VDH's Blade of Perseus

By Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

College football players are gladiators of sorts. On the one hand, they are vastly underpaid for the risks they take as well as the profits they generate for the university and the scores of jobs they subsidize. On the other, in terms of college protocols, they are pampered and exempt from rules that other students follow. Being exploited and privileged is a bad combination.

For half a century, liberals have pointed out that football players should drop the amateur pretense, join a semi-pro club, and make the money they deserve — given that their admissions, grades, and class attendance are exempt from university rules, and warp the college experience. Why do we treat as a privileged class those who so often do not meet university requirements that are non-negotiable for mostly indebted students without recourse to such lavish scholarships and subsidies? Entire majors, curricula, counseling, and protocols were invented simply to free football players from having to be students.

Athletes are also exempt from the new liberal policing.  The university campus has grown into a scary place, given the Maoist tendencies to go after race/class/gender enemies of the people. But no institution is more guilty of such politically correct crimes than is the football team. Continue reading “End College Football” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications.

“Intersection” How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here’s an example: “Joe Blow is a social theorist working at the intersection of class oppression, racial stereotyping, and transgendered emergence.”? Or: “Amanda Lopez writes at the intersection of Latina identity, Foucauldian otherness, and social media.” Most of the time “intersection” exists only in the grandiose mind of the writer. It is a patent though feeble attempt to become a threefer or fourfer on the race/gender/generic victim/revolutionary activist scale. The intersected topics are individually irrelevant — and all the more so when cobbled together.  The use of “intersection” is a postmodern way of plastering bumper-sticker narcissisms without writing, “I am an identity-studies person without much knowledge of literature, history, or languages, but am desperately trying to convey expertise of some sort by piling up a bunch of pseudo-disciplines that credential my victimhood activism.” Continue reading “Politics and What Remains of the English Language” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services

We live in a weary age of fable.

The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled “Truth.” But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his “60 Minutes” producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning.

In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his “60 Minutes” team — just weeks before the 2004 election — had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot. Continue reading “The Fiction of ‘Truth’” →

Progressive Faculty and Administrators Deserve All of the Blame for the Unrest

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

The recent wave of student protests is aimed at liberal professors and administrators.

Current student anger eerily fits the pattern of most left-wing unrest, from the cycles of the French Revolution to the campus riots of the 1960s.

First, protests gradually grow more extreme. Venom is directed at fellow leftists who are deemed insufficiently radical.

Continue reading “Recent Unrest on Campus” →

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Earlier this month, premier Fox newsman Bill O’Reilly became unhinged on live television. A red-faced O’Reilly loudly and repeatedly called his invited guest, Washington Post columnist and fellow conservative Fox News journalist George Will, a “hack” and accused him of lying.

It was a surreal moment, with stunned viewers no doubt muttering to themselves, “Is the jig finally up?” Continue reading “Did O’Reilly Finally Go Too Far?” →

This isn’t an attack on “humanity.”  It’s a war against the West. 

by Victor Davis Hanson // Politico (Europe Edition)

President Obama summed up the jihadist killing in Paris as “an attack not just on Paris.” But rather, he assured us, “This is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share.”

But is that assumption true?

Certainly, the president seems as unable to utter the targeted “West” and “Western” as he is the targeter “radical Islam” or “jihadist.”

Were the suicide bombers and the AK-47 shooters who slaughtered the innocent in Paris seeking to destroy the ideology of communist China?

Was their deadly message aimed at the protocols of Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela? The Islamist terrorists — how careful were the president and the American news media to use the generic “they” and the non-specific “the terrorists” — did not seem too concerned with “all of humanity.” By the pattern of their attacks, our enemies seem not to share with the president that all of humanity embraces “universal values.” Continue reading “Why Won’t We Call This Islamist Terrorism?” →

On campus, social norms no longer apply.

The university, long exempted from social norms and rules, has gone wild in the 21st century — or rather, regressed to pre-puberty.

The University of Missouri campus police now request that students — a group not known for polite vocabulary — call law enforcement if someone disparages them with hurtful names.

On the same campus, a media professor shouts for students in the vicinity to strong-arm a student photographer to stop him from taking pictures in a way that she does not approve. Other staff members try to block and push away a journalist they find bothersome. Since when do thuggish faculty, in Michael Corleone fashion, call in muscle to intimidate students who are exercising their First Amendment rights?

Continue reading “The University Gone Feral” →

by Victor Davis Hanson//Tribune Media Services

The current presidential campaign is blowing up lots of political myths.

For years, the conventional lament was that the “wrong” Bush had run for president in 2000. George W. Bush was supposedly tongue-tied. He was said to be polarizing. He was derided as too much the twangy, conservative Texas Christian.

If only his younger, softer-spoken brother, then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, had run instead!

So the myth went. Continue reading “Conventional wisdom proves ignorance in the presidential race” →