Quotes from Victor Davis Hanson

And a free state that does not employ armies of unproductive snoops, spies, and politically correct commissars does not have its most daring and innovative minds crippled or its economy hobbled by costly hordes of unproductive trimmers.

Truly white supremacist states, such as the former apartheid government of South Africa, do not elect black presidents or vice presidents as does the United States, any more than Islamic supremacist societies like Iran or Saudi Arabia would ever allow a Christian or Jew to become their head of state.47

One was made famous by Ulysses S. Grant and later John J. Pershing, emphasizing finding the enemy, then confronting and destroying him through overwhelming firepower.

In the global media community, "intolerance" does not denote so much China's mass incarceration of Muslim Uighurs in reeducation camps, or destruction of Tibetan culture, or strangulation of Hong Kong's democracy, or systemic racism shown African students and resident workers in China. Instead, America's purported sin is occasional consideration of recalibrating its open-borders policies and requiring legality before entering the country.

Rather, China rightly expected that the American media would parrot its accusations, which privately even the communist apparat in Beijing likely does not believe. If it did trust its own propaganda, Beijing certainly would not send over three hundred thousand of its best students to American universities to live in jeopardy in an inherently racist society.

third of all American residents currently on welfare live in California, as do a quarter of the nation's illegal aliens—a state where one in four was not born in the United States, but otherwise with just 12 percent of the population. A second force multiplier is that reds

China no doubt wonders how Americans can feel any patriotic unity or affection, the bonding agent of classical citizenship, for a country so confessedly and irredeemably racist and divided. No wonder, then, indications arose that in 2020 China was directly funding various identity politics groups within the United States, apparently on the theory that their adherence to tribalism weakened Beijing's existential rival.50

Martin Luther was excommunicated in the year Cortés first occupied Tenochtitlán, yet nascent Protestantism and its accompanying debate about religious doctrine would find no receptive audience back in contemporary Castile.

What is distant is seen as exotic and alluring; what is proximate becomes mundane and ordinary. Saving the world is a much more ambitious, ennobling, and ego-gratifying project than preserving the neighborhood.

Despite the far greater carnage between 1939 and 1945, seventy years later historians rarely write of the political or strategic futility of the Second World War as they so often do of the First. Apparently, losing sixty million for a subsequent general seventy-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing fifteen to twenty million for a twenty-one-year hiatus was sometimes not.

The companions might dress in Persian fashion, and Alexander himself might don the tiara and offer up a Davos-like prayer that all peoples and races under his new-world regime would be equal subjects.

Intellectuals and the elite in general are especially prone to the globalist disconnect, most idealistically a concern for global well-being amid local intractable pathologies, most truthfully at worst an end-of-history, megalomaniac impulse to solve innate problems on a grand scale once and for all.

In fact, a mere 535 elected senators and representatives can hardly become acquainted with, much less even read, some 175,496 pages of the Federal Register or monitor 2.7 million employees—without the enlistment of more bureaucrats to monitor bureaucrats.12

saw rearming as reactionary and coming at the expense of achieving social justice.

The individual Soviet infantryman after mid-1942 was often armed with the superb PPSh-41 submachine gun (over 6 million produced during the war) or the SVT-40 semi-automatic rifle (1.6 million).

Transgenderism, climate change, females in frontline combat units, and gay marriage, between 2008 and 2020, were transformed from topics of legitimate discussion and debate into rigid, politically correct orthodoxies—often more by regulators than legislators. When the deep state embraces new normals, its powers to target dissidents and mavericks and redefine them as dangers to the ideas of equality, fairness, and decency can become downright scary.

It is usually judged dead last in terms of the cost of doing business. Translated, that means that small-business operators relocated to more business-friendly states (for example, seventy thousand Californians on average have left for Texas alone each year of the last decade, and the rate is climbing to over eighty thousand per year), as did

So far Trump has proved to be one of the rare presidents who has attempted to do what he said he would. He has also not acted much differently in 2017–18 than he said he would during 2015–16. That continuum is why his critics understandably fear him, and why his hard-core supporters often seem to relish their terror.

In France during the 1920s, teachers' unions had all but banned patriotic references to French victories (which were regarded as "bellicose" and "a danger for the organization of peace") and removed books that considered battles such as Verdun as anything other than a tragedy that affected both sides equally.

The irony, of course, is that today's immigrants are not risking their lives to reach America because they think it is striving for a solar/wind-powered managed economy or institutionalizes racial and ethnic reparatory college admissions and hiring or is systematically destroying the statues and monuments of its past; they are doing so because they sense its market capitalism and Constitution allow the lower and middle classes economic opportunities and freedoms rarely found elsewhere.

As a result, the radical Islamists have nearly pulled off the impossible: A formerly receptive Sunni tribal community has turned against Sunni Muslim jihadists and joined with American infidels, sometimes alongside the troops of a Shiite-led government.

Naval and occasionally land-based air power turned the great sea battles—the fighting near Singapore, the chase of the Bismarck, the Coral Sea, Midway, the fight over the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa—mostly into contests of carrier-based aircraft attacking with impunity any enemy ships except like kind.

soon became a pejorative term for ignorant outsiders like those of the Trump administration who struggled to find even mediocre replacement talent, once they had ostracized the seasoned professional classes of Western government. Trump, for example, ran against both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party's veteran politicians

The war no longer pits radicals against conservatives, but often socialists and anarchists against both liberals and conservatives.