VDH's Blade of Perseus

Ricochet Podcast Featuring Victor Davis Hanson

With a little over three weeks to go before the election, we thought it would a good time to have a heart to heart discussion with our good friend Victor Davis Hanson. the Classics professor, the military historian, the farmer, the cultural observer, and the author of The Case For Trump, his best selling book that came out in 2017 and was re-issued earlier this year. It’s the most cogent case we’ve seen for the re-election of the President. In this one on one conversation, Peter Robinson takes Victor through all the reasons to cast a vote for Donald Trump and challenges Victor with a few reasons not to pull the lever for him. It’s an enlightening and informative hour and should be required listening (if we do say so ourselves) for all voters, especially those who are still undecided. Have at it.

Listen to the episode here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

California’s state legislature just passed, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed, Assembly Bill 3121 to explore providing reparations to California’s African-American population — 155 years after the abolition of slavery.

Apparently, when California’s one-party government cannot find solutions to current existential crises, it turns to divisive issues that have little to do with the safety and well-being of its 40 million citizens.

California has the highest gas taxes in the nation, even as its ossified state highways remain clogged and dangerous. Why, then, does Sacramento kept pouring billions of dollars into the now-calcified high-speed-rail project?

When fires raged, killed dozens, polluted the air for months, consumed thousands of structures, and scorched 4 million acres of forest, the governor reacted by thundering about global warming. But Newsom was mostly mute about state and federal green policies that discouraged the removal of millions of dead and drought-stricken trees, which provided the kindling for the infernos.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

In the second presidential election debate between President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on October 16, 2012, CNN moderator Candy Crowley sensed that Obama, coming off a dismal initial September 26 debate, was again floundering. 

Romney was driving home the valid point that the Obama Administration had inadequately prepared the American mission in Benghazi for likely terrorist attacks. And such laxity resulted in a horrific attack and the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. 

Yet in the wake of the attacks, Team Obama denied that the killing of four Americans was indeed an act of terror. Instead, it fed the public a transparently but politically correct false narrative of a spontaneous riot in reaction to a video posted by a purported right-wing Egyptian residing on American soil. 

Yet in the debate, Obama retorted: “The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime.” 

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Once it was announced that President Trump had COVID-19, the media almost immediately talked of all the people in the “Trump orbit” who fell ill from COVID-19 — including many on his staff, U.S. senators, and at least three White House reporters.

The surreal subtext was not that the toxic Trump had been infected by someone else. Apparently reporters, in their Trump-obsessed universe, believed in some mysterious Aristotelian concept of spontaneous generation, by which his self-spawned coronavirus germs had sickened all within his deadly circuit. Or perhaps Trump was guilty of catching the germ from one of his staffers, who in turn would never have been sickened if they had never been close to Trump in the first place. The possibility that the White House “positive” reporters might have been careless at times or might’ve infected others was never entertained.

Within a few hours, the usual camps and suspects weighed in. Former Clinton and Obama staffer Zara Rahim prayed for Trump’s demise and celebrated his infection with a terse “I hope he dies.” The Washington Post hastily took down an official Twitter feed automatically posting an op-ed column expressing a similar hope for a dead president: “Imagine what it will be like to never have to think about Trump again,” on the realization that running such a headline while Trump was sick “rendered it tasteless”— as if it was not tasteless when he was well. Write that after swapping the name “Obama” for “Trump,” and the FBI would have shown up at their doors.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The news media until recently had rarely criticized the medical advice of experts — especially those who worked for federal bureaucracies, international organizations, or elite universities.

Yet the much-praised Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, has demonstrably weakened the effort to fight COVID-19.

During the critical initial weeks of the virus’s spread, Tedros parroted Chinese propaganda. He falsely assured a complacent world that the virus was probably not transmissible between humans and did not warrant travel bans. The fact that Tedros was the first WHO director not to have a medical degree was seldom cited by the media.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

After the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd while in custody of officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, protesters demanded the fair prosecution of those responsible. Yet quickly the demonstrations devolved into a veritable cultural revolution, spearheaded by two groups, Antifa and Black Lives Matter, both with strong socialist origins and agendas.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

There was once a tradition of Democratic liberalism. But that wing of the Democratic Party no longer exists and died sometime in the 1990s. Old-style liberalism has been absorbed by Progressivism at best and unapologetic socialism at worst—in a journey on the supposedly predetermined arc of history that bends toward 1984.

The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power. 

Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

After the summer protests and rioting in many large cities, activists demanded a defunding, or at least radical pullbacks, of the police. So-called crime experts often concurred. So some city governments ignored public warnings and diminished their police presence despite a sharp rise in crime in many cities. Looting and arson were often ignored.

If you call 911 in a large American city, there is no guarantee that anyone will answer promptly and send out police to aid the endangered. So gun sales have soared. Some people who never before owned weapons, or who even opposed the use of firearms, are now terrified to remain unarmed. Self-protection often outweighs abstract ideology.

According to a recent Gallup poll, most black Americans favor maintaining or increasing police presence. Often, city officials who support cutting back on law enforcement still expect their own homes and property to be constantly policed. The same is often true of activist elites who live far from the inner city.

Large swaths of the American West are now charred by out-of-control wildfires. Some governors and many federal bureaucrats blame the conflagrations on climate change. But those who actually live within forests, or on mountains and foothills, that are historically vulnerable to wildfires know that the epic droughts of 2013–15 killed or dried out millions of acres of trees and vegetation.

Read the full article here

Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory published by Forbes

Trying to figure whither Nord Stream 2 (hereafter NS2) – the undersea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany – is akin to solving five complicated jigsaw puzzles at once. Competing interests, changing legal foundations, and momentum all make it difficult to either start or stop. One thing is certain: Russia is playing a long game from which it will not retreat until NS2 becomes operational.

At 95% complete and 11 billion Euros out of pocket, the NS2 consortium, comprised of Russia’s state-owned natural gas monopoly (Gazprom) and German, Austrian, and Dutch utility giants, seemed poised to enter into service by early 2021. The Trump administration had already played its sanction card to the limit, and there were just a few regulatory issues to be ironed out.

That was before the “attempted murder” (to use Angela Merkel’s characterization) of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny on August 20 over East Siberian skies. The Navalny case, piled on top of Russian hacking of the German Bundestag and a blatant political assassination on the streets of Berlin, raised German voices in favor of stopping NS2.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The problem with conventional wisdom is not that it is always wrong. The rub is that the majority of “experts” unthinkingly and habitually mouth its validity until they ensure that it becomes static, unchanging, and immune from reexamination and dissent — an intolerant religious orthodoxy that finally become dangerous.

The recent Middle East breakthroughs are a perfect example. Both the Obama and Trump administrations sought quite different ways of navigating through the nearly 75-year-old “Middle East problem,” usually framed as the Israeli–“Palestinian” question.

Obama, in radical fashion, sought to empower and elevate Iran. The so-called Iran deal, the dropping of sanctions, the nocturnal infusions of cash, the exemptions for clear violations of the deal’s protocols, the nefarious work of Hezbollah — all that and more was excused on the theory that a growing Persian Shiite Iranian nexus from Tehran to the Mediterranean was inevitable and would “balance” both Israel and the so-called moderate Sunni Arab states. That realignment might prevent a Middle East war and end the leverage of America’s former Arab allies and Israel over us.

Read full article here