Archive for the ‘Victor Davis Hanson’ Category

THE NEW REGRESSIVE DARK AGES – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021

 

 

The New Regressive Dark Ages

May 30, 2021
Once upon a time long ago, we agreed there were certain immutable laws of human nature. These laws were based on facts, reality, and data.
In other words, we accepted common sense about the way the world worked according to logical and even “scientific” principles. That assumption defined us as “enlightened” rather than Dark Age reductionists and ideological- or myth-driven zealots.
Not now. “Progressives,” especially the media, are most often regressive, anti-Enlightenment, and intolerant people, who start with a deductive premise and then make the evidence conform to it—or else.

Regressives

For example, we used to believe that if the government printed more money without commensurate sudden rises in population or economic output, inflation followed. And money cheapened in value all the more so if the government simultaneously both incentivized labor non-participation through over generous entitlements, and promised or enacted higher taxes and more regulations. The latter inevitably would discourage production as demand from a stimulated economy rose.
In 100 days, we’ve either done all of those things or, at least sent messages to producers that we shall do so shortly. Why then are we surprised that monthly consumer prices are spiking after nearly 20 years of very low inflation? Why are our essentials such as lumber, gasoline, housing, appliances, and food skyrocketing? Is the current idea that there is no science of economics? Or is inflation good by “spreading the wealth” through decreasing the value of money for those who have too much of it?
Deterrence is also an ancient law. Humans make instant cost-benefit analyses and act accordingly—from nation states that weigh the advisability of war to potential criminals who gauge the chances of their arrest and punishment.
Share

VIDEO AND ARTICLE – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Wednesday, February 17th, 2021

 


VIDEO – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON 

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.

 

Victor Davis Hanson on Impeachment and the ‘Cancer’ of Woke Ideology | American Thought Leaders

ARTICLE –   BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON  THE WORLD GOES ON WHILE AMERICA SLEEPS 
February 11, 2021

The Democratically controlled Senate spends thousands of collective hours conducting an impeachment trial against a president who is no longer president.

The acquittal is predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago — and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors.

The Democratically controlled House of Representatives is busy ferreting out purportedly extremist Republican House members. For the first time in memory, one party now removes committee members of the other.

Yet for each Republican outlier, there is a corresponding Democratic firebrand member who has either called for violence or voiced anti-Semitic slurs — and yet will not be removed from House committees.

So the asymmetrical tit-for-tat continues.

The subtext to this madness is that the Democratic Congress, the new administration, the administrative state and the political left are obsessed with dismembering the presidential corpse of now-citizen Donald Trump.

Apparently they fear that one day he will rise from the infernal regions to wreak his revenge.

Meanwhile, life in America goes on.

(more…)

Share

THE REMAINS OF AN ADMINISTRATION

Wednesday, May 27th, 2020

 

This is one of the best articles that Victor Davis Hanson has written and that is saying something as he is a brilliant  writer and historian  !!!!  You’ll have to click on the link to read the article as National Review makes it too difficult to copy and paste their articles.   Thanks to Martha Jenkins for sharing this exceptional article.  Nancy    

The Remains of an Administration

Obama’s policies are in tatters, and the worst scandals of his White House are coming to light.
by Victor Davis Hanson    May 26,2020
“One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:
Gilded Socialism

Finally, the Obama post presidency did not help his cause. After eight years of lecturing the nation about the proper time to profit, or identifying the point after which there was no need to make additional money, or that private businesspeople did not really build their businesses, or the need to spread the wealth around, Obama liberated from office almost immediately rushed to the life of private jets and luxury yachts.

He signed multimillion-dollar tech and media deals characterized by requiring little expertise and less work but the promiscuous use of his brand and name. The erstwhile lecturer in chief about redlining and insidious bias bought a mansion in Washington’s toniest district; and after warning about rising seas, coastal flooding, and the need to lower them, he bought a seaside estate at Martha Vineyard, for the fire sale price of just under $12 million. In other words, he knew no time to stop profiting; there was no point when he had enough money; he saw no reason to spread his wealth around; and  he really did build his own empire,

The less charismatic purveyors of the Obama legacy have not done well.

Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to compile a dirty dossier on Trump and seed it in the Obama administration. She blew an election and ended up babbling and fixated permanently on her failure, before pathetically joining the “Resistance.” Joe Biden in his dotage may be spared her angst, given his own seeming inability to know exactly where he is and what he is supposed to say. Obama was supposed to have jump-started the careers of dozens of young, charismatic “diversity” imitators in the presidential arena, such as Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Deval Patrick, Kamala Harris, and Andrew Yang. All crashed and burned in the Democratic primaries, whether because they were not the Obama Adonis or because they reminded voters of his shallowness.

We were supposed to see a fundamental transformation of the country between 2009 and 2025, as the Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum finally made America right and correct. Instead, we witnessed eight years that ended in scandal whose full dimensions of criminality will take years to process.

NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump@vdhanson

Share

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON – MEMBERS OF PREVIOUS GENERATIONS NOW SEEM LIKE GIANTS

Sunday, May 3rd, 2020

 

Past vs. Present

Victor Davis Hanson column: Members of previous generations now seem like giants

Oct 9, 2019

 

www.richmond.com/opinion/columnists/victor-davis-hanson-column-members-of-previous-generations-now-seem-like-giants/article_bca413bb-5505-5ee9-8ed8-86a25e4f57a9.html

Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during the Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.

Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers’ monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.

Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?

Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up.

The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno — and not yet a foot of track laid.

Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?

California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.

 

When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with 11 years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns — and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our single replacement span in less than four years.

It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts.

Our generation required five years just to plan to replace a single section. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent six times the money on a quarter of the length of the bridge and required 13 agencies to grant approval. In 1936, just one agency oversaw the entire bridge project.

(more…)

Share

NEW IMPEACHMENT RULES WOULD SNARE OBAMA BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020

 

Thanks to Victor Davis Hanson for reminding us of all the  illegal  and corrupt actions taken by Obama during his presidency.   Just makes your blood boil that he got away with it all !  Would love to see him do a similar article on Hillary. He certainly would have plenty of material to work with !!!    Nancy  

Do not insult our collective intelligence by suggesting that Donald J. Trump abused the Constitution and the office of president in a way that would have been unthinkable to Barack Obama.

Obama was not impeached not because he did not do things that Donald Trump did, but because his opposition in the House did not do what Democrats later most willingly did: attempt a coup to remove a president without cause

By Victor Davis Hanson    March 1, 2020

New Impeachment Rules Would Snare Obama

March 2, 2020

Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person.

Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms. 

Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico.

It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hinthis “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards)

Fine—politicians and bureaucrats misspeak. It is no surprise that radical progressives like Holder are both partisans and tribalists or that they don’t always have positive thoughts about America, past or present. But Obama won the election. So voters had ample warning from his past that he would likely put as many leftists as he wished into government. He had the legal right and political rationale to do so, without his opponents inventing crimes to remove them. 

At least he did before the Trump hysteria.

Criminalizing Politics

(more…)

Share

AMERICAN INGRATE: ILHAN OMAR AND THE PROGRESSIVE ISLAMIST TAKEOVER OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Tuesday, February 25th, 2020

 

NEWLY RELEASED BOOK

 
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 24, 2020 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BOOKSILHAN OMARMEDIAMINNESOTA

AMERICAN INGRATE: ILHAN OMAR

I met up with the Federalist’s Ben Weingarten in Minneapolis this past fall when he was in the process of finishing American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party. With a foreword by Andrew McCarthy, the book is published in paperback today by Bombardier Books; it is available on Amazon at the link.

Ben sent me and a few other students of Omar a copy of the book in galley last month. At my request, Ben forwarded the blurbs his early readers offered to recommend the book. With Ben’s permission, I am posting them below in lieu of a formal review of the book this morning:

Victor Davis Hanson: “Benjamin Weingarten professionally and thoroughly dissects the strange case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and demonstrates that much about the congresswoman is an enigma at best and a fraud at worst. We do not know, and authorities are apparently not interested in, her strange marriage…her tax avoidance, her violations of campaign financing laws, and her apparent disgust with a country that she…sought out and presently finds profitable. Weingarten’s case study of Omar serves as a larger indictment of the therapeutic mindset, which Omar manipulated so well on her way to notoriety and power. Weingarten suggests that if Omar had not existed, she would have had to be invented, given that she is a metaphor for a larger American pathology of progressive virtue-signaling and, ultimately, self-loathing.” – Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Dennis Prager: “American Ingrate is a serious, deeply researched work that makes the compelling case Rep. Ilhan Omar is the new face of the Democratic Party, and delves deeply into her background and beliefs. It compellingly sets forth the argument that she not only personifies but leads a Progressive-Islamist alliance held together by the glue of hatred of America, of Judeo-Christian values, of Western civilization, and of Israel. Read it and weep. Or better, read it and fight back. This is a manual in that fight.” – Dennis Prager, nationally radio talk show host and columnist, co-founder of PragerU, and New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including, most recently, the first two volumes of The Rational Bible, a five-volume commentary on the Torah

(more…)

Share

IS TRUMP’S UNORTHODOXY BECOMING ORTHODOX ?

Friday, February 21st, 2020

 

REAL CLEAR POLITICS

Is Trump’s Unorthodoxy Becoming Orthodox?

By Victor Davis Hanson
February 2020

When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.

Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.

The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling communist government.

Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.

China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier.

Trump courted moderate Arab nations in forming an anti-Iranian coalition opposed to Iran’s terrorist and nuclear agendas. His policies utterly reversed the Obama administration’s estrangement from Israel and outreach to Tehran.

Last week, Trump nonchalantly offered the Palestinians a take-it-or-leave-it independent state on the West Bank, but without believing that a West Bank settlement was the key to peace in the entire Middle East.

Trump’s cancellation of the Iran deal, in particular, was met with international outrage. More global anger followed after the targeted killing of Iranian terrorist leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

In short, Trump’s Middle East recalibrations won few supporters among the bipartisan establishment.

But recently, Europeans have privately started to agree that more sanctions are needed on Iran, that the world is better off with Soleimani gone, and that the West Bank is not central to regional peace.

(more…)

Share

GERMANY- VICTIM OF ITS OWN GREEN POLICIES

Sunday, January 26th, 2020

 

Because of Germany’s delusional  green policies, it now finds itself in a self made box of being dependent for its energy from totalitarian  and unreliable energy sources from  Russia and the Middle East.  Thankfully, the United States is now energy independent because of our common sense energy policies.  For many years, the oil  money flowing into the Middle East has fueled terrorism around the world.  How wonderful it is not to have to depend on the Middle East for our energy needs anymore .  Drill baby drill !!!!  Nancy 

Energy Paradoxes Put Europe in a Precarious Position

By Victor Davis Hanson   January 26, 2020

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas.

Oil output in the North Sea and off the coast of Norway is declining, and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it.

Europe itself is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United States, currently the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are either illegal or face so many court challenges and popular protests that they are neither culturally nor economically feasible.

The result is that Europe is almost entirely dependent on Russian, Middle Eastern, and African sources of energy.

The American-Iranian standoff in the Middle East, coupled with radical drop-offs in Iranian and Venezuelan oil production, has terrified Europe — and for understandable reasons.

The European Union has almost no ability to guarantee the delivery of critical oil and gas supplies from the Middle East should Iran close the Strait of Hormuz or harass ships in the Persian Gulf.

Europe’s only maritime security is the NATO fleet — a synonym for the U.S. Navy.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia supplies an estimated 30 percent of Europe’s oil needs. In times of crisis, Putin could exercise de facto control over the European economy.

In other words, Europe refuses to develop its own gas and oil reserves, and won’t fund the necessary military power to ensure that it can safely import energy from problematic or even hostile sources.

(more…)

Share

“AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP IS ERODING” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Saturday, December 28th, 2019

 

IMPRIMIS

“American citizenship is eroding”

November 2019  • • Victor Davis Hanson

The following is an abridged version of a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 2, 2019, during the College’s 175th anniversary gala. Videos of this and other speeches delivered during the gala are available at fourpillars.hillsdale.edu.

Today many condemn the idea of nationalism by connecting it to race hatred (e.g., white nationalism). But historically, the modern nation-state has proven uniquely suitable to preserving individual rights. The American nation in particular was successful in uniting individuals of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and creeds into one people based on shared principles, a unique physical space, and a common national story. Our nation is the best example in human history of positive nationalism.

The key to this benign nationalism is American citizenship, based on an understanding of American exceptionalism and formed by the American melting pot. But today, our citizenship is eroding and, along with it, American nationalism in the positive sense is disappearing.

American citizenship is eroding in three ways.

First, we are blurring the line between mere residents and citizens. We have between 45-50 million non-native-born residents in the U.S. today—the largest absolute number we’ve ever had. There’s no legal problem with the 30 million of them who have green cards or have acquired citizenship—although even 30 million is a challenge for the American melting pot to assimilate and integrate.

But we also have, according to a recent Yale and MIT study, about 20 million people who are here illegally. In regard to them, the classical ingredients of American citizenship—the right to leave or enter the country as one pleases, for example, or to vote in elections, or to reside here as long as one pleases—are being blurred.

(more…)

Share

OUR BANKRUPT NOMENKLATURA – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019

 

Great America

Our Bankrupt Nomenklatura

Take all the signature brand names that the Baby Boomers inherited from prior generations—Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, the Oscars, the NFL, the NBA, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and a host of others. And then ask whether they enhanced or diminished such inheritances?

October 27, 2019

Donald Trump is now in the midst of another coup frenzy that has the Left accusing him of being crazy. But he already took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test. It was a simple cognitive exam and he aced it, as would most people. The Left, remember, had called in a Yale psychiatrist to testify that Trump was demented, during the lulls between the first impeachment, the serial “Russian collusion” hoaxes, the emoluments clause psychodrama and Robert Mueller’s “walls-are-closing-in,” “turning-point,” and “bombshell” investigation.

Perhaps the wrong public figures took the test.

At times, former Vice President Joe Biden is unaware of which town, indeed which state, he is in. He slurs his words often. Biden strings together unconnected thoughts that result in utter incoherence—not alleviated by his near shouting emphatics or fits of pique at reporters.

Sometimes, Biden forgets names, and referents, and appears befuddled generally. His biography is mythical. He cannot address Ukraine and the role of his son, Hunter Biden, because, after all, what would a truthful person say? That the vice president of the United States allowed his wastrel son to become a multimillionaire by leveraging his father’s office with foreign corrupt governments? And was Biden’s moral lapse atypical, or rather reflective of prior ethical laxities that destroyed his two earlier presidential bids when he variously lied about his bio, plagiarized, and used a variety of racially insensitive remarks of the sort that would have characterized most others as racists.

Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton also take the MoCa Test? At times she seems completely delusional—or is she a bit unhinged?

In one of the strangest paradoxes in American history, Clinton apparently does not accept or cannot remember that she hired Christopher Steele, a foreign national, through the use of three deceptive firewalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS—in order to smear candidate Trump from bought Russian sources. She also simply will not admit that other campaign aides in 2016 were working to get dirt on Trump as well from disgruntled Ukrainians.

While fleeing from this reality, she had concocted a fantasy that Donald Trump won the Electoral College not because her hare-brained campaign team sent her southward to win a “mandate” by flipping unflippable red-states Georgia and Arizona, while neglecting a supposedly secure blue wall in the north.

Now she apparently believes an erstwhile, post-election ally, third-candidate leftist Jill Stein, was a Russian “asset” used by Moscow to draw votes from her candidacy, while current Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard likewise is in the de facto service of the Russians. Who knew that outsiders Trump, Stein, and Gabbard were all Russian moles variously working against Hillary’s interests?

And all this from Hillary Clinton, who inaugurated the 2009 disastrous Russian appeasement scheme known as “reset” by pushing a red plastic Jacuzzi button in Geneva, and who was instrumental in green-lighting North American uranium sales to Russian interests, which interests through third parties had donated to her foundation and indirectly paid Russians to interfere in the 2016 election to destroy her opponent?

(more…)

Share
Search All Posts
Categories