THE NEW REGRESSIVE DARK AGES – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Wednesday, June 2nd, 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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” (hint: his “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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?