The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month—100 Years Ago

victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The First World War ended 100 years ago this month on November 11, 1918, at 11 a.m. Nearly 20 million people had perished since the war began on July 28, 1914.

In early 1918, it looked as if the Central Powers—Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire—would win.

Czarist Russia gave up in December 1917. Tens of thousands of German and Austrian soldiers were freed to redeploy to the Western Front and finish off the exhausted French and British armies.

The late-entering United States did not declare war on Germany and Austria-Hungary until April 1917. Six months later, America had still not begun to deploy troops in any great number.

Then, suddenly, everything changed. By summer 1918, hordes of American soldiers began arriving in France in unimaginable numbers of up to 10,000 doughboys a day. Anglo-American convoys began devastating German submarines. The German high command’s tactical blunders stalled the German offensives of spring 1918—the last chance before growing Allied numbers overran German lines.

Read the full article here.

The Issues That Tore Us Apart

victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Slavery was the issue that blew up America in 1861 and led to the Civil War.

But for the 85 years between the nation’s founding and that war, it had seemed that somehow America could eventually phase out the horrific institution and do so largely peacefully.

But by 1861, an array of other differences had magnified the great divide over slavery. The plantation class of the South had grown fabulously rich — and solely dependent — on King Cotton and by extension slave labor. It bragged that it was supplying the new mills of the industrial revolution in Europe and had wrongly convinced itself that not just the U.S. but also Britain could not live without Southern plantations.

Federal tariffs hurt the exporting South far more than the North. Immigration and industrialization focused on the North, often bypassing the rural, largely Scotch-Irish South, which grew increasingly disconnected culturally from the North.

Read the full article here.

CNN’s Existential War With Trump

victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of “fake news.” And the constant refrain “enemy of the people” should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN.

Yet Trump’s obsessions with CNN are largely reactive, not preemptive.

After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative. Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics. No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition.

In his serial pushbacks against CNN, if Trump has perhaps surpassed the invective of Barack Obama’s own periodic dismissals of Fox News, he has clearly not ordered his Justice Department to monitor the communications of any CNN reporter, in the manner of Eric Holder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Associated Press journalists are not being monitored by the administration as they were during the Obama years. That difference is oddly never cited by CNN reporters who are want to decry their own treatment by the administration, but who were not particularly vocal when their professional colleagues were once placed under electronic surveillance.

Read the full article here.

Angry Reader 11-02-2018

victorhanson

From An Angry Reader:

Maybe if nazi apologists weren’t threatening to lock up their political enemies, or harassing them in their columns, we might see less polarization. Hi Victor, Nice to meet you. You wrote about me in March. Care to discuss? Or are you just up for the pot shots in your column?

Melinda Byerley, Founder, TimeshareCMO

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Dear Angry Tweeter Melinda Byerley,

I will only respond to your latest tweet and do so once, since it is merely one of a frenzied series that displays a certain obsessive-compulsive monotony.

You do not start out well when your third word is “nazi” (sic). If you meant to include me in your category of Nazi “apologists” who wish “to lock up” their enemies or harass them, you might at least cite proof that I am a Nazi sympathizer, or have advised locking up or harassing any one. As for harassing or locking people up, remember that you are writing in an era in which the Obama-administration’s FBI, CIA, DOJ, and IRS were all weaponized for political purposes and many of these agencies’ top administrators have resigned, been fired, retired, or face criminal exposure.

You are apparently angry because I merely quoted an infamous rant of your own that you posted on social media right after the 2016 election. It was reposted and republished in hundreds of social media and news venues, apparently because your candor in expressing your abject disdain for red-state America became iconic of why and how the election turned out as it did. In sum, your venom inadvertently became the touchstone to the prejudices and stereotypes of a self-appointed elite.

So what I quoted in my column was an extended excerpt of your own words as they were reported in the general media and they were as follows:

“One thing middle America could do is to realize that no educated person wants to live in a sh**hole with stupid people. Especially violent, racist, and/or misogynistic ones…When corporations think about where to locate call centers, factories, development centers, etc., they also have to deal with the fact that those towns have nothing going for them. No infrastructure, just a few bars and a terrible school system.”

Your own words reveal a great deal of hatred and stereotyping, and yet in the end display abject ignorance. By ignorance, I mean even your prejudices are not factual.

In fact, California infrastructure is usually rated at or near bottom in most state rankings of roads, bridges, and airports. The streets of suburban Palo Alto and Menlo Park are often potholed and substandard. California ranks usually in the bottom fifth of our nation’s schools; test scores usually rate no higher than 45th in comparisons with the other 50 states. Silicon Valley professionals apparently realize these depressing statistics, which may explain spiraling enrollments in private academies and prep schools by those who have apparently no desire to put their own children in Santa Clara and San Mateo public schools and have thus forsaken public education, despite their otherwise progressive and egalitarian ideologies. I have traveled to lots of small towns and rural areas in the so-called swing states that gave Trump the election, and have not witnessed the degree of homelessness that now characterizes major California cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.

Thousands of Silicon Valley tech workers, in addition to tens of thousands of low-wage and often minority laborers, live in their automobiles and vans which dot streets where they work—especially in the environs of the signature companies of Silicon Valley.

Multiple families cram into single Redwood City homes. Why, when the market capitalization of companies like Apple, Facebook and Google reaches nearly three trillion dollars, and there are vast expanses of open land between the Pacific Ocean and freeway 280, are not there not affordable housing projects, especially in a state that virtue-signals its egalitarianism?

You may think the hinterland is, in your words, a “sh**hole”, but your own state is home to the most impoverished residents in the nation, where outbreaks of hepatitis and typhus are now not uncommon. California’s poverty rate ranges at about 20 percent of the resident population; one-third of the nation’s residents on some form of public assistance now live in California. Wealth disparity is among the most acute in the nation. Crime now makes many California cities quite unsafe.

In fact, hundreds of California businesses are relocating to red-state America, often in areas without the natural beauty and climate of California, given that they find the infrastructure, government regulations, schools, safety, and power and fuel costs far superior to those in California. New changes in the tax codes and continued depressing news about rising California crime, homelessness, failing schools and public agencies may accelerate the trend.

The people of rural America outside California in fact have a lot going for them. They are hardly “stupid”, and they feel no need to flee the public-school system. As far as bars go, I think there may well be more bars per capita in cities of California, Silicon Valley included, than what I have seen in places like Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio.

Again, I bear no animus toward you. I wrote not “pot-shots,” but simply quoted your own words—as did hundreds of other writers and journalists who found them emblematic, as I did, of a cultural and political denseness that helps to explain the Trump victory. Your current scurrilous tweet alleging that I am a Nazi sympathizer only confirms your original unhinged posting. So not only do you write recklessly and inaccurately, but you display a certain crudity perhaps unbecoming of a CEO of a corporation. That you couch your views with an aura of self-assumed cultural superiority is really quite sad.

When Laws Are Not Enforced, Anarchy Follows

victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

What makes citizens obey the law is not always their sterling character. Instead, fear of punishment—the shame of arrest, fines or imprisonment—more often makes us comply with laws. Law enforcement is not just a way to deal with individual violators but also a way to remind society at large that there can be no civilization without legality.

Or, as 17th-century British statesman George Savile famously put it: “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”

In the modern world, we call such prompt, uniform and guaranteed law enforcement “deterrence,” from the Latin verb meaning “to frighten away.” One protester who disrupts a speech is not the problem. But if unpunished, he green-lights hundreds more like him.

Worse still, when one law is left unenforced, then all sorts of other laws are weakened.

The result of hundreds of “sanctuary cities” is not just to forbid full immigration enforcement in particular jurisdictions. They also signal that U.S. immigration law, and other laws by extension, can be ignored.

Read the full article here.

The Electronic Committee of Public Safety

victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Celebrities, politicians, and almost anyone of influence and wealth are always an incorrect or insensitive word away from the contemporary electronic guillotine. Regardless of the circumstances of their dilemmas, the beheaded rarely win sympathy from the mob. Coliseum-like roars of approval greet their abrupt change of fortune from their past exalted status.

So, for example, perhaps few feel sorry for anchor Megyn Kelly, recently all but fired by NBC and now walking away with most of her $69 million salary package as a severance payout.

Kelly was let go ostensibly for making a sloppy but not malicious morally equivalent comparison between whites at Halloween dressing up in costumes as blacks, and blacks likewise appearing as whites. But she sealed her fate by uttering the historically disparaging word “black face” as some sort of neutral bookend to her use of “white face.” Her fatal crime, then, was insensitive thought and speech and historical ignorance.

For someone so familiar with the rules of our electronic French Revolution and the felonies of speech and thought, Kelly proved surprisingly naïve in a variety of ways.

Read the full article here.

Caravan Contradictions

victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

A“caravan”—the euphemism for a current foot-army of more than 10,000 Central Americans—of would-be border crossers has now passed into Mexico. The marchers promise they will continue 1,000 miles and more northward to the U.S. border, despite warnings from President Trump that as unauthorized immigrants they will be turned away. No one has yet explained how, or by whom or what, such a mass of humanity has been supplied, cared for, and organized.

Once at the border, the immigrants further predict that they will successfully, but illegally, enter the United States, then claim refugee status, and finally rely on sympathetic public opinion—and progressive political activism—to avoid deportation.

If past experience is any guide, they are quite right in thinking they can melt into the population, ignore future legal summonses, and count on the de facto amnesty that currently protects 22 million illegal aliens, the vast majority from Mexico and Central America. Border crashers assume rightly that U.S. security agents and the military will not use force, on the principle that Central Americans appearing on CNN battling helmeted Americans with batons and tear gas is bad American “optics.”

But for all the staged midterm theatrics, the caravan illustrates the abject ironies and paradoxes of the entire illegal alien project.

Read the full article here.

One Person can (In)validate the Steele Dossier and No One Seems to Bother

victorhanson

Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in Ricochet

Christopher Steele deliberately constructed his Trump dossier to be unverifiable. As long as it remains invalidated, it hangs over the Trump administration, even though the Clinton campaign was identified as its funder and Steele refused to vouch for it under oath. Apparently he did not express such doubts when he was peddling the dossier to a skeptical press.

Steele purports that his “trusted sources” for the dossier are high-level Kremlin officials with intimate knowledge of Putin and his inner circle. I have expressed serious doubts about this claim by asking: Why would someone of such elevated rank disclose the Kremlin’s secrets for a few bucks? In the unlikely case they are what Steele claims, Steele has positioned his sources behind an impenetrable firewall.

The Washington Post shows how this works:

It is “impossible to say that the dossier is entirely inaccurate (there are some glimmers [my italics] of accurate predictions)…. it is also impossible to say that it has been broadly validated….That unsatisfying answer…. gives either side of the political fight all the ammo that it might want.

Read the full article here.

New Online Course at Hillsdale College

victorhanson

I will be teaching a new online course on World War II at Hillsdale College. See the following tweet for more information.

Purchase a copy of The Second World Wars here.

 

‘Medicare for All’ is as scary as it gets

victorhanson

Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in The Hill

There is no mystery as to what House Democrats want to do with American medical care. Their intentions are clearly spelled out in House Resolution 676, also known as the “Expanded & Improved Medicare for All Act.”

Its sponsors promise to provide “comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents, improved health care delivery, and for other purposes.”

These assurances, as sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and his Democrat colleagues, carry as much weight as President Obama’s promise that you can keep your medical insurance and your doctor under Obama Care.

Only HR676 is much worse: You lose your primary health insurance, you cannot buy supplemental insurance (such as Medicare Advantage), and your medical care provider must be either public or non-profit, operating under the strictures of Washington bureaucrats.

Read the full article here.