Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The COVID-19 pandemic is ending with mass vaccinations. So is the national quarantine. The riots, arson, and looting of the 2020 summer are sputtering out—leaving violent crime in their wake.

The acrimony over the 2020 election fades. Trump Derangement Syndrome became abstract when Donald Trump left office and was ostracized from social media. 

In other words, the American people are slowly regaining their senses after the epidemic of mass hysteria and insanity that gripped the nation in 2020. 

But Americans will wonder whether what Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the hard Left wrought last year will last when the nation is no longer gripped by 2020 madness. 

Teachers and academics are notorious for furious opposition to administrative bloat. For the last 50 years, administrations have proliferated, while the ratio of non-teachers to teachers has skyrocketed—to the chagrin of teacher unions. 

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Part I. Enchanted Dangers

To a boy six or seven, great-horned owls proved terrifying. You would walk through the Santa Rosa plum orchard at dawn. Then suddenly this huge, hidden monster would spring out from a tree trunk and sweep through the row, about three feet off the ground, right on by you. 

His six-foot wingspan quietly swished the tall orchard grass. We never knew whether our Rodan would pick all 50 pounds of us up (In our defense, we were raised on that terrifying scene of the Wicked Witch of the West’s fleet of flying monkeys, snatching the heroes in the Wizard of Oz). And who knows, or so we wondered, if once he grabbed us by the scruff of the neck, he would then drop us from his nest in the cottonwood tree—in the manner a red-tailed hawk would sometimes swoop down and lift up a poor tiny turtle that came down the irrigation ditch into the pond, and then drop him from on high to shatter his shell. So, certainly, we did not want our 50-pound, six-year-old shells smashed by this three-pound bird of prey.

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance. What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common? 

A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others. Add also incompetence. Movies are mostly bad now. The network news is blow-dried groupthink. There is no “paper of record” anywhere. Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part Three. The Nihilist Logic of Death

Once the sick dogs of war are unleashed, legalized murder has a Satanic logic of its own. In the US case, the agenda from December 8 onward was how to end the war as quickly as possible that it did not start and had tried to avoid through appeasement and isolationism.

In terms of Japan and its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (a more brutal but eerie forerunner of the Chinese Belt-and-Road initiative), its war machine was an engine of murder—and fueled from the Japanese mainland. And it was the mainland, that is Tokyo, that the US military from the outset of the war had wished to target, on the theory that decapitating the head of the octopus would render inert its murderous tentacles. 

Victor Davis Hanson // John Bachelor Show

An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill

Much has been made of President Biden’s comment that “Nord Stream 2 is a bad deal for Europe.” Yet with the announcement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Nord Stream 2 sanctions are not in the U.S. national interest and will be waived, the Russian-financed European pipeline should glide to a speedy completion. There remains only German regulatory approval before Nord Stream 2 will become operational, unless Germany’s September elections yield some major surprises.

The Biden administration’s rationale appears to be that President Trump treated major ally Germany roughly, so we should give Germany what it wants — Nord Stream 2. Let our other European allies simmer; Trump hurt their feelings less than Germany’s, so they don’t count. And, besides, maybe a magnanimous gesture will bring Russia’s Vladimir Putin to a summit with Biden that will solve the world’s outstanding problems.

Trump, the alleged pro-Russian president, fought the Nord Stream 2 pipeline throughout his presidency; in that, he, like Biden, enjoyed the strong backing of the U.S. Senate. Trump wielded sanctions to scare off Western companies involved in its construction, leaving only Russian vessels, associated Russian oligarchs and the Nord Stream parent company, headquartered in Switzerland, at risk of further sanctions. Although the Nord Stream 2 project was launched in 2016, Trump managed to stave off its completion throughout his term before handing off the battle to the Biden administration.

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