Russia Didn’t Interfere In U.S. Election To Help Trump, But To Destabilize America

victorhanson

 By Paul Gregory // Forbes.com

 (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

A still unidentified Democratic Party donor paid for the factually challenged dossier that almost sunk the Donald Trump campaign. The dossier was created (and perhaps written) with the support and assistance of unregistered foreign agents of the Russian government, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The offer by an obscure music publicist to Donald Trump Jr. to share compromising information on the Clinton campaign was, as will be shown below, most likely a Russian operation. I conclude that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was not to help Trump but to throw the American political system into chaos and threaten its foundations.

Russia boasts one of the most effective and ruthless political operations in Washington. A flamboyant man-about-town ambassador sits at the top hobnobbing with the American political aristocracy. Russia’s diplomats, spies, and PR experts lobby Russian interests and recruit the powerhouses of American political influence to plead their cases and use hired guns to sling dirt and promote “disinformation” about opponents.

To read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2017/07/14/russia-didnt-interfere-in-u-s-election-to-help-trump-but-to-destabilize-america/#75759a231734

victorhanson

From An Angry Reader:

You either drank the cool aid or got a handsome check in the mail. Nonetheless, your argument doesn’t hold water. Not when I talk to people in southwest Virginia whose wells were contaminated by fracking. And throw in the illegal discharge of the brine water back into local streams. A resident showed me the pipe he says the company (look it up) uses in the wee hours of the morning.

The push back to the eventual end to fossil fuels is to be expected, but the end will come. That is something to bank on.

Mike Harton
Midlothian, VA

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Mike Harton,

It is never wise to begin a refutation with an ad hominem attack, a de facto admission of a weak argument.

Fracking is not a zero sum game of evil versus good, as I wrote.

You simply do not appreciate the role of cheaply produced U.S. energy in relation to geostrategic, military, and economic challenges, as natural gas and affordable petroleum can bridge the fossil fuels gap until competitive so-called “green” energy is available.

For each of your anecdotes, I could add and trump you one: the Mexican-American poor in my environs who cannot afford $4 a gallon gas to get 40 miles to work, but now save $1,000 a year due to crashing gas prices, or the enlisted military who feel relieved that the Middle East  and its assorted quagmires are not vital any longer for U.S. energy needs, or the business people who believe cheaper natural-gas generated electricity will lure back high-paying jobs from Asia and Europe in  energy-intensive industries.

We live in a tragic world of 51% advantage always being preferable to 49%. Only the adolescent mind argues that a choice must be perfect to be good. The alternatives to fossil fuel production for now are more Solyndra-like subsidized boondoggles, or the green mandates that spike kilowatt rates and force California’s Central Valley poor to sit in Target and Wal-Mart to cool off, given their inability to afford to run air conditioners in 110 degree heat.

Fossil fuels may well disappear in a few decades; in the meantime, if we can produce our own fuel it will immeasurably aid our middle and poor classes, while giving us latitudes in foreign policy not seen since the 1940s.

By the way, I have never  taken payment from anyone to massage a particular point of view nor have used mind-altering drugs. To suggest those who disagree with you do that is what the psycho-babble industry calls ‘projection’.

Finally, as I write, some members of Congress are investigating various green anti-fracking groups for allegedly receiving “a handsome check” from Putin’s oil interests (that have been nearly wrecked by US frackers) to stop fracking and thereby restore billions of lost foreign exchange to the now anemic Russian economy. Should I accuse you—without evidence—of predicating your anti-fracking stance on Russian money? To do so would be as absurd as what you suggest.

Victor Hanson
Selma, CA

 

victorhanson

From an Angry Reader:

Hello Dr. Hanson,

While it’s hard to argue with “be happy day by day”, our current form of capitalism – which Hoover seems to endorse – makes that near impossible.

Over the last 30 years, Friedman’s nutty idea of maximizing shareholder value as the only responsibility a corporation has, followed by Jack Welch’s popularizing of that nutty idea (which he later regretted) killed the middle and working class.

And CEO’s are paid not Drucker’s 20x average wages but 335x. Hoover’s free market stance seems ok with all that.

We need a different form of capitalism for your column to make sense.

Best,

D Davidson

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader D Davidson,

Thank you for your note. As I look around the word at the plight of the poor—Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, Russia—I do not see capitalism as the common denominator of poverty, but rather communism, socialism, statism, and crony capitalism of a sort. Globalization did untold damage to the red-state interior, in that it helped weaken the idea of a nation of common values and citizens and made the global market the final arbiter of social policy.

Are you a Trump voter, given that your letter seems to echo the concerns, for example, as voiced by Steven Bannon at the Vatican not long ago, who called for an enlightened form of capitalism and an end to transnational elite governance? I really do not care what CEOs or the rich make—most like the Google team, Facebook people, Warren Buffet, and Gates, Inc. are leftist billionaires—as long as the middle classes and poor have good jobs, fairly priced housing and the hope that life will be better for their children. That is no longer the case, largely because an elite has decided that overregulation, utopian environmentalism, and creeping statism is good for everyone else but themselves who have the means to navigate around the consequences of their own ideologies.

We need to promote cheap energy, manufacturing jobs, vocational education, and begin to honor professions like farming, mining, timber, and construction rather than relegate them to caricatures and ossified entertainment (e.g., Ax-men, ice truckers, tuna boaters, etc.) on cable reality TV.

I have found among the rich somewhat of a difference between those who ‘made it’ farming, ranching, building, manufacturing, etc. vs. those who made it even more so through speculation, banking and insurance. The former often seems more real in some sense. As you can see I have a prejudice against the metrosexual Pajama Boy elite who profess one way and live quite another, although I confess it is often stereotyped and unfair.

Sincerely,

V Hanson

West Can Neither Live with nor Take Out North Korean Nukes

victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

It’s time for the U.S. and its allies to prepare for a tough, messy confrontation.

 

North Korea recently test-launched a long-range missile capable of reaching Alaska.

 

When North Korea eventually builds a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, it will double down on its well-known shakedown of feigning indifference to American deterrence while promising to take out Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle unless massive aid is delivered to Pyongyang.

 

Kim Jong-un rightly assumes that wealthy Western nations would prefer to pay bribe money than suffer the loss of a city — and that they have plenty of cash for such concessions. He is right that the medicine of taking out Kim’s missiles is considered by Western strategists to be even worse than the disease of living with a lunatic regime that has nukes.

 

No wonder that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations had few answers to North Korea’s serial lying and deceit about its nuclear intentions.

 

Sanctions were eventually dropped or watered down, either on reports of the mass starvation of innocent North Korean civilians or on false promises of better North Korean behavior. Continue reading “West Can Neither Live with nor Take Out North Korean Nukes” →

Military History In The News

victorhanson

Stalin’s Greatness?

by Andrew Roberts

Poster from Stalin Era
Image credit:Poster Collection, RU/SU 2156, Hoover Institution Archives.

“The Red Army could have defeated Nazi Germany without Allied help,” records The Times of London, “according to two thirds of Russians, who are adopting an increasingly positive view of Joseph Stalin’s wartime leadership despite the enormous casualties suffered under his command.” This worrying sign of increased ultra-nationalism under Vladimir Putin was based on findings from a poll conducted by the respected Levada Center in Moscow. Whereas 34% of Russians in 1997–the year Putin came to power–believed that the fact that “Stalin acted regardless of casualties” and that was the main reason that 27 million Russians died in World War Two, today only 12% believe that, a tribute to the two decades of Putin’s ceaseless propaganda sanitizing Stalin’s role.

In June Putin claimed that “excessive demonization” of Stalin had been used to “attack” and slander post-Soviet Russia. History is a political battlefield in modern Russia, where the historical and civil rights society Memorial, which investigates the extent of Stalinist crimes in the Gulags, has been repeatedly disrupted and attacked by the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation). This was taken to a new level in June when Yuri Dmitriev, who dedicated his life to finding and identifying the burial sites of Stalin’s victims in his native Karelia, was arrested for child abuse. Dmitriev played a huge role in uncovering the hidden history of the Solovetsky Islands and the White Sea Canal, and the accusations made against him appear to be a pure act of vengeance carried out by the FSB–the institutional descendant of the NKVD and KGB.

Campaigners such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag, who demand that the accusations against Dmitriev are investigated properly and independently, point out how the FSB persecution tactics come straight out of the old Soviet playbook. Alexei Navalny, the charismatic Russian opposition leader, is also being barred from contesting the presidential elections against Putin in March next year because he has a criminal conviction for fraud, also on trumped-up charges.

TO READ MORE: http://www.hoover.org/research/stalins-greatness

Trump’s Anti-Cairo Speech

victorhanson

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

In Warsaw, the president delivered the antithesis to the fallacious, appeasing lecture Obama preached to the Egyptians.

Obama’s Cairo Address, June 4, 2009

About five months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, the president gave a strange address in Cairo. The speech was apparently designed to win over the Muslim world and set Obama apart from the supposed Western chauvinism of the prior and much caricatured George W. Bush administration.

Obama started off by framing past and present tensions between Muslims and the West largely in the context of explicit and implied Western culpability: past European colonialism, and the moral equivalence of the Cold War and disruptive Westernized globalization. Continue reading “Trump’s Anti-Cairo Speech” →

As physical jobs decline, something is lost

victorhanson

Op-Ed

By Victor Davis Hanson // Los Angeles Times

As jobs that require physical work decline thanks to technological advances, life superficially appears to get better. Cheap cellphones, video games, the Internet, social media and labor-saving appliances all make things easier and suggest that even more and better benefits are on the horizon. Formerly backbreaking industries, from the growing of almonds to the building of cars, are increasingly mechanized, using fewer but more skilled operators.

Anyone who has spot-welded or harvested almonds with a mallet and canvas has no regrets in seeing the disappearance of such rote drudgery. Consumers benefit in the from of cheaper prices. But as we continue on this trajectory, initiated in the Industrial Revolution, is something lost? Something only poorly approximated by greater leisure time, non-muscular jobs and contrived physical exercise in air-conditioned gyms?

Talk long enough to the most accomplished academics, lawyers and CEOs — who also tend to be the most conscientious about biking, jogging and weightlifting (obesity being an epidemic of the poor and lower middle classes) — and more often than not, they will brag about a long-ago college summer job waiting tables or repairing hiking trails. They might praise the granite-counter installer who redid their kitchen, or offer an anecdote about the time they helped the tree-trimmer haul limbs from the backyard out to the trailer at the curb. There seems a human instinct to want to do physical work.

The proliferation of hard-work reality-television programming reflects this apparent need, if only vicariously. Indeed, the more we have become immobile and urbanized, the more we tune in to watch reality television’s assorted truckers, loggers, farmers, fishermen, drillers and rail engineers. In a society that supposedly despises menial jobs, the television ratings for such programs suggest that lots of Americans enjoy watching people of action who work with their hands. Continue reading “As physical jobs decline, something is lost” →

victorhanson

From an Angry Reader:

Mr. Hanson,

You seem intent on defining progressives as people who loathe Donald Trump, as clearly defined group who have a unified strategy of driving him out of office.

 

The tactic of defining—and dismissing—all progressives with a broad brush is a convenient way to give Trump supporters a clearly defined enemy to hate. That style of rhetoric has more in common with Rush Limbaugh than a respected academician. It is also the type of divisive and overwrought discourse (from both sides) that we are currently awash in.

 

I am a progressive, which to my mind describes what I am for, not against.

 

I do deeply regret that, though fairly elected, Donald Trump is our president, but that is unrelated progressivism or conservatism.  Even if I were apolitical I would find President Trump deeply lacking in so many non-ideological ways. He is thin-skinned, untruthful and doesn’t seem to grasp the import of his position and seems to lack the character and intellect for the presidency.

 

I agree that he is being relentlessly attacked from many quarters (not just progressives), but his detractors do not need a strategy to bring him down. The media does not need to constantly vilify him to destroy his credibility. Simply observing his behavior, listening what he says and reading his tweets is sufficient to irreparably damage his presidency. He will likely bring down his own presidency with very little outside help.

 

Respectfully,

Glenn Shellhouse

Colorado Springs, CO

 

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:


Dear Angry Reader Glenn Shellhouse,
I do not think nor did I write that all progressives wish to drive Trump from office.
But what political rubric would you use for those who wished to subvert the Electoral College, or sued to nullify the voting results in three states, or boycotted the Inauguration, or seek to impeach Trump after 120 days, or to sue him under the Emoluments Clause, or to invoke the 25th Amendment, or seek to trump up false charges of collusion, or obstruction of justice, or demand recusals, or stonewall appointments? Are they reactionaries? Conservatives? Perhaps libertarians? Some generalized rubric is needed.
And what do Madonna, Snoop Dog, Bill Maher, Steven Colbert, etc. have in common? A shared conservative vision?
“An enemy to hate”? Who is using scatology, and the f— word? Who videoed a ritual decapitation, or dreamed of blowing up the White House, or wanted to punch Trump in the face? Independents? Moderates? Palecons?
It seems the vast majority of threats are from the left and their target is Trump, in a way not true of conservatives in their opposition to Obama. I was very critical of Obama’s policies and often polarizing rhetoric. I think he crippled the economy and left us vulnerable abroad, but I never translated that opposition to any personal hatred of the President, and most certainly I would never have gone the CNN or Chris Matthews route. Let us confess, so far the hate is mostly a left-wing phenomenon.
Trump is certainly flawed as you point out. But his agenda is far preferable to the Obama-Clinton trajectory. And we have had pretty creepy presidents in the past. So far Trump is not seducing and bedding 20-something interns as did JFK routinely, or as Bill Clinton frolicked with an unpaid intern of 22 (and then lied about it to the nation and under oath in a deposition). He has not tried to pack the Supreme Court as did FDR, or report book profits as capital gains to escape income taxes, as did Ike. We must in part see Trump’s excesses in a context of past presidencies. I thought de facto suspending federal immigration law was revolutionary and harmful to the state.

Trump is the first president who has neither political nor military service, so obviously the landscape is very different, and of course Trump’s style is over-the-top and often ad hominem. All regrettable. But with Obama the venom was directed at entire groups (“punish our enemies”, “get in their faces”, “take a gun to a knife fight”, the clingers, the “lazy” Americans, etc.).

As to your point of Trump’s self-destructiveness, time shall tell. He certainly is diverted by the trivial, such as two failed morning hosts without an audience. But the Shorenstein Center noted that 80% of all media coverage of Trump was negative, and in the case of CNN, 93%.  We’ve never seen that level of bias before. Nor the level of hatred and assassination talk: celebrities and public figures have variously talked of decapitating Trump, ritually stabbing him, hanging him, blowing him up, shooting him, beating him to a pulp—all without consequences. So, yes, we are in new territory.
Finally the polls, to the degree they are credible after the 2016 fiasco, suggest Trump enjoys only 40%—quite an amazing number actually when 80% of all news coverage is negative.
 Yet the media polls much lower, about 30-35% expressing confidence in journalists.
Trump has exposed the utter corruption of the media (Wikileaks did the same), but in the process he has diverted attention from the real issues at home and abroad. Tweeting is a wise way to communicate directly over  the heads of the media, but only if focused and confined to existential issues.
What you or I think about Trump won’t matter in 2020:  if the economy hits 3% GDP growth, he will be likely reelected, if it does not, he may not even run. Let us wait and watch the issues play out and we will see whether a sharp decrease in illegal immigration, an increase in oil and gas production, less regulation, and lower taxes,  enrich the citizens or impoverish them.  If the former, a crude Trump will win; if the latter, even Trump an angel would still lose.
Respectfully,
Victor Hanson
Selma, CA
victorhanson

From an Angry Reader:

Dr. Hanson,
You will not like what I am about to say.
It’s a good thing we’re 3,000 miles apart.  Because if I saw you on the street, I’d …
A threat?  You decide.
Daniel Weir
Washington, DC

Reply from Victor Davis Hanson:

Dear Second-time Angry Reader Daniel Weir,
And if we we’re not 3,000 miles apart, you would do what exactly if you saw me? Resort to physical violence?
In the polarized age of assassination chic and threats against the president and an actual hit on Rep. Scalise, do you really think it is wise to threaten publicly someone with whom you disagree?
 I get a few letters and angry calls like your own, and occasionally a few mad sorts have shown up at my office or farm or follow me around in stores, so your sort of threat is not new.
Victor Hanson
Selma, CA