Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, Energy, Immigration, Politics, Taxes | Tags: California Gone Wrong, Lousy Governance, Victor Davis Hanson
Dr. Hanson speaks of the wealthiest state, the Golden State, and where has California gone wrong? California was supposed to be the answer or the guide to a better future for the rest of the world, with the best climate, the best universities, the most beautiful state with lovely beaches, redwood forests, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, bountiful farmlands and citrus groves — what happened? This is the San Mateo County “Progress Seminar 2017” held in May. Hanson is a renowned historian, emeritus professor of Classics at Cal State University at Fresno, fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, 5th generation Central Valley farmer, and author of at least two dozen books. If you’re not from California, why should you care?
Though he talks about what is going wrong in California, it is also what is going on in perhaps lesser ways in the rest of the country. The cities of so many dreams have become unaffordable, business is leaving for more welcoming states, a heavy tax burden, water problems, energy problems, a coastal elite and impoverished Central Valley. Hanson has retained all of his worlds, which inform his scholarship and views on modern life and the long span of history since the days of ancient Greece.
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Election 2016, Foreign Policy, History, Humor, Media Bias, National Security, Politics, Regulation, The United States | Tags: Leftist Idiocy, The 2016 Election 's Myths, Victor Davis Hanson
This is a speech Victor Davis Hanson gave at the David Horowitz Restoration Weekend shortly after the election in 2016 and elaborates on all the myths surrounding the election. So it’s all past history, but good to revisit because it helps to explain where we are now and why.
Democrats are always ready with talking points, insults, accusations, and false claims. They believe firmly that they are entitled to be in charge. As David Horowitz has said “Inside every Progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” They are always ready for battle, and Republicans, unfortunately, just can’t bring themselves to stop being polite.
Victor Hanson skewers most of the Democrats’ accusations and talking points, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I think you will too.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Education, Environment, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Freedom, History, Immigration, Law, Middle East, Military, National Security, Politics, The United States | Tags: Free Markets / Free People, The Decline and Fall of Liberalism, Victor Davis Hanson
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, Free Markets, Freedom, History, Immigration, Law, Progressives, Unemployment | Tags: Restoration Weekend, The Mythology of the Election, Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson was a featured speaker at David Horowitz’ Restoration Weekend, talking about the election and all the myths and misunderstandings and meanness and media excess. It’s a fascinating talk, and I hope you can find time.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Cool Site of the Day, Crime, Domestic Policy, Economics, Economy, Free Markets, Freedom, Health Care, Immigration, Law, Politics | Tags: Disengagement, The Alienated American, Victor Davis Hanson
A new column from Victor Davis Hanson at Defining Ideas, a publication of the Hoover Institution, titled “The Alienated American,” is especially pertinent:
Many Americans increasingly seem psychologically, if not materially, disengaged from their own country. A few vote with their feet and move to quieter enclaves in the American rural West or to no-income-tax states in the South and hinterlands. More withdraw with their minds, by shutting out most of the noise emanating from American popular culture, politics, and the media.
I spent my vacation in September in small towns in southern Michigan, and a few days of October traveling to a number of communities in rural California, as well as talking to a variety of people on my farm. In all these venues, I kept meeting the same sort of detached American. Though these men and women came from varying class and ethnic backgrounds, they were united by a sense of malaise. Let me sum up what I think is the new Americanus alienatus.
The American stranger embraces a pessimistic view of this country, rather than the therapeutic view shared by most Americans. Given the nation’s cultural and financial profligacy, he assumes things are going to get worse. Or at least he accepts that they cannot go on as they are. The medicine (that will fall on him to administer) will be as catastrophic as the lethal disease (which he thinks was caused mostly by others).
Stereotyped as a “deplorable” “clinger” and “everyday American,” the stranger certainly has no wish to dispute the new politically correct orthodoxies of open borders, Black Lives Matter, the euphemisms that mask radical Islamic terrorism, record deficits, unsustainable entitlements, and chaos abroad. All of that, he believes, is now the concern of the members of the coastal establishment, whose incestuous lives are glimpsed in the latest WikiLeaks trove.
Filed under: Capitalism, Communism, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Freedom, History, Military, National Security, The United States | Tags: Communist China, South Korea, Victor Davis Hanson
Here’s military historian Victor Davis Hanson to explain, briefly. War is not the worst of things.
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Foreign Policy, History, Intelligence, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Israel, Middle East, Military, National Security, The United States | Tags: Iran's Revolutionary Guards Quds-Force, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Victor Davis Hanson
Much has been written after Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes had a lengthy interview with the New York Times about his part in The Iran Deal, his ‘mind-meld’ with the president, and how they fooled the public into believing that the deal came about only when Iran elected a new “more moderate” administration, rather than admit that the Iran Deal was Obama’s intent from the first days of his presidency. It was all hooey, of course.
Obama undoubtedly turned against the Iraq War when the rest of the progressives did— three months into the war — when it began to look as if George W. Bush might have a great success on his hands. At any rate, Obama believed that he was elected based on his opposition to the Iraq War. Progressives are deeply opposed to wars, unless it’s one of theirs. Though if you asked any number of Americans why Obama was elected, I doubt if any would say it was because of Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War. If you recall, during the campaign in 2007 Obama refused to wear one of those little American flag pins in his buttonhole and to put his hand over his heart during the national anthem, at least until someone told him to cool it, he was offending people.
His interest at some point became getting America out of the Middle East, and turning the whole messy area over to Iran, where the Persians were the more educated and refined nation and better qualified to manage the rest of them. In this, he was apparently urged on by his senior counselor, Valerie Jarrett, who shared his vast experience of living abroad — Obama until he turned 10 in Indonesia, and Jarrett in her first 5 years, in Iran. Seems a rather odd and ephemeral experience on which to base world-shaping agreements.
We are now nearly a year into the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to limit Iranian nuclear proliferation, so how is it going?
Last week, a senior advisor to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards elite al-Quds Force said if the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave to order to destroy Israel, the Iranian military had the ability to “raze the Zionist regime in less than eight minutes.” Their armed forces had successfully tested a precision-guided, medium-range ballistic missile, with zero error. They even wrote the words “Israel must be wiped off the earth” on the missiles.
The Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “underlined that the U.S. hues and cries will by no means influence the development of the country’s missile development program.”
They have engaged in a lot of hue and cry over Iran’s missile capabilities, but they should know that this ballyhoo does not have any influence and they cannot do a damn thing,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, addressing graduation ceremony of Imam Hossein University cadets in Tehran on Monday.
The Obama administration remained unconcerned about the Ayatollah’s bloviations, perhaps as they thought a previous peroration was simply intended as “public relations.”
The Supreme Leader reiterated that we are at an asymmetrical war with global arrogance, and said, “In this war, willpowers are fighting. The stronger willpower will win.”
Just yesterday, the Free Beacon reported that the Obama administration was considering permitting advanced Russian arms sales to Iran. The administration has the power to sanction key Russian arms sales to Iran, but has so far abstained from exercising that right. Russia is apparently transferring their S300 surface-to-air missile systems, an advanced long-range weapon that would boost Iran’s military ability. It is one of the most advanced anti-aircraft missile systems in the world.
The administration considers the Iran Deal the most important of Obama’s achievements, and will go to great lengths to preserve the “nuclear deal.” I have read that Obama just doesn’t believe that Iran would ever actually use a nuclear weapon. I’ve always believed that when your enemy makes threats, you should pay attention.
Here is Victor Davis Hanson writing in the Hoover Institution’s Strategika, “A Year After the Iranian Deal.”
And here is Dr. Hanson’s essay on “How Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy De-Stabilized the World.”
Whether the Obama administration is just terminally naive, or simply hopes that any repudiation of the Iran Deal will fall on his successors’ administration rather than in the last days of his own is an unknown. but as Victor Hanson says:” the next few months may prove the most dangerous since World War II.”
