Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers

Victor Davis Hanson: Why are the Western middle classes so angry?

June 13, 2019 6:16 pm / Leave a Comment /

Victor Davis Hanson // Bozeman Daily

What is going on with the unending Brexit drama, the aftershocks of Donald Trump’s election and the “yellow vests” protests in France? What drives the growing estrangement of southern and eastern Europe from the European Union establishment? What fuels the anti-EU themes of recent European elections and the stunning recent Australian re-election of conservatives?

Put simply, the middle classes are revolting against Western managerial elites. The latter group includes professional politicians, entrenched bureaucrats, condescending academics, corporate phonies and propagandistic journalists.

What are the popular gripes against them?

One, illegal immigration and open borders have led to chaos. Lax immigration policies have taxed social services and fueled multicultural identity politics, often to the benefit of boutique leftist political agendas.

Two, globalization enriched the cosmopolitan elites who found worldwide markets for their various services. New global markets and commerce meant Western nations outsourced, offshored and ignored their own industries and manufacturing (or anything dependent on muscular labor that could be replaced by cheaper workers abroad).

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Uncategorized

The 2020 News Cycle Will Look Very Different

June 13, 2019 6:15 pm / Leave a Comment /

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

The Russia collusion narrative and associated Robert Mueller hysteria are all but over.

Mueller’s obstruction of justice narrative involving the non-crime of collusion is ending, too.

Donald Trump’s tax-return psychodrama is going the way of the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment and the comical in-house coup attempt of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

What takes the place of Mueller and “the noose is tightening” bombshells? Perhaps the new narratives involving Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FISA abuse, or Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the Russia collusion probe—far quieter, far more serious.00:00

The media for three years obsessed over a false “Trump did it” story. But in the next 17 months, the storyline may change from the myth of the “walls are closing in” on the president to the reality that Obama-era officials committed serial felonies—from perjury and lying to federal officials, to leaking classified documents, spying illegally on a political campaign, deceiving a FISA court, and obstructing justice.

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Uncategorized

The FBI Tragedy: Elites above the Law

June 12, 2019 8:22 am / Leave a Comment /

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

We are told, however, that the FBI’s culture and institutions are exempt from the widespread wrongdoing at the top. Such caution is a fine and fitting thing, given the FBI’s more than a century of public service. Nonetheless, many of those caught up in the controversies over the Russian-collusion hoax were not recent career appointees. Rather, many came up through the ranks of the FBI. And that raises the question, for example, of where exactly Peter Strzok (22 years in the FBI) learned that he had a right to interfere in a U.S. election to damage a candidate that he opposed.

We are told, however, that the FBI’s culture and institutions are exempt from the widespread wrongdoing at the top. Such caution is a fine and fitting thing, given the FBI’s more than a century of public service. Nonetheless, many of those caught up in the controversies over the Russian-collusion hoax were not recent career appointees. Rather, many came up through the ranks of the FBI. And that raises the question, for example, of where exactly Peter Strzok (22 years in the FBI) learned that he had a right to interfere in a U.S. election to damage a candidate that he opposed.

And why would an Andrew McCabe (over 21 years in the FBI) think he had the duty to formulate an “insurance policy” to take out a presidential candidate? Or why would he even consider overseeing an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s improper use of emails when his wife had been a recent recipient of Clinton-related PAC money? And why would McCabe contemplate leaking confidential FBI information to the press or even dream of setting up some sort of operation to remove a sitting president under the 25th Amendment? And how did someone like the old FBI vet Peter Strozk ever end up at the center of the entire mess — opening up the snooping on the Trump campaign while hiding that fact and while briefing the candidate on Russian interference in the election, interviewing Michael Flynn, preening as a top FBI investigator for Robert Mueller’s dream team, right-hand man of “Andy” McCabe, convincing Comey to change the wording of his writ in the Clinton-email-scandal investigation, softball coddling of Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, instrumental in the Papadopoulos investigation con — all the while conducting an affair with fellow FBI investigator and attorney Lisa Page and bragging about his assurance that the supposedly odious Trump would be prevented from being elected. If a group of Trump zealots were to call up the FBI tomorrow and allege that a member of Joe Biden’s family has had unethical ties with the Ukrainian or Chinese government, would that gambit “alarm” the FBI enough to prompt an investigation of Biden and his campaign? How many career-professional Peter Strozks are still at the agency?

Read the full article here.

Posted in: FBI, Uncategorized

Greece Finds New Footing as a Player on the World Stage

June 8, 2019 11:57 am / Leave a Comment /

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

ATHENS—After Greece temporarily hosted a pair of U.S. military drones, Greek Defense Minister Panagiotis Kammenos said last fall that, “It’s very important for Greece that the United States deploy military assets in Greece on a more permanent base.”

Indeed, Greece just took delivery of some 70 military helicopters that it had purchased from the U.S., and there have been discussions about basing American drones, air tankers and other military aircraft on Greek soil.

COSCO, a state-owned Chinese shipping and logistics services company, has invested more than 3.5 billion euros in renovating the historic Greek port of Piraeus, which is now the second-largest port in the Mediterranean. The Chinese brag that it will soon become the busiest. The massive renovation is part of China’s 35-year lease of two of the port’s container terminals and the Chinese purchase of a majority stake in Piraeus’ port authority.

Despite recent spats, Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains a supposed ally of Greece, given historic religious ties and the envisioned completion of a natural-gas pipeline that will supply Russian gas to energy-starved Greece.

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Greece, Uncategorized

Is Germany Becoming Germany — Again?

June 6, 2019 9:12 am / Leave a Comment /

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The more things change, well, the more they . . . So it is with the perpetual German resentments of the U.S.

Recently German chancellor Angela Merkel reminded us of that German fixation, when she made some astounding statements to the German media that revealed what many Americans had long ago surmised.

Merkel all but announced that Germany, or for that matter Europe itself, is no longer really an ally of the United States: “There is no doubt that Europe needs to reposition itself in a changed world. . . . The old certainties of the post-war order no longer apply.”

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Uncategorized

Tired, Boring—and Dangerous—Celebrity Death Wishing

June 6, 2019 9:07 am / Leave a Comment /

Víctor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Recently, New York writer Fran Lebowitz told Bill Maher on his HBO program that the U.S. government should turn President Donald Trump “over to the Saudis, his buddies—the same Saudis who got rid of that reporter.”

Lebowitz thought it was cool to imagine on live television that the president might be chopped up in the manner of the recent murder of Saudi journalist and activist Jamal Khashoggi.

A veritable mini-industry of celebrity calls for Trump’s violent death or assassination is now old and boring—and getting dangerous.

As if on cue, actors, singers, comedians, and banal entertainers compete with each other to hope for the most gruesome manner of killing the president—and thereby insidiously lowering the bar for unhinged minds of what could be conceivable or even acceptable to big screen icons and popular culture’s cool crowd.

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Uncategorized

Trump Has Become the Democrats’ Great White Whale

May 30, 2019 8:03 pm / Leave a Comment /

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

One way of envisioning the Democratic obsessions with Donald Trump is as an addiction. We have seen the initial impeachment efforts; the attempt to get him under the emoluments clause, the Logan Act and the 25th Amendment; the Russian collusion hoax; the Mueller investigation; the demand for his tax returns; and the psychodramas involving Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels. Relentless progressives have needed a new Get Trump fix about every two months.

More practically, their fixation also substitutes for a collective poverty of ideas. The Democratic Party has no plan to secure the borders other than to be against whatever Trump is for. They would not build a wall, deport illegal entrants, end sanctuary cities, fine employers or do much of anything but allow almost anyone to enter the U.S.

The homeless crisis is reaching epidemic proportions in our cities, almost all of them run by progressive mayors and city councils. None have any workable plan to clean the sidewalks of needles and human excrement. None know what do with the hundreds of thousands who have camped out in public spaces, endangering their own health and everyone around them due to drug addiction and inadequate sanitation and waste removal.

On abortion, the new Democratic position seems to be that the unborn can be aborted at any time the mother chooses, up to and including the moment of birth.

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Donald Trump, Uncategorized

Strategika Issue 58: Current U.S.-Israel Relations

May 29, 2019 11:36 pm / Leave a Comment /

Trump And Israel

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Barry Strauss in Strategika.

The Trump Administration has changed course in various ways from its predecessor when it comes to relations with Israel. Among other things, the current American government has moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and reduced aid to the Palestinians. In addition, the administration is on the verge of unveiling the so-called Deal of the Century, a new proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.

Read the full article here.

Israel’s Narrow Path to Peace

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Angelo M. Codevilla in Strategika.

Pitilessly, the past quarter century’s events have dismissed the hopes for peace with the Arabs that Israeli diplomats, often accompanied by U.S. counterparts, detailed to the world in 1993 as they explained the concessions they had finalized in Oslo. Previously, they had treated Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization as a terrorist organization to be marginalized if not destroyed. The list of its outrages, from bombing school buses and airports to murdering Olympic athletes, spoke for itself. In 1982, the U.S. saved the PLO from imminent destruction by an Israeli and Lebanese alliance, and sustained it in supervised exile in Tunisia. 

Read the full article here.

Trump and the Israeli-Palestinian Standoff

Please read a new essay by my colleague, Paul Rahe in Strategika.

In his inimitable way, Donald Trump has gored yet another sacred cow—this one in the Levant. First, consider this. For nearly seventy years, the United States was the principal source of funds for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—an outfit which not only provided (and still provides) support for Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948 and found, after the first Arab-Israeli War, that they could not return, but which also provides for those of their patrilineal descendants who still reside in the refugee camps situated in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. 

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Uncategorized

Trump’s High-Wire Act of Reestablishing Deterrence without War

May 29, 2019 11:32 pm / Leave a Comment /

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Donald Trump inherited a superficially stable world from Barack Obama that, in fact, was quite volatile. There had been no tense standoffs with North Korea, but also apparent intercontinental ballistic missiles with possible nuclear warheads now pointed at the United States. Obama more or less punted on North Korea, by declaring it a problem — and hoping that Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear testing did not get too out of hand before 2017.

Then there was the “Iran deal.” It was an appeasing agreement that almost surely guaranteed that Iran would soon have nuclear weapons, along with a revived economy liberated from sanctions and empowered with American cash. Iran’s terrorist surrogates were the greatest beneficiaries of U.S. naïveté. At best, Obama assumed that when Iran went nuclear, it would be on someone else’s presidential watch and therefore not his fault. At worst, Obama, in delusional fashion, believed that empowering Iran would balance Sunni states and bring justice to historically oppressed Shiite and Persian minorities who would take their rightful place in the Islamic world.

Everyone knew that China violated almost every aspect of world commerce. Everyone knew that China would never allow the U.S. to trade with China the same way that Beijing traded with America. Everyone knew that 1.3-billion-person China was a neo-imperialist Communist dictatorship that was headed on an announced trajectory of world hegemony. Obama in particular thought that stopping China’s agenda would be medicine that was more painful than the disease.

Like the proverbial medieval mice who voted to warn of a marauding carnivorous house cat by putting a bell around his neck, the prognosis of Chinese mercantilism and aggression — and the need to confront Beijing — was right-on. But no one wished to do the messy, dangerous work of belling the Chinese cat.

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Donald Trump, Uncategorized

Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists

May 29, 2019 11:31 pm / Leave a Comment /

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama. “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections,” Obama said in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.

Obama was anxious that the sure-to-be-sore-loser Trump would not blame his defeat on voting impropriety in a fashion that might call into question Clinton’s victory. After Clinton’s stunning defeat, Russian “collusion”—thanks initially to efforts by Obama holdover Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to go after Michael Flynn and the successful attempts of the CIA and FBI to seed the bogus Steele dossier among the government elite—became a club to destroy the incoming Trump Administration.

Colluders, Inc.
How ironic that Russian “collusion” was used as a preemptive charge from those who actually had colluded with Russians for all sorts for financial and careerist advantages.

The entire so-called Uranium One caper had hinged on ex-President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and their Clinton Foundation uniting with Russian or Russian-affiliated oligarchs to ease restrictions on the sale of North American uranium reserves to a Russian company with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Coincidentally what followed were massive donations from concerned Russian parties to the foundation, as well as a $500,000 honorarium to Bill Clinton for a brief Moscow speech. Note that no more money has been forthcoming from Russia to either of the Clintons or their foundation.

Read the full article here.

Posted in: Hillary Clinton, Uncategorized
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