Thought of the Day
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Water, Water and Not a Drop?
Behind the national headlines are lots of other stories.
Here in California, the Department of Water Resources and the Federal Bureau of Reclamation announced that they may not (be able to?) honor the meager 5% of the contracted water allotments of westside California farmers south of the Delta.
Continue reading “Thought of the Day”Dr. Victor Davis Hanson on The Trevor Carey Show
Hundreds of thousands of deaths averted because of COVID vaccines
An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill
Recall the desperate early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in early Spring 2020. Researchers worried that the Spanish flu of 1918 that cost millions of American lives could be a possible model. The Imperial College of London released a projection of over 2 million deaths in the U.S. alone if government failed to take action. The government’s top advisor, Anthony Fauci, recommended a strategy of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to “bend the curve.” However, the highly infectious nature of the disease meant that they could offer only a temporary respite.
Adding to the gloom was the scientific community’s pessimism concerning the prospects for an early vaccine. Past history suggested that vaccines required years to get through regulatory approval — and then an additional year or more to scale-up for the millions of doses needed. Four months into the pandemic in the Spring of 2020, the most optimistic observers projected that we were well more than a year away from a viable vaccination program.
Contrary to earlier expectations, two vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) were approved in December 2020, and the first doses were administered less than a week later. These advances occurred under the auspices of Operation Warp Speed, a joint government, business, and military venture. Its unique feature was to guarantee purchases of experimental vaccines as they proceeded through regulatory approval in order to scale-up quickly the successful ones.
Is Racism Moral Now?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
“Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expediencies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people . . . ”
—Damon Young, New York Times contributor
“Over the past year, I have, of course, still had to interact with white people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about whether they would succeed in reelecting a white-supremacist president. But white people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less, only deal with whiteness when I want to . . . White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them.”
—Elie Mystal, The Nation
Racism is the deductive bias against, and often hatred of, an entire racial group. It is often birthed by dislike of particular individuals of a given group that supposedly justifies, by extension, disliking or indeed hating all of them. The popular reaction against this widespread toxic pathology shown African Americans birthed the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, the resistance to Jim Crow, and the modern Civil Rights movement.
The Angry Reader
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
From an Angry Reader,
“Keep your shit views to yourself. You disgust me – go kiss trumps ass somewhere else. The armed insurrection was leaderless and officer Sicknick only was “allegedly” murdered? ??! You’re delirious you sick fuck”
— Deb Chapple
The John Batchelor Show: Beware the political speakers of “follow the science.”
The Military and Other Madness
Thoughts of the week
Victor Davis Hanson // Week In Review
We do not know when we hit peak wokeness—only that no constitutional republic can long exist in a climate of McCarthyite fear and anti-racism racism. I wrote about this crux for next week’s American Greatness (“Anti-Racism Racism”) in a long essay that will appear on Monday. It refutes the idea that a white supremacist ideology stifles all the aspirations of the non-white, and explains why the current racialization of dialogue and weaponization of debate have a bad history.
Continue reading “Thoughts of the week”The Nature of Chinese Contempt for US
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
LAST WEEK IN ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, CHINESE diplomats dressed down Biden Administration Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the Chinese broadsides.
Apparently, as elite Americans readily confess to inherent white supremacy and racism—highlighting the complaints of BLM and Antifa—the Chinese are happy to agree that such admittedly toxic Americans should not dare to criticize China’s racist policies.