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.

On Assimilation

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The idea of rapid assimilation, integration, intermarriage, and Americanization was once melting-pot clear. Immigrants arrived in the U.S. eager to find something better (whether economically, politically, culturally, or socially) than what they left behind.

So they accepted the premise that the general core of American customs, traditions, and protocols, such as free-market economics, protections of private property, the chauvinism of a middle class, legal transparency, due process, an independent judiciary, the rule of law as defined by the Constitution, republican and consensual government, freedoms as outlined in the Bill of Rights, separation of church and state — within a general landscape of both Christian predominance and tolerance of competing faiths, rationalism, and ongoing expansion of civil rights.

To do otherwise and reject such a menu, was seen as an absurd paradox: Why would an emigrant leave an apparently less pleasant place simply to replicate its institutions in his new home and thereby contribute to re-creating the original problems that he had fled from? (That is not to say that people are rational, as Texans and Floridians discover when some California refugees start imposing their destructive California tastes upon arrival in the very no-income-tax, less regulated, and smaller-government states they sought out.)

Read the full article here.

The Progressive Race to the Bottom

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The old Democratic party championed the working classes, wanted secure borders to protect middle-class union wage earners, and focused generous federal entitlement help on the citizen poor. Civil rights were defined as equality of opportunity for all.

That party is long dead. An updated Hubert Humphrey or even Bill Clinton would not recognize any of the present “Democrats.”

Even the old wing of elite liberals is mostly long gone, with its talk of legal immigration only, opposition to censorship, pro-Israel foreign policy, let-it-hang-out Sixties indulgence, and free speech.

It was superseded by grim progressives who are not so much interested in a square, new, or fair deal for the middle classes, as an entirely different deal that redefines everything from the Bill of Rights and the very way we elect presidents and senators to an embrace of identity politics as its first principle.

Read the full article here.

Attack of the Techno-Lynch Mob

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The Covington Lie offered the perfect occasion for the electronic mob to pounce—after temporarily licking its wounds following the BuzzFeed fake news hysteria. And it did so without shame or even much regret after the fact, as Jason Leopold, the BuzzFeed fabulist, ceded center stage to a kindred serial prevaricator, Nathan Phillips. The latter in his 15 minutes of fame did not make a major statement that was not contradicted by an earlier statement or by the facts.

The entire psychodrama boiled down not to what the facts on the ground showed, but rather who each party was perceived innately to be.

On the one side, the suspects were seen as rambunctious teenage kids (thus easy targets not especially schooled in the arts of rhetoric or repartee).

They were white (enough said) and smiling (indicative of their smirking privilege and lack of victim status).

Read the full article here.

The Issue Is Not Roger Stone’s Lurid Personal Life but Equality under the Law

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The issues of special Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone have nothing to do with his personal life. His sexual habits should be of no concern to anyone. And what is so funny about the Internet jokes about (a still presumed innocent) Stone enjoying rape once he’s in prison?

The issues are instead threefold: One, given that Stone has said so many contradictory things, were his public statements lies and his sworn statements true, vice versa, neither or both?

Two, why after 21 months, is the special counsel still hounding minor transitory Trump officials (Stone was fired from the Trump campaign way back in August 2015) in hopes of flipping them to find proof of almost anything against Trump? Stone, like all other Americans indicted by Mueller so far, is not charged with any crime close to “collusion.” We are now well past the descent of this investigation into “show me the man, and I’ll show the crime.”

Three, the Stone indictment raises real questions of equality under the law.

Read the full article here.

Angry Reader 01-23-19

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From An Angry Reader:

Re: IMPEACH TRUMP

Dear Sir:

I just read your article in the opinion section of the Albuq. Journal today.

I guess I want to ask you if you approve of the President of our Country, the role model for our children, going out there every day lying, cheating, and manipulating everything money that Trump wants for his own account.

He will not turn over his tax returns. Why? He’s hiding something.

He doesn’t understand that even his family were immigrants. We all were.

He has no compassion or empathy for anyone, especially if you’re brown or black.

If you need proof, it’s there every day. Just open your eyes and watch the TV and read the paper.

Everyone with half a brain is DISGUSTED with Trump and his behavior on every level. I can’t wait until he gets impeached.

We are all DISGUSTED. And if you are not, you really need to talk to your mother and your wife and your daughter.

They need you to challenge his rhetoric, not support it. They are looking to you for your perspective.

It’s a great opportunity to show them how much of a man you are. Support them. Be kind to them. Believe in them.

Please retract your article.

Here is my personal mobile # if you would like to talk about it. 505-XXX-XXXX

Thank you for reading my email.

James L. Lester, RT, BSN, MbA
Medical Practice Consultants, Inc.

————————————————————————————————————

Dear Angry Reader James L. Lester,

I congratulate you on incorporating lots of our all too familiar characteristics of the Angry Reader.

You included the all-capital words of outrage.

You sign off with the usual array of titles to suggest authority and expertise.

There is the standard ad hominem (I am culpable and so must talk to my family for therapeutic guidance). Even my manhood is at stake if I do not denounce Trump (63 million are thus also emasculated?).

There is the usual leftist effort to censure opposition ideas (“Please retract your article”). And finally, there is simply no argument, just a serious of adolescent and unsupported assertions.

I wish all presidents might turn over their tax returns; few do. Barack Obama weaponized the IRS against his opponents, and never reported the gift from Tony Rezko of a radically discounted lot until exposed. Ditto Hillary on Cattlegate, in which against 1-4 trillion odds she parlayed $1,000 into $100,000 and never paid capital gains taxes on the profit—again, until caught.

I am afraid I have zero confidence in the news; just this weekend they presented the two latest examples of fabricated stories with the supposed proof that Michael Cohen was ordered to lie by Trump about the dates of the Trump organization’s business dealings in Russia, and the psychodrama of the Covington school kids on the DC mall. In both cases, the stories were unverified and yet used by the electronic lynch mob, pundits, and talking heads to hang Trump and the kids before the jury of facts and evidence weighed in and discredited the sources. The current progressive mob is sort of like the cowards who swarm the proverbial Western jail, eager to hang the suspect before he can be tried. Only in our culture there is no sheriff with a double-barreled shotgun to hold off the Internet mob and so they usually drag out and lynch their prey.

As for compassion, it can be defined a variety of ways. One might think how a 3% annualized GDP and peacetime unemployment at 3.7-9% has given millions a chance of a good job and with it respect and dignity—in a way not true since 2007.

Victor Davis Hanson, BA, PhD, JD (Honorary) etc. etc.
The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, etc. etc.

Should the FBI Run the Country?

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario.

Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against the overseas old-hand, decorated veteran, and national icon John McCain—a bipartisan favorite in Washington, D.C.

During the campaign, unfounded rumors had swirled about the rookie Obama that he might ease sanctions on Iran, distance the United States from Israel, and alienate the moderate Arab regimes, such as the Gulf monarchies and Egypt.

Stories also abounded that the Los Angeles Times had suppressed the release of a supposedly explosive “Khalidi tape,” in which Obama purportedly thanked the radical Rashid Khalidi for schooling him on the Middle East and correcting his earlier biases and blind spots, while praising the Palestinian activist for his support for armed resistance against Israel.

Read the full article here.

The Mueller Squirrel Case

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump.

Like almost all of Mueller’s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against Veselnitskaya had nothing to do with his original mandate of finding any possible Trump–Russia collusion. No matter; within minutes, Veselnitskaya’s name was injected into the media cycle as if the fact that she was Russian and connected to the name Mueller were de facto proof that Trump was guilty of something — if not collusion, something worse.

If Mueller was not a special counsel, and if he was not looking for anyone deemed useful to flip to find dirt on Donald Trump, then Veselnitskaya would have been just another daily Washington foreign influence-peddler being courted with impunity by her American influence-peddling and often equally suspect counterparts.

To date, in almost every one of his indictments of Americans, Mueller has gone after Trump staffers, often quite minor, for alleged crimes that either were committed well before Mueller began his investigations, or came as a result of plea bargaining in exchange for providing expected dirt on Trump, or were the result of government surveillance or the use of government informants, or all of that and more. And all that sensationalism, through leaks and insinuations, was packaged by the media as “bombshells” and “watersheds” and “turning points” ad nauseam for 20 months.

Read the full article here

Strategika Issue 56: The Defense of Europe

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European Defense

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Angelo M. Codevilla in Strategika.

Europe was never a full partner in its own defense. The very question—Will Europe ever fully partner with the U.S., or will the European Union and NATO continue to downplay the necessity of military readiness?—is no longer meaningful as posed, because the political energies of Europe’s elites are absorbed as they try to fend off attacks on their legitimacy by broad sectors of their population.

Read the full article here.

NATO Renewed (Coming soon to a theater of war near you)

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Ralph Peters in Strategika.

Clio, the muse of history, has a fabulous sense of irony: As the human pageant unfolds, she delights in confounding our intentions and expectations. Thus, two public enemies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (whose acronym, NATO, sounds like another Greek deity) promise to be the unwitting saviors of the alliance, rescuing it from complacency, lethargy, and diminishing relevance.

Read the full article here.

Urging More from Our NATO Allies

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Robert G. Kaufman  in Strategika.

The United States should never expect to achieve full burden-sharing with the European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Even in the most balanced alliances, the most powerful member will pay some premium for ensuring its credibility and effectiveness. The United States can strive plausibly to minimize but not eliminate the massive degree of free riding and strategic incoherence that has become politically untenable and strategically unwise. 

Read the full article here.

Trump’s Re-Election Chances May Be Better Than You Think

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

What are Donald Trump’s chances for re-election in 2020?

If history is any guide, pretty good.

In early 1994, Bill Clinton’s approval rating after two years in office hovered around a dismal 40 percent. The first midterm elections of the Clinton presidency were an utter disaster.

A new generation of younger, more conservative Republicans led by firebrand Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” gave Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Republicans also picked up eight Senate seats in 1994 to take majority control of both houses of Congress.

Read the full article here.

The New, New Anti-Semitism

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The old anti-Semitism was mostly, but not exclusively, a tribal prejudice expressed in America up until the mid 20th century most intensely on the right. It manifested itself from the silk-stocking country club and corporation (“gentlemen’s agreement”) to the rawer regions of the Ku Klux Klan’s lunatic fringe.

While liberals from Joe Kennedy to Gore Vidal were often openly anti-Semitic, the core of traditional anti-Semitism, as William F. Buckley once worried, was more rightist. And such fumes still arise among the alt-right extremists.

Yet soon a new anti-Semitism became more insidious, given that it was a leftist phenomenon among those quick to cite oppression and discrimination elsewhere. Who then could police the bigotry of the self-described anti-bigotry police?

The new form of the old bias grew most rapidly on the 1960s campus and was fueled by a number of leftist catalysts. The novel romance of the Palestinians and corresponding demonization of Israel, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War, gradually allowed former Jew-hatred to be cloaked by new rabid and often unhinged opposition to Israel. In particular, these anti-Semites fixated on Israel’s misdemeanors and exaggerated them while excusing and downplaying the felonies of abhorrent and rogue nations.

Read the full article here.