VDH's Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part One

Barn Owls really do like barns. And they are invaluable predators of mice, squirrels, rats and such who all do their small part to wreck a barn and its environs. And yet they are not the fierce Great-Horned-Owls of six-foot wingspans that swooped just above the ground as they once terrified us in the orchard. They are not those strange little “screech” owls, without necks that roost at night in our redwood trees and hoot without fear. 

As I have mentioned here before, barn owls have the face of monkeys, hence the sobriquet monkey/monkey-faced owls. They seem globalists. In Greece, I once saw one on the island of Aegina in a crumbling Byzantine Church. At dusk in Hillsdale, Michigan I would see them on the bike path in an old pump shed. 

When growing up, there were always pairs who had nests in the rafters and kept rodents out of the barn, where the sweat boxes of raisins evened out before trucking the crop into Sun-Maid. I don’t think they attacked the flicker woodpeckers. But the more the two owls flew on patrol, the rarer seemed those pests that drilled holes throughout the barn (usually covered up with tin-can lids). 

Continue reading “A Child’s Garden of Animals: Barnicide” →

Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

How often during the last year of woke, have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? 

Million-dollar-a year university presidents virtue signal on the cheap their own sort of “unearned white privilege.” 

Multimillionaire Meghan Markle and the Obamas, from their plush estates, indict Americans for their biases. 

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You can find the interview on the Left’s pathology below.

Or click here:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/victor-davis-hanson-lefts-vague-claims-america-racist

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn? 

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The world may be increasingly baffled by 2021 America, and its sudden scapegoating of “white supremacist” hobgoblins for problems it cannot or will not solve. 

Roughly 400 Americans were shot over the past July 4 holiday weekend. About 150 of them were killed. The majority, both of the shooters and the victims, were inner-city, African-American males. The level of violence approaches the bad casualty days of the recent Afghan and Iraq wars. 

Meanwhile, during the carnage, progressive black leaders, from Representatives Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to Cori Bush (D-Mo.), blasted America’s foundational holiday and the country at large for its white supremacy and the current supposed lack of freedom for African Americans. 

During 120 days of rioting, arson, and looting during the summer of 2020, the country suffered about $2 billion in property damage, roughly 25 deaths, and some 14,000 arrests. 

Rioters burned down a Minneapolis police precinct. They set afire a federal courthouse in Portland. And they tried to incinerate the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church next to the White House. Downtown areas of Portland and Seattle were taken over by rioters, who occupied entire city blocks with impunity. 

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News

Join Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc as they discuss immigration in the late, declining Roman Empire and the current chaos on our border.