? They were so eager to attack white children that they didn’t even bother watching the video before condemning them.

This is why we hate you.

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Dear Very Angry Reader Tars Tarkusz,

What planet do you live on?

The moment I woke up on January 20, and started the long process of viewing all the various videos of the Covington incident, I was outraged at the groupthink mob. And so I think I was the first at NRO to post an appeal to stop the Ox-Bow-Incident like lynching of innocent kids and begged my fellow writers to stop it asap and first examine all the evidence as well as in the matter of the Buzzfeed farce of the day before. 

Did you read this or notice the time or the date in which it appeared?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/from-the-buzzfeed-psychodrama-to-the-covington-video-melodrama/

Or cf. this:

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/the-dox-bow-incident/

Your shoot from the hip accusations condemn you on the very charges you level against others.

Stalin Gets Another Hollywood Pass

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Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in Defining Ideas

The December 17 Oscar short-listing of Marianna Yarovskaya’s Women of the Gulag in the documentary-short category created a stir in the world-wide Russian intellectual community. Yarovskaya, a dual citizen and a graduate of both Moscow University and USC, is the first Russian woman to be so short-listed since the founding of the Russian Federation. While official Russian media limited coverage to a brief announcement on the Kultura channel, Russia’s small liberal media celebrated.

Hopes for a historic Russian Oscar were elevated when Hollywood’s seven top gurus all predicted nomination. When Women of the Gulag fell short of a nomination, social media redirected to a discussion of Hollywood’s silence on Stalin’s genocides, which are among the worst in modern history. (By “Hollywood,” I mean L.A.’s international film community).

In the sometimes-heated online exchanges that followed, “Andrew” explained Hollywood’s leniency towards Stalin as the choice of the lesser evil—Stalin over Hitler—made back during World War 2. “Tatyana” opined that Stalin’s terror is an “internal” matter. Hitler started a world war. Stalin did not. “Yulia” ventured that Hollywood’s political inclinations prompt it to ignore the crimes of communist regimes, be they Stalin, Mao, or Fidel. In contrast to its reticence on communism, Hollywood has provided extensive coverage of the crimes of fascist regimes. (A notable exception is “The Killing Fields,” set in Pol Pot’s Cambodia with seven Oscar nominations and three wins.)

Read the full article here.

Trump and the Latino Vote

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Trump would not have to change his policies to capture 40 to 50 percent of the Latino vote (which is quite different from “Latino” spokespeople on television and the Jorge Ramos crowd), as opposed to simply articulating them:

1) The “new” Democratic party not only show signs of a new more insidious anti-Semitism. But as we’ve seen from comments by Senator Feinstein, Harris, and Hirono, and the surreal and barbarous statements coming out of Virginia and New York on third-trimester abortion (and near infanticide), it is now becoming anti-Catholic to a degree not seen in decades in America. Why would a devout Catholic wish to side with such bigotry? Trump is on the right side of the abortion and the religious-discrimination issues.

2) Hispanic unemployment is at record low levels in a growing economy. One can see the realities by simply driving around small towns in Central California where the flurry of activity and demand for labor are unprecedented, and workers have a range of options and leverage not seen in the 21st century. Even slight decreases in border crossings are force multipliers in the empowerment of Mexican-American and other Hispanic citizens in efforts to boost wages and gain options in employment. Trump’s policies did much of that, visible even in highly regulated and less dynamic California. Few middle-class commuters wish to endorse the New Green Deal that would mandate soon ending chain saws, leaf blowers and the workers’ daily commute.

Read the full article here.

Angry Reader 02-01-2019

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From An Angry Reader:

Dear Dr. Hanson,

I am most definitely an “angry” reader, but in no way angry with your writing! I respect and value what you have to say, and read virtually everything you post on the Internet. Thank you for all you do.

I address you because you always have a view that is rational, interesting and adds immeasurably to the discourse; you seem to ‘get it.’

Like many other conservatives, I’m sure, my anger is boiling over from this latest insult and assault on conservatives: The Incident of the Covington Boys. Of course, it’s “just” the latest attack, but it’s so blatant, so vitriolic, so shameless, so widespread. Why, oh why, is there no way we can mount a coordinated defense/response/redress? Why do we have no “Tea Party” moment? Why is there no organization that reflects the other half of this country? Why is there no way to let the parents of Nicholas Sandmann know how proud so many of us are of their son and his literal stance? Why is it only Leftists are capable of implementing their agenda? Is it because we’ve kept our collective heads in the sand and just expected “others” would play by the rules? Is Pat Buchanan correct in his statement this date that the country votes, but the elites do as they please (e.g., Brexit, The Wall). Is it hopeless?

I am old and probably won’t see the end of this malaise. But I wish I could DO SOMETHING!

Any ideas??

Thanks again,

Linda Barr

Pe Ell, Washington

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Dear Not Really Angry Reader Linda Barr,

You describe a paradox in which 55 percent of the country is socially and economically conservative and yet 90 percent of our influence creators—Hollywood, network news and programing, the mainstream media, the Internet and social media, foundations, universities, professional sports, most big corporations—are leftwing. The result is that the old silent majority is like some ancient defiant sandstone rock jutting out on the beach, as the relentless surf insidiously pounds it and wears it ever so slowly away.

My only advice is not to remain silent. Everyone, each according to his or her station, has a role to play. This is not time for timidity or reticence.

Third-trimester abortion is not normal but virtual infanticide. The New Green Deal is a prescription for disaster. Free college and cancellation of student debt are insults to millions who went to work at 18, did not drift in and out of college, and oppose Pajama Boy culture, and yet are asked to pay for the debts of the more advantaged. Medicare for all is Medicare for no one, and the pathway to managed and rationed care and worse to come. Wealth taxes and higher income and estate taxes will inevitably, despite the rhetoric, fall on the upper middle-class, given that billionaires are mostly on the side of the Left and find exemptions. Abolishing ICE and open borders mean the end of U.S. sovereignty.

These new progressive agendas are frightening and we must say “they shall not pass.”

Sincerely,

Victor Hanson

Much Has Changed for the Better Since 2016—Not That Trump Will Get Credit

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The news obsesses over the recent government shutdown, the latest Robert Mueller arrest and, of course, fake news—from the BuzzFeed Michael Cohen non-story to the smears of the Covington Catholic High School students.

But aside from the weekly hysterias, the world has dramatically changed since 2016 in ways we scarcely have appreciated.

The idea that China systematically rigged trade laws and engaged in technological espionage to run up huge deficits is no longer a Trump, or even a partisan, issue.

In the last two years, a mainstream consensus has grown that China poses a commercial and mercantile threat to world trade, to its neighbors and to the very security of the United States—and requires a strong response, including temporary tariffs.

The world did not fall apart after the U.S. pulled out of the flawed Iran nuclear deal. Most yawned when the U.S. left the symbolic but empty Paris Climate Accord. Ditto when the U.S. moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Read the full article here.