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The Washington, D.C.-based Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost all credibility as a disinterested investigatory agency. Now we learn from a whistleblower that the agency was allegedly investigating moms and dads worried about the teaching of critical race theory in their kids' schools. In truth, since 2015, the FBI has been constantly in the news - and mostly in a negative and constitutionally disturbing light. The fired former Director James Comey injected himself into the 2016 political race by constantly editorializing on his ongoing investigation of candidate Hillary Clinton's email leaks. In a bizarre twist, the public learned later that...

One man’s anarchy is another’s road to justice. Sheer chaos and anarchy on the border?Afghanistan—the most humiliating defeat in recent U.S. military history?A labor-starved supply chain in shambles and holiday shelves emptying out?The worst inflation in 30 years that seems soon ready to match Carter-era levels?Gas hitting $5 a gallon with winter heating fuels soaring?Free-for-all looting in the major cities without consequences?Joe Biden’s policies and Biden himself diving in the polls?Never in recent American history has any administration birthed such disasters in its first nine months. Yet most Americans are arguing not over the sheer chaos and disasters of the...

Epigraph: "Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." George Orwell, "Animal Farm" What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama's 60th birthday bash at his Martha's Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants? Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a...

The world outside or before the U.S. was and is not a pretty thing. Even in rare consensual societies, factions and inequality under the law persisted—whether the plebs and populares of early Republican Rome, the greens and blues of Justinian’s Constantinople, or the Guelphs and Ghibellines of thirteenth-century Florence. Belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion or political clique translated into a diminished political existence—or often far worse. Institutionalized persecution required the use of mass violence, in the way that governments today have systematically oppressed Chinese Uyghurs and Tibetans, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, or Serbian Bosnians. https://victorhanson.com/what-made-us-go-crazy-part-two/

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson joined Fox News to rip the Federal Reserve for being more concerned with targeting gender pronouns than dangerous inflation. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said during the June 10 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight that he obtained a Federal Reserve memo instructing employees to dispense with “offensive” words and phrases. Carlson said these words included: “‘Founding Fathers,’ ‘man-made,’ and singular pronouns like ‘he’ or ‘her.’” Hanson was not having any of it. Hanson explained that the Federal Reserve being woke was “characteristic of all bureaucracies, that when they can’t solve an existential problem,...

For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital and time in an effort to constantly flagellate itself for not being perfect. Yet America's resilience and its resources are not infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans. There are repercussions when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings. Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest? Once...

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States—despite its deterrent embassy pride flags, powerful diversity training programs, and indomitable new Afghan University gender studies majors. Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage a cognitively challenged American president, an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon, and politically weaponized...

Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In the last six months, we have seen...

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

How often during the last year of wokeness have middle- and lower-class Americans listened to multimillionaires of all races and genders lecture them on their various pathologies and oppressions? University presidents with million-dollar salaries virtue-signal on the cheap their own sort of "unearned white privilege." Meghan Markle and the Obamas, from their plush estates, indict Americans for their biases. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors Brignac decries the oppressive victimization she and others have suffered -- from one of her four recently acquired homes. Do we need another performance-art sermon on America's innate unfairness from billionaire entertainers such as Beyonce,...

Name one mainline institution that the woke Left does not now control—and warp. The media? The campuses? Silicon Valley? Professional sports? The corporate boardroom? Foundations? The K-12 educational establishment? The military hierarchy? The administrative state? The FBI top echelon? The Left absorbed them all. But this time around it really believes that “by any means necessary” is no mere slogan. Instead, it is a model of how to disrupt or destroy 233 years of American customs, traditions, and values. Our 21st-century revolutionaries are multibillionaires in flip-flops, tie-dye T-shirts, and nose rings, but with the absolute power and wish to censor...

The new American Middle East policy is an extension of the new American domestic policy. By Victor Davis Hanson More than 2,500 rockets have landed in Israel over the past week. Some Arab Israeli citizens are terrorizing Jewish Israelis. Apparently, as the rockets fall, these citizens are to be Arab Islamic nationalists first, and Israelis last—even if they wisely prefer to live on the Israeli rather than the Palestinian side of Israel’s hated wall. The usual Hamas sympathizers are promising death to the Jews on social media (so much for the idea that Twitter and Facebook are “shocked, shocked” by...

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,...

The left's failed attack on the Hoover Institution was a victory against the academy's intolerance. Yet most conservatives lack the same protection.Cancel culture is successful because of two basic assumptions. One is that all enlightened people within a certain community believe in the same things and that anyone who disagrees with any of the current leftist orthodoxies about politics, race, or sex is a heretic who must be shunned, shamed, and driven out of polite society. The other is that the cultural consensus is so strong that no individual or group of individuals can resist it.Armed with these factors, outrage...

The opposition to the Trump administration’s policy was carried out by the likes of “Anonymous” — who bragged of working inside the administration to countermand legal directives by systematically and illegally leaking classified information — and by a biased media that reached a new record of 80–90 percent negative coverage of the current administration and its policies. Joe Biden’s team, if it were to be wise and without arrogance, would build on the present policies, which have created far more strategic advantages for the West in general and the U.S. in particular than had the more praised but often empty...

To those who see an intellectual case for Donald Trump as a contradiction in terms, Victor Davis Hanson is an unlikely figure. A senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Dr Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal by George W Bush in 2007. He is the author of more than 20 books on classics, military history and more. When he isn’t writing or teaching, he’s managing his family’s farm. Dr Hanson is also a full-throated and unapologetic supporter of the president. Last year, Dr Hanson published The Case for Trump, a coherent and thoughtful argument for an often incoherent and...

In all the perfervid reporting this week (Victor Davis Hanson calls this “concocted melodramas”) there are only three big stories to my mind: The President’s stunning success in the Middle East, Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos’ brilliant parlay to Princeton’s virtue-signaling president and the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Each of these are likely to further tip Trump toward an election victory in which according to Rasmussen he’s already reached 53% approval among likely voters.No one has better described the significance of the Abraham Accord than Spengler (David Goldman). The President, defying the conventional wisdom of decades of...

Joe Biden and his handlers know that he should be out and about, weighing in daily on the issues of the campaign. In impromptu interviews, Biden should be offering alternative plans for dealing with the virus, the lockdown, the economic recovery, the violence and the looting, and racial tensions. Yet Biden's handlers seem to assume that if he were to leave his basement and fully enter the fray, he could be capable of losing the election in moments of gaffes, lapses or prolonged silences. So wisely, Team Biden relied on the fact that the commander in chief is always blamed...

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Au1MCA02bmnJL0F438lcN?si=ZR2-EzqPTh2nybWvOhTgQA https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Au1MCA02bmnJL0F438lcN?si=ZR2-EzqPTh2nybWvOhTgQA This was the weekly podcast. Hanson has been hinting about how difficult things will be to turn around politically and culturally for a while. In this podcast he said a blunt truth no one has touched. That blacks hate non blacks. That has not been stated by a mainstream thinker. It made me pause for many reasons. And you should too.

The Electoral College lessens the chance of voting fraud affecting the outcome of a national vote [Video] Victor Davis Hanson By Victor Davis Hanson -- Tribune Media Services Democrats are waging war against traditions and the Constitution. Several of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates favored the abolishment of the Electoral College. Or, as once-confident candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it, “I plan to be the last American president to be elected by the Electoral College.” Furor over the Electoral College among the left arose from the 2000 and 2016 elections. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively, won the popular...