Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Armed insurrection—a motley mob riot with no leaders, no firearms, no plans, and resulting in five fatalities, four from natural causes and one shot while unarmed by an unnamed police officer.
Assault—anything but 120 days of rioting, looting and arson, $2 billion in damage, 25 killed, and 14,000 arrested.
Bipartisan—you are if you hate Trump.
Continue reading “Words Matter—Or Not: The Biden Vocabulary of the Times”
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part Two.
Here are the last two of five observations about our current woke racial mania.
4. What were race relations like before the death of George Floyd? Did stats show that of the millions arrested each year by police, unarmed blacks were disproportionally lethally shot? Does a systemically racist country in the last twelve years elect both a black president and a black vice president? Does a racist nation canonize affirmative action for 55 years that provides reparatory preferences to those who are nonwhite as a means to ensure equality of opportunity in reaction to the past racism of those mostly now dead?
Does a contemporary racist country strive to achieve minority unemployment in 2019 of 2.5 percent for Asian-Americans, 3.9 percent for Latinos, and 5.5 percent for African-Americans? In a systemically racist country, why do so many ethnic groups out earn the per capita household income of the purported oppressive majority of whites, in some cases by $20,000 per year? Why in popular culture are media racial imposters, such as a Ward Churchill, an Elizabeth Warren, a Rachel Dolezal, or a Shaun King mostly whites faking minority identities when it is said to be a purported disadvantage?
Continue reading “Eeyore’s Cabinet: The Paradoxes of Woke Racism”Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Traditionalist and conservative America once was the U.S. military’s greatest defender.
Bipartisan conservatives in Congress ensured generous Pentagon budgets. Statistics of those killed in action, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, reveal that white males, especially those of the rural and middle classes, were demographically “overrepresented” in offering the ultimate sacrifice to their country.
When generals, active and retired, have become controversial, usually conservative America could be counted on to stick with them.
There will be “no safe space, no sanctuary from wokeism until the system starts to erode the safety and the security of the elite that created it,” says classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson.
In this episode, Hanson breaks down the problems he sees plaguing American society today, from the assault on meritocracy to the “Frankenstein monster” of moral relativism.
Throughout society today, elites justify their control of or manipulation of information as for the good of the people, Hanson says. It’s the “noble lie”: “I’m smarter than you. I’m your platonic guardian. I can lie for your own good…Just don’t dare suggest I’m lying,” Hanson says.
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Here are the first three of five observations about our current woke racial mania.
1. Are the non-white elite in government, universities, entertainment, and the corporate world who rail about “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” and pathological “whites” in general mostly referring to their own elite white colleagues? Are not they doppelgangers of the same class without knowing much about so-called white, working-class America outside their own enclaves?
The social media crowd of Silicon Valley, the university administrative cadre, the corporate boardroom grandees, and the thousands of neurotic Hollywood elites are not exactly fond of the two-thirds of white America precisely because they feel their money, privilege, and zip codes exempt them from the consequences of their loud nihilist advocacies they are so eager to impose on others. In other words, is not most of the current racial war the infighting of those of the same class who agree in theory they are on the same side, but in the concrete don’t like each other much, as both claw for similar spoils?
Continue reading “Eeyore’s Cabinet: The Paradoxes of Woke Racism”Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Debt is suffocating us. Our currency is on its way to being Lebanonized.
Most major American cities are broke, dirty, unsafe, and run by either corrupt incumbents, neo-Marxists, or both. The law is optional, and applied asymmetrically on the basis of race and ideology. The past is found guilty by the laws of the present and so it is being undone.
The military budget is on a trajectory to be the smallest in terms of GDP allotment since World War II; its careerist officers, for their own short-term interests, are now demonizing and will soon be driving away the very demographic that has suffered percentage-wise the greatest casualties in recent wars and was once unquestionably the foundation of the military.
Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News
Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc discuss the cultural significance of the Battle of Shiloh and the Year of the Wuhan Virus.