Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News
Optimism, Inc: Dante’s California Inferno—Nine months later.
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Two weeks ago, I drove up Route 168 to Huntington Lake, sometimes known as Lakeshore, California.
I had not been there since winter. I have a small house up there, at nearly ground zero of the “Creek Fire” (September to December 2020) that devoured much of the central Sierra National Forest. The house, along with those of my neighbors, should have been engulfed with the other tragic destruction of 900 or so other cabins and structures over a vast area. But it was due to heroic efforts of the local and state Fire service frontline fighters and employees, some of whom drove their dozers into the flames and made a huge firebreak around the market, restaurant, marina—and our houses—near the lake. When I fly on American or United from Fresno to Dallas or Denver, the entire four-month-long, 400,000-acre black swath of destruction is visible from high above. The fire suppression cost was nearly $200 million alone. No one knows the cost of all the lost property, equipment and infrastructure—and probably never will.
Continue reading “Optimism, Inc: Dante’s California Inferno—Nine months later.”Eeyore’s Cabinet: When Is Some Hatred, Some Racism OK?
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part Two
Here are some puerile comments from a Sarah Jeong 2018 rant on social media. She was appointed for a while to the New York Times editorial board, which is usually and otherwise bothered by racial venom:
Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins…Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men…White people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.
OK, you reason, she was just a young pampered Ivy League sensationalist, addicted to social media, eager to gain clickbait attention.
Continue reading “Eeyore’s Cabinet: When Is Some Hatred, Some Racism OK?”The Classicist: The Value of Studying the Classics
Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 // The Victor Davis Hanson Show
This Isn’t Your Father’s Left-Wing Revolution
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Starry-eyed radicals in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that they either were going to take over America or destroy it.
One of their favorite psychodramatic mottos was “Change it or Lose it,” even as protests focused on drugs, music, race, class, sex, fashion—and almost anything and everything.
Sixties radicals tutored America on long hair, wire-rim eyeglasses, and who was a drag, a square, a bummer, and who was hip, cool, groovy, mellow, and far out. Most of these silly revolutionaries were not unhinged Weathermen killers or SDS would-be Communists, but just adolescents along for the good-time ride.
Eeyore’s Cabinet: When Is Some Hatred, Some Racism OK?
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part One
A canon of the Left has always been that “words matter.” But do they?
Only sometimes, and selectively so.
So when Trump, for example, insisted on calling the SARS-CoV-2 virus the “China virus”—in a manner of the 1918 “Spanish flu,” or the way the Left did in the first few months of the pandemic or subsequently referred to mutant strains as “the South African virus,” or the “Brazilian virus”—he then became a “racist.” (How ironic that “Wuhan/China virus” may be the most appropriate term, if it is confirmed that Chinese scientists engineered the gain-of-function COVID-19 virus, and if especially their research was known to or overseen by the Chinese military).
Continue reading “Eeyore’s Cabinet: When Is Some Hatred, Some Racism OK?”The Traditionalist: To Plague Or To Be Plagued
Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 & Just the News
Listen to Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discuss Biden, the Harris faction, the new evidence on COVID and its cures, and whether America is slumping into cultural and political regression.
The Lethal Wages of Trump Derangement Madness
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Think about it: For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.
Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited—regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant—given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family.
Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.
Eeyore’s Cabinet: Living in Our Kingdom of Lies
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part Two
There were a few more lies we lived with in our Kingdom of Untruth.
The Satanic Andrew Cuomo Deification
Over last summer and early fall 2020, Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo reached mythic media proportions. His ingratitude was enshrined as New York, “get-used-to-it, buddy” chutzpah. Yes, he momentarily feigned gratitude that Trump had listened to his hysterical daily rantings about the streets littered with corpses unless, right now, immediately, Trump sent a hospital ship, a tent-city hospital, thousands of ventilators, and protective equipment.
And Cuomo got them all. Yet mysteriously he did not seem to use them much. As the 2020-election campaign geared up and his name was dropped as a key cabinet secretary or even VP, Cuomo dropped his daily attacks on the hapless Mayor De Blasio and turned on his former benefactor Trump. Or as NPR put it, “The regular briefings helped buoy his approval ratings in New York and make him perhaps the country’s most recognizable Democratic leader in the struggle against COVID-19.”
Continue reading “Eeyore’s Cabinet: Living in Our Kingdom of Lies”The Classicist: Memories for Memorial Day
Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 // Private Papers
Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler discuss the firebombing of Japan, Battlefield Monuments Commission, and favorite war movies.