Free Republic

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...

Donald Trump is trying to break through a 2020 wall. By January 2019, after over three years of failed efforts to impeach him, sue him, indict him, impoverish him, and destroy him, the Left had failed. The economy was booming. Trump’s tweets were mostly bragging about his accomplishments. And the Left was dumbfounded that both impeachment and Mueller, in Nietzschean fashion, had only made Trump stronger.

Every cultural revolution starts at year zero, whether explicitly or implicitly. The French Revolution recalibrated the calendar to begin anew, and the genocidal Pol Pot declared his own Cambodian revolutionary ascension as the beginning of time. Somewhere after May 25, 2020, the death of George Floyd, while in police custody, sparked demonstrations, protests, and riots. And they in turn ushered in a new revolutionary moment. edit... The counterrevolution will be easy to spot. Suddenly a left-wing institution will refuse to change its name. Gone with the Wind will insidiously reappear on the schedule of TBN classic movies. Statue topplers all...

Victor Davis Hanson is without question the finest true conservative thought leader alive today. He is the William F. Buckley/Emmett Tyrell of his time, and his commentaries are not to be missed. Writing at The National Review online today, Hanson pens an absolutely devastating takedown of the Democrat Party’s Unfrozen Caveman Presumptive Nominee, Joe Biden. He eviscerates Biden’s elder-abusing handlers for their craven strategy of hiding their obviously cognitively-impaired candidate in the basement of his home, and scorches the Democrat Party for its despicable effort to saddle the nation with a man who is clearly incapable of holding a simple...

“Should Trump win, I think there are going a lot of recriminations like there were after the McGoven wipeout or the Carter wipeout,” remarked Hanson. “People are going to say, ‘You guys did this to us, and Black Lives Matter and Antifa are going to be the culprits. This election is very important, not so much to get Trump in, but to stop — although I think he will win, it’ll be iffy — this Maoist tradition, this direction that we’re having that’s really dangerous. Hanson concluded, “I think the only way it’ll stop is for them to lose and...

he 2020 election will be decided in the fall by swing voters in ten or 15 states. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, those voters were leaning to reelect President Trump, largely on the powers of incumbency and a near-record vibrant economy. The Democratic left-wing primary agendas, from the New Green Deal to reparations, the clownish candidates of the Beto O’Rourke and Corey Booker sort, the arrogance and meltdown of Mike Bloomberg, and Joe Biden’s cognitive impairment collectively frightened voters. Meanwhile, the booming economy, record energy production, record-low minority unemployment and reckoning with China had overshadowed Trump’s cul de sac tweeting,...

<p>Each day that the Obama administration fades into the past, its wrongdoings manage to wander back into the present.</p> <p>After years of suppression, all sorts of strange events keep popping up to remind us of what little is left of the Obama years — the Susan Rice memo, Christopher Steele deleting his computer records, FBI-doctored and lost 302s, text messages wiped clean, the bizarre Obama January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, the ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the unmasking and leaking of redacted names swept up in reverse-targeting surveillance operations, the administration fraud perpetrated on the FISA courts. The list is so overwhelming and bizarre that it ensures that anything at any time can now appear. And the result keeps reminding Americans of how corrupt were the years between 2009 and 2017 and how untruthful was the coverage of such institutionalized wrongdoing.</p>

Most people today assume that our understanding of WWII is largely complete, thanks to the enormous quantity of books, TV series such as ITV’s classic 1970s documentary The World at War, the myriad of documentaries that aired in the early days of the History Channel cable TV network, and the unending series of movies produced by Hollywood, particularly when compared to its predecessor, WWI. But classicist historian and fellow PJM columnist Victor Davis Hanson does yeoman’s work unpacking the events of 1939-1945. Starting with the plurality in the title, Hanson’s 2017 book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global...

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a military historian and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno. He has written two articles relevant to today's society. Last October he published, "Members of Previous Generations Now Seem Like Giants," and he recently wrote, "Is America a Roaring Giant or Crying Baby?" In the first article, Hanson starts with some observations and questions regarding the greatness of previous generations compared with today's Americans. He asks: "Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years? ......

In this current crisis, the longest if not the first complete shutdown in U.S. history, the freedoms of American democracy are being tested in ways we scarcely ever imagined. Out of nowhere little Napoleonic governors arise to enact decrees prohibiting gardening or strolling on an empty beach — decrees that seem to have little purpose other than to reflect that they can do so. Snitches volunteer to out felonious social deviants who are seen cooking in the backyard with a neighbor. A little horned-devil virus seems to be trying to do what those Russkies never could. Experts with all sorts...

In A. A. Milne’s classic Winne-the-Pooh children’s tales, Eeyore, the old gray donkey, is perennially pessimistic and gloomy. He always expects the worst to happen. Milne understood that Eeyore’s outbursts of depression could at first be salutatory but then become monotonous. The outlook of the pessimist (“if you think it’s bad now, just wait”) always enjoys advantages over both the realist (“so what, life goes on”) and the optimist (“oh, come on, it can’t be that bad”).When the pessimist frequently errs in his gloomy prognostications, he can plead that they were intended to be didactic, if not therapeutic. Only by...

Sometime in late November the Chinese Communist Party apparat was aware that the ingredients of some sort of an epidemic were brewing in Wuhan. Soon after, it was also clear to them that a new type of coronavirus was on the loose, a threat they might have taken more seriously given the similar Chinese origins of the prior toxic SARS coronavirus and the resources of a Level 4 virology lab nearby. Yet the government initially hid all that knowledge from its own people in particular and in general from the world at large. Translated into American terms, that disingenuousness ensured...

It may be difficult to believe in this enlightened age but there was a time not so long ago when the National Review was the intellectual heart of America's conservative movement. Its writers were sharp, gifted and irreverent. Their appearances on Fox News and other TV outlets made them rock stars. All that ended on January 22, 2016, when the magazine posted online its "Against Trump" issue. Once again, the editors proudly chose to stand athwart history rather than make it. They chose to lose with what they consider honor rather than win. 22 writers signed on, each penning...

Here's a riddle: What do Victor Davis Hanson, Dennis Prager and Ricky Gervais have in common? Hanson published an excellent piece at National Review online on Jan. 7. Titled "The Steele Dossier Bacillus," Hanson summarizes the evident defects in the substance of the dossier compiled by British former spy Christopher Steele as well as defects in its use to obtain surveillance warrants from the FISA court. Steele was known to be "a pathological liar," Hanson notes. But the "fanciful" (translation: false information contained in the dossier spread like wildfire because so many on the left -- including Hillary Clinton and...