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The word “imperialism” comes from the Latin word imperium. It refers to a nation or a state implanting its rule on other states, treating them as subordinates and in an inferior fashion. Some suggest today that America is behaving imperialistically—we do, after all, have some 600 military bases around the world. So it is worth recalling some historical examples of imperialism to understand what the idea entails. Looking at empires through history, we can identify several things that most of them have in common. One is that their leaders often say or seem to believe that their imperialist policies have...

I am posting this because Victor Davis Hanson provides outstanding advice for Donald J. Trump. This video runs 39:00, and is well worth the listen, in my humble opinion. 🙂 👍

Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable. Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power. In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war. A 79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power. After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe...

The owner of a wine and beer bar who openly flouted Gov. Tim Walz's executive orders to shut down last winter during the COVID-19 pandemic was found guilty of six criminal misdemeanor counts Thursday by a Freeborn County jury. A jury of three women and three men took only an hour of deliberation to convict Lisa Hanson, the 57-year-old bar owner, after a three-day trial punctuated by Hanson's repeated attempts to argue that Walz's orders were unconstitutional. Judge Joseph Bueltel followed the reading of the verdict with a scathing denunciation of Hanson's behavior, explaining why the governor's orders were legal....

Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson discusses op-ed that calls out the Democratic Party as 'the party of wealth,' suggesting Republicans need to make the argument that they're 'the party of the middle class.' Wokeness comes from the elites who are wealthy and who cannot be effected personally by the policies they promote such as defund the police, or radical energy policies that drive up fuel prices.The elites have enough money that they can buy their own protection without relying on police.Similarly they are wealthy enough that fuel prices and inflation do not effect their life style These woke...

"The two parties are switching class constituents. Some 65% of the Americans making more than $500,000 a year are Democrats, and 74% of those who earn less than $100,000 a year are Republicans, according to IRS statistics." "In the recent presidential primaries and general election, 17 of the 20 wealthiest ZIP codes gave more money to Democratic candidates than to Republicans"

As a general rule, the next time an official, a politician, or an expert lectures us on the “science,” make sure that he is not projecting his own unscientific biases onto others.Throughout the Trump years and in particular during the 2020 COVID pandemic crisis, the nation was lectured by the Left “to follow the data,” as the Democrats proclaimed themselves the “party of science.” As sober and judicious children of the enlightenment, they alone offered the necessary disinterested correctives to Trump’s supposed bluster and exaggeration—and to his anti-scientific deplorable following (often dismissed by Biden as dregs, chumps, and Neanderthals).In truth,...

Episode 41: The Don’t-Fight Club Hosted by Victor Davis Hanson November 11, 2020 6:04 PM | Click in the header. No link in here.

There was a low bar for Joe Biden in the first debate, given his cognitive challenges. Because he exceeded that pessimism, he won momentum. In opposite fashion, there was similarly an expectation that a disruptive Donald Trump would turn off the audience by the sort of interruptions and bullying that characterized the first debate. He did not do that. He instead let a cocky Biden sound off, and thus more or less tie himself into knots on a host of topics, but most critically on gas and oil. So likewise Trump will gain momentum by exceeding those prognoses. But far...

Link at the click. Richard Davis Hanson is a grower in California's Central Valley, and an expert on Ancient Greek Warfare. He commonly remarks as he goes out of "The Great Beyond" into the Left Coast (at Stanford University, The Hoover Institution), on how he sees common people living in his agricultural area, filled with fields but not houses. He is hearing shooting all night. His predominantly Latino neighbors are out at night, target practicing, presumably at how Univision is perhaps not strictly following the Antifa/BLM narrative, but is reporting more of a Brown vs. a DeepBlue-White or a Red-Black...

Historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told "The Story" Friday that Democratic governors of states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illinois are creating an "untenable situation" by being slow to lift lockdowns instituted to counter coronavirus. "We don’t think more people will die because of the lockdown versus exposure to the virus," Hanson said, mimicking the thought process of some Democratic governors, "We have to be absolutely certain that nobody gets the virus and dies." As a result, he said, residents of those states are prevented from paying into the system with tax money, which...

President Trump is waging a nonstop, all-encompassing war against progressive culture, in magnitude analogous to what 19th-century Germans once called a "Kulturkampf." As a result, not even former President George W. Bush has incurred the degree of hatred from the left that is now directed at Trump. For most of his time in office, Trump, his family, his friends and his businesses have been investigated, probed, dissected and constantly attacked. In 2016 and early 2017, President Barack Obama's appointees in the FBI, CIA and Department of Justice tried to subvert the Trump campaign, interfere with his transition and, ultimately, abort...

The Case for Trump, Victor Davis Hanson. Basic Books, 2019. 372 pp. As the title suggests, The Case for Trump, balances a clinical approach to our currently incendiary politics alongside a brief for Donald Trump’s presidency. Of course, the success or failure of this attempt is a subjective matter though it seems to me that any reader of this book of whatever political stripe would concede that, for its length, it is thorough if not encyclopedic in its presentation of facts and its historical depth. All of which is not surprising in that Victor Davis Hanson, occupies a unique position...

<p>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.</p>

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...

Iwrote a book, The Case for Trump, in an effort — as an outsider who has no career investment in Trump and has never met him or visited the Trump White House — to analyze how and why Donald J. Trump was elected president and why his agenda so far has been successful. One Gabriel Schoenfeld has just published a hysterical attack on that effort in the Bill Kristol–Charles Sykes new Bulwark, and it is emblematic of that venue’s promised Never Trump ad hominem assault on individual supporters of the president. A writer for The Atlantic recently interviewed Sykes, noting:...

Historian Victor Davis Hanson said there has been no consequences for the wrongdoing by elites in society and warned that republics and successful states fall apart when the elites fall out of touch with the people. "We have a whole bunch... here at home, that feel they can dictate to people and they're never subject to the ramifications of their own ideology and policy," he said of elites. "And it's like the emperor has no clothes and then they're surprised that Trump won or surprised that people are rioting in Paris. What did they think was going to happen?" "We...

this is an interview by Carlson of VDH. This was the front page of Drudge for about 10 minutes. This has dropped off the face of the net.

The House Intelligence Committee memo is pretty simple. It should not have been classified and thus far withheld from the public. In fact, far more information now needs to be released. . . snip If all this is not a scandal — then the following protocols are now considered permissible in American electoral practice and constitutional jurisprudence: An incumbent administration can freely use the FBI and the DOJ to favor one side in a presidential election, by buying its opposition research against the other candidate, using its own prestige to authenticate such a third-party oppositional dossier, and then using it...

It is now fashionable to demonize Russia, but most Americans have forgotten key aspects of 20th-century history, including the Russians’ fight to stop the march of Nazi Germany. Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded — and would soon destroy — a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany’s best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942–43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II.