VDH's Blade of Perseus

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Some 80 years ago, on August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between Communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential — and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and the Netherlands.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Any majority population must be careful not to revert to pre-civilized tribalism and oppressing minority groups. The United States, like every other country that enjoys diverse populations has struggled from its beginning to ensure equality, sometimes unsuccessfully, and only at the cost of thousands of lives.

While the United States was founded originally mostly by those of European ancestry and was plagued by the endemic racism of the age, especially in regard to African slaves and Native Americans, nonetheless its unique Constitution, embedded within a larger framework of the Western Enlightenment, institutionalized self-reflection and the chance for amendment. America’s founding documents were unique in their singular calls for innate and universal human freedom and equality under the law that would eventually and logically demand reification of such ideals.

In other words, in America there was a real chance to overcome not American sins per se, but the ancient sins of mankind in general.

The result is that more than 243 years after its independence, the current longest-lived democracy arguably is also the world’s most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse nation and unmatched in its efforts to promote equality.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

A  great deal of controversy has continued the past few days over Robert Francis O’Rourke’s longtime use of a nickname given to him at birth (albeit temporarily jettisoned while in prep school) — especially in the wake of his recent sensational and unfounded charges that Donald Trump is directly responsible for the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and that white supremacy defines America, past and present, and explains Trump’s culpability.

The point of the amused contention is not that O’Rourke was given such a nickname at or near birth. Rather, the controversy is over his continued use of the sobriquet for cynical political advantage in a somewhat related manner to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s longtime false cultural appropriation of a Native American identity for careerist purposes. After all, we live in a progressive era in which “cultural appropriation” is a mortal sin and non-minority university students are routinely chastised for wearing clothing or hairstyles associated with minority groups or appearing in dramas playing the roles of characters of a different ethnic background.

According to the Dallas Morning News, a quite prescient senior O’Rourke once explained why he had given the shortened form of the Spanish “Roberto” to his son as a nickname. And he seemed to imply that such naming was for political reasons in addition to avoiding confusing young Robert with his maternal grandfather of the same first name:

In the backdrop of the city’s multicultural community, his father, Pat O’Rourke, a consummate politician, once explained why he nicknamed his son Beto: Nicknames are common in Mexico and along the border, and if he ever ran for office in El Paso, the odds of being elected in this mostly Mexican-American city were far greater with a name like Beto than Robert Francis O’Rourke.

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Victor Davis Hanson // The Hill

The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have rightly shocked the nation. In our understandable collective furor over the senseless loss of life, all the old political divides are being revisited, now in a climate of often frightening blame, anger and distrust — from gun control to the role of extremist ideologies to mental health to responsibilities of political leaders not to inflame tensions.

Such reexamination is a fine and good thing.

But what is not is a different sort of outrage, one that leverages the deaths of innocents to destroy the reputations and careers of others.

It was to be expected that the progressive media and political activists would go after President Trump and his effort to secure the border by blaming him directly for the deaths in El Paso — while not extending such flawed logic to other mass shooters in Dayton and, previously, in Washington, D.C. Both those shooters explicitly claimed fervent support for left-wing causes and particular progressive candidates, such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Democrats by 2004 had become obsessed with defeating incumbent President George W. Bush.

Four years earlier, in the 2000 election, Bush had won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Democrats were still furious that Bush supposedly had been “selected” by the Supreme Court over the contested vote tally in Florida rather than “elected” by the majority of voters.

By late 2003, Bush’s popularity had dipped because of the unpopular Iraq War, which a majority in both houses of Congress approved but had since disowned.

Bush was attacked nonstop as a Nazi, fascist, and war criminal. “Bush lied, people died” was the new left-wing mantra.

Talk of Bush’s impeachment was in the air. Democrats remembered that his father, George H. W. Bush, had lost his reelection bid in 1992. They hoped the same fate awaited his son.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Half of the Democratic 20-person primary field in the debates appeared unhappy, shrill, and self-righteous, and determined that no candidate should out-left any other.

So far, they certainly sound clueless about how they sound to those in western Pennsylvania or southern Michigan.

Their timidity also only accentuated rampant hypocrisy. It manifested itself a number of ways, from fear of defending their own past records to cowardice in calling out the rank socialist absurdities of the demagogues on stage.

Does any candidate believe in one’s prior convictions?

In debate one, Joe Biden could have barked back at the attack-dog Kamala Harris that federally mandated school busing was always a bad and unpopular idea. He could have asked her whether the young Harris was aware of the chaos of the 1970s that surrounded forced busing, the dislocations that caused more problems than any problem that busing solved. He might have mentioned that forced busing would find zero support today.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

When figurehead Robert Mueller likely allowed Andrew Weissman to form his special counsel team to investigate so-called charges of Russian collusion involving Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin, Washington elites became bouncy. The high-profile legal “powerhouse” lineup immediately looked like a sure-thing—an elite slaughter of the yokels.

As they perused the résumés of the New York and Washington prosecutors, and the Wilmer-Hale veterans, reporters were ecstatic that the supposedly straight-shooting Republican Mueller had turned his investigation into what the media soon boasted was a progressive “dream team” of “all-stars,” a veritable “hunter-killer team” of get-Trump professionals. One would have thought mere names and credentials win indictments, regardless of the evidence.

The subtext was that Trump had all but met his Waterloo. Indictments for conspiracy, obstruction, and worse yet inevitably would follow, until Trump either resigned in disgrace or was impeached. The media counterparts of the dream-team on MSNBC and CNN would make short work of the rubes. On air law professors and legal analysts who knew “Bob” Mueller (the same ones who assured us that “Jim” Comey was a “straight-shooter”), after all, swore this would be true.

Almost all the all-stars were not just liberal but “correct” as well. Many were either Clinton donors; a few in the past had defended either Clinton aides or the Clinton foundation. Many also had been tagged as Department of Justice future superstars. Their tony degrees seemed designed to spell the doom of the buffoon Trump.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he would like to beat up President Donald Trump.

In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Biden’s tough-guy braggadocio was apparently no slip. A year later, he doubled down on his physical threats.

“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? … He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”

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