VDH's Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatnes

Over the last five years, the pathology of Trump Derangement Syndrome has been widely described. It was more than a chronic disease and was often characterized by an array of rapidly advancing symptoms of deterioration in reasoning, emotional stability, and personal ethics. 

More practically, often the deranged Trump hater found in his odium a cover for all sorts of prior personal intemperance and careerist dissipation. Loudly hating Trump became a passport for excess, private and public, and a sort of preemptive insurance that excused or rather greenlighted smears, slander, and personal misdeeds.

The Anti-Lincoln Project

For over a year, the theme of the NeverTrump Lincoln Project was the organizers’ professed superior morality. They had it; most others on the Right did not. Only a select heroic few of the Republican Party would dare to break ranks to end the danger to the country posed by a supposedly morally inferior Donald Trump. 

Forget Trump’s economic, domestic, cultural, and foreign policy record that had belied critics by its successes—despite historic opposition, investigation, denigration, and obstruction. No matter. Character was king. Again, the Lincoln Project had it; Trump followers did not. 

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson / American Greatness

Over the last five years, the pathology of Trump Derangement Syndrome has been widely described. It was more than a chronic disease and was often characterized by an array of rapidly advancing symptoms of deterioration in reasoning, emotional stability, and personal ethics. 

More practically, often the deranged Trump hater found in his odium a cover for all sorts of prior personal intemperance and careerist dissipation. Loudly hating Trump became a passport for excess, private and public, and a sort of preemptive insurance that excused or rather greenlighted smears, slander, and personal misdeeds.

Read more.

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The Democratically-controlled Senate spends thousands of collective hours conducting an impeachment trial against a president who is no longer president. 

The acquittal is predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago—and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors. 

The constitutionally mandated presiding judge—the chief justice of the United States—refused to show up.  

Chief Justice John Roberts apparently believes an impeachment trial of a private citizen is either a waste of time or unconstitutional—or both. 

The Democratic House of Representatives is busy ferreting out purportedly extremist Republican members. For the first time in memory, one party now removes committee members of the other. 

Read the full article here

Listen to Victor Davis Hanson on the Trevor Carey Radio Show here

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

On Feb. 2, the Moscow City Court sentenced Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny to two years and eight months in jail. Noted for its “telephone justice” (verdict dictated by the Kremlin), the Moscow court’s sentence revealed that Russian President Vladimir Putin has concluded that Navalny is too dangerous to remain free. By returning to Moscow after being poisoned and flown to Germany for treatment, Navalny declared he would continue his campaign for a democratic and clean Russia, irrespective of the consequences for him personally. In his statement to the court, Navalny declared that, however much Putin “pretends to be a great geo-politician, he’ll go down in history as a poisoner.”

Navalny has long been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side with his disclosures of high-level corruption by Putin’s inner circle. The Kremlin’s non-stop anti-Navalny media campaign has described him as corrupt, a foreign agent, a bombastic Russia-hating poseur. Sham court proceedings disqualified him from political office. Putin carefully avoided speaking Navalny’s name, referring to him instead as “the blogger” or more recently the “Berlin patient.” As a result of this drum beat, Navalny scarcely registered on Russian approval and trust polls in the past, but no longer.

Four recent events elevated Navalny from a pesky irritation to a formidable opponent of the Kremlin, who must now be isolated.

The first is the attempted poisoning of Navalny on Aug. 20, widely covered by international press and Russian social media. This was followed by Navalny’s telephone-scamming of one of his poisoners into a confession, the recording of which went viral on social media. The Russian people now know that the Kremlin routinely uses political murder to get its way.

Read the full article here

George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression. 

The short, allegorical novel’s human-like farm animals replay the transition of supposedly 1917 revolutionary Bolsheviks into cynical 1930s Stalinists. Thereby, they remind us that leftist totalitarianism inevitably becomes far worse than the supposed parasitical capitalists they once toppled.

Orwell saw that the desire for power stamps out all ideological pretenses. It creates an untouchable ruling clique central to all totalitarian movements. Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless.

for more: https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/07/our-animal-farm/

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The corruption of the Renaissance Church prompted the Reformation, which in turn sparked a Counter-Reformation of reformist, and more zealous, Catholics.

The cultural excesses and economic recklessness of the Roaring ’20s were followed by the bleak, dour, and impoverished years of the Great Depression.

The 1960s counterculture led to Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, as “carefree hippies” turned into careerist “yuppies.”

So social, cultural, economic, and political extremism prompt reactions — and sometimes counter-reactions.

Read the full article here

Watch the interview here