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@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Ten bad takeaways from the Zelenskyy blow-up 1. Zelenskyy does not grasp—or deliberately ignores—the bitter truth: those with whom he feels most affinity (Western globalists, the American Left, the Europeans) have little power in 2025 to help him. And those with whom he obviously does not like or seeks to embarrass (cf. his Scranton, Penn. campaign-like visit in September 2024) alone have the power to save him. For his own sake, I hope he is not being “briefed” by the Obama-Clinton-Biden gang to confront Trump, given their interests are not really Ukraine’s as they feign. 2. Zelenskyy acts as if his agendas and ours are identical. So, he keeps insisting that he is fighting for us despite our two-ocean-distance that he mocks. We do have many shared interests with Ukraine, but not all by any means: Trump wants to “reset” with Russia and triangulate it against China. He seeks to avoid a 1962 DEFCON 2-like crisis over a proxy showdown in proximity to a nuclear rival. And he sincerely wants to end the deadlocked Stalingrad slaughterhouse for everyone’s sake. 3. The Europeans (and Canada) are now talking loudly of a new muscular antithesis, independent of the U.S. Promises, promises—given that would require Europeans to prune back their social welfare state, frack, use nuclear, stop the green obsessions, and spend 3-5 percent of their GDP on defense. The U.S. does not just pay 16 percent of NATO’s budget but also puts up with asymmetrical tariffs that result in a European Union trade surplus of $160 billion, plays the world cop patrolling sea-lanes and deterring terrorists and rogues states that otherwise might interrupt Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto including Europe under a nuclear umbrella of 6,500 nukes. 4. Zelenskyy must know that all of the once deal-stopping issues to peace have been de facto settled: Ukraine is now better armed than most NATO nations, but will not be in NATO; and no president has or will ever supply Ukraine with the armed wherewithal to take back the Donbass and Crimea. So, the only two issues are a) how far will Putin be willing to withdraw to his 2022 borders and b) how will he be deterred? The first is answered by a commercial sector/tripwire, joint Ukrainian-US-Europe resource development corridor in Eastern Ukraine, coupled with a Korea-like DMZ; the second by the fact that Putin unlike his 2008 and 2014 invasions has now lost a million dead and wounded to a Ukraine that will remain thusly armed. 5. What are Zelenskyy’s alternatives without much U.S. help—wait for a return of the Democrats to the White House in four years? Hope for a rearmed Europe? Pray for a Democratic House and a 3rd Vindman-like engineered Trump impeachment? Or swallow his pride, return to the White House, sign the rare-earth minerals deal, invite in the Euros (are they seriously willing to patrol a DMZ?), and hope Trump can warn Putin, as he did successfully between 2017-21, not to dare try it again? 6. If there is a cease fire, a commercial deal, a Euro ground presence, and influx of Western companies into Ukraine, would there be elections? And if so, would Zelenskyy and his party win? And if not, would there be a successor transparent government that would reveal exactly where all the Western financial aid money went? 7. Zelenskyy might see a model in Netanyahu. The Biden Administration was far harder on him than Trump is on Ukraine: suspending arms shipments, demanding cease-fires, prodding for a wartime, bipartisan cabinet, hammering Israel on collateral damage—none of which Westerners have demanded of Zelenskyy. Yet Netanyahu managed a hostile Biden, kept Israel close to its patron, and when visiting was gracious to his host. Netanyahu certainly would never before the global media have interrupted, and berated a host and patron president in the White House. 8. If Ukraine has alienated the U.S. what then is its strategic victory plan? Wait around for more Euros? Hold off an increasingly invigorated Russian military? Cede more territory? What, then, exactly are Zelenskyy’s cards he seems to think are a winning hand? 9. If one views carefully all the 50-minute tape, most of it was going quite well—until Zelenskyy started correcting Vance firstly, and Trump secondly. By Ukraine-splaining to his hosts, and by his gestures, tone, and interruptions, he made it clear that he assumed that Trump was just more of the same compliant, clueless moneybags Biden waxen effigy. And that was naïve for such a supposedly worldly leader. 10. March 2025 is not March 2022, after the heroic saving of Kyiv—but three years and 1.5 million dead and wounded later. Zelenskyy is no longer the international heartthrob with the glamorous entourage. He has postponed elections, outlawed opposition media and parties, suspended habeas corpus and walked out of negotiations when he had an even hand in Spring 2022 and apparently even now when he does not in Spring 2025. Quo vadis, Volodymyr?

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

The Art of Democratic Democracide Democrats are destroying democracy by engineering a veritable coup through forcing out Biden from the race—but not from the presidency. Here are ten of their new rules of American democracy that they have now bequeathed to us. 1) The Democrats have decided that Biden is technically mentally unfit to run as their nominee for president—but fit as fiddle to continue for six months as our president. Thus, the Democratic primary winner turns out today to be the loser. And it is far more important to be mentally fit as a Democrat candidate than as an American president. 2) So, primaries and delegates won by popular vote now mean zilch. They are erasable at the whim of the back-roomers in the darkness. Will Democratic primaries cease to exist? If not, why would anyone take the time to vote in them? 3) Remember the same coup plotters today in 2020 engineered the sudden abdications of all of Biden’s socialist primary rivals to ensure that he would be a suitable veneer for their own extremist agendas. In that now infamous Faustian bargain, Joe and Jill got the ceremonial White House spotlight. In exchange, the team of Barack and Michelle ran things stealthily. So did Joe live by the coup, and then die by the coup? 4) The donors and politico grandees (did anyone vote for these people?) determine who runs and who doesn’t—not the people who vote in the primaries. 5) The convention will be as rigged as was the coup to depose Biden. 6) Barack Obama set a new precedent that the ex-president stays put in Washington, implants his team onto his successor’s administration, and runs the country covertly through a puppet president. 7) The legal minds who crafted lawfare to neuter Donald Trump now dreamed up a phony loophole in their party rules to depose Biden. Their absurd theory is that the delegates and voters had no idea when they voted for Biden that he was actually unhinged. Therefore, their prior pledges and primary results now mean nothing—although any who said just that were demonized by the party hierarchy who swore publicly that Biden was vigorous and cogent. 8) From now on, when the Democrat winner of all the primaries and delegates falls behind in the summer polls, he can be kicked out by party diktat. 9) Note that Biden was declared dynamic last week, and this week too unfit to run—when the Americans knew the problem was not just that Biden was senile (it never bothered Democrats until the disastrous exposure during the debate). The real disaster was that he was too far behind in the polls, threatened down-ballot Democrats, and therefore, presto, Biden instantly became mentally unfit. 10) Will the party that chanted 25th Amendment the moment Trump was elected in 2017, at least go through that constitutional process to show that they are worried about the American people being led by a president for the next half-year whom they themselves feel is too incompetent to remain their standard bearer?

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

How To Destroy the American Legal System By either listening to testimonies or reading transcripts of the various 2024 Trump election-related court cases and testimonies, what we are left with is an epidemic of lies. 1) Hunter Biden’s current testimonies are contradicted by his own text messages, bank records, phone records, and testimonies of some of his associates. Anytime he is trapped in inconsistencies, he falls back on his addiction. Translated, that means we are sometimes supposed to believe he is a Yale-trained lawyer, experienced corporate grandee, and skilled negotiator, and thus carefully avoided involving his father in the family’s various schemes. And then again, sometimes when the evidence is damning and overwhelming, he simply cannot remember, or claims he was addled at the time in question due to his medical “addiction”. 2) In the Georgia Trump case, lawyers Terence Bradley, Nathan Wade, and Prosecutor Fani Willis all testified under oath to events that are contradicted by either prior other witness testimonies, or their own previous statements, or electronic phone records, and thus, to square the record, either have claimed amnesia, ignorance, or larger racist forces at work. Two of the three are leading the effort to indict a former president and current leading candidate for the presidency on a racketeering charge never before used in a Georgia election interference case, and to be tried by prosecutors who have either zero experience in felony criminal cases or no experience in racketeering cases or both. 3) Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, ran for office on promises to use her office to go after Donald Trump. She used an obscure consumer fraud law to claim Trump overvalued assets to obtain a loan that was paid back with interest and on time to a bank that audited his financial statement prior to the loan and had zero complaints about its profitable loan after it was paid off. Trump now is fined $355 million for a crime that has no victim, and has lost control of his New York businesses to a court-appointed judge. No one in New York history has ever been tried under this statute for allegedly exaggerating assets to get a loan that was paid back and over which the lending agency had no complaints. 4) Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg also boasted in his campaign for office he would go after Donald Trump. He is trying Trump on multiple felonies in a state court surrounding a supposed campaign finance violation over a nondisclosure agreement that the proper federal attorneys earlier felt did not merit prosecution. 5) Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is trying Trump for removing classified files to his estate at Mar-a-Lago. Note that twin special prosecutor Robert Hur found that President Biden also removed classified files to more and less secure residences for far longer (over 30 years) but as a senator and Vice President without Trump’s statutory presidential authority to declassify such documents. Biden admitted in 2017 he possessed such classified files and yet knowingly waited years to notify authorities. He did so only on the expectation that prosecutor Smith would soon indict Trump for the same alleged crime. Smith is also trying Trump on “insurrectionary” conduct despite Trump never having been charged in the prior three years by any federal or state authority for such an offense. 6) E. Jean Carrol (won $83.3 million in a “defamation” civil suit against Trump) won her case despite: 1) having no idea what year the alleged sexual assault took place some 30 years ago; 2) claiming she remembered the assault by the designer dress she wore that did not exist at the time; 3) advancing a narrative of events nearly identical to an episode of Law and Order that aired in 2012; 4) tweeting roughly two decades later that her supposed assailant’s TV show The Apprentice was one of her favorites; 5) her ELLE editor denying Carroll was fired from the magazine due to the Carroll-Trump dispute; 6) creating an app about how to break up couples through various machinations; 7) refiling her case beyond the statute of limitations, but only once a leftwing New York legislator strangely passed a bill allowing claimants of sexual abuse to have a one time, one year window to refile beyond the statute of limitations. 7) Blue or purple states such as Colorado, Illinois, and Maine are currently all attempting to remove Donald Trump from their presidential ballots on allegations of insurrectionary activity despite the fact he has never been convicted of any such charge and there is no precedent for such presidential disqualification. 8) Note the following: All the prosecutors, and litigants are either Democratic partisans or liberals. The trials have and will take place largely in Atlanta, New York, or Washington among leftwing prosecutors, judges, and jury pools. The majority of the charges and suits—the various states’ misuse of 14th Amendment, Bragg’s bootstrapping a state indictment onto a federal charge, James’s contortion of using a consumer fraud law to try Trump for a crime without a victim, Willis’s misuse of a racketeering statute to concoct an election interference charge, Carroll refiling once a leftwing jurist passed a special law that allowed her to do so postfacto, Smith’s effort to indict a president for insurrection and removing classified files—have either never been used before in these ways, or are in the wrong jurisdiction, or could equally apply to Democratic targets such as Joe Biden (found culpable by a special counsel but exempt by cognitive disability, named in various testimonies and texts as recipient of illicit foreign payments, accused of prior sexual assault), Hillary Clinton (fined for campaign finance violations), or Barack Obama (fined for campaign finance violations). So what is the reason for all this lying, these legal contortions, and egregious prosecutor and judicial misbehavior? Five simple facts alone: 1) The Left both fears and detests Donald Trump. 2) Donald Trump chose to run for the presidency in 2024. 3) Donald Trump is not a man of the Left. 4) Donald Trump is currently ahead of Joe Biden in both national polls and in the majority of swing state polls. 5) The Left feels barring Trump from the presidency is worth destroying 235 years of American jurisprudence.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

“Oh What a Tangled Web Biden Weaves, When He First Practices to Deceive” Joe Biden and his White House handlers continue to peddle misinformation if not lies about his removal of classified files. The worst is that Biden—supposedly so unlike Trump—came forward willingly as soon as he realized that he had unlawfully, but inadvertently, removed and possessed classified files. And thus he cooperated fully and promptly with federal authorities. The truth is far, far different. Biden removed files improperly both as a Senator and Vice President. He held some of them in his unlawful possession for perhaps at least 14 years without a word to authorities, dating back at least to his departure from the Senate on January 15, 2009 when he resigned to become Vice President—or if not longer over his some 36-year Senate career. In fact, in 2017 Biden was fully aware that he had wrongly removed these classified files. As Hur noted, there is a taped conversation on record between Biden and his ghostwriter to just that effect. Biden, at home in Virginia, was recorded as remarking, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs”. And yet Biden apparently did nothing. He never came forward to any federal authorities for nearly the next five years. So given that knowledge, why did the attorneys belatedly disclose Biden’s possession of the files on November 2, 2022? Civic virtue? Altruism? Respect for the law? Hardly. Otherwise, Biden would have disclosed his unlawful possession at any time during either the intervening prior years when he was a private citizen or during the first 18 months of his presidency, when he knowingly still possessed classified files and still did nothing about it. In truth, Biden would likely never have come forward, save for one insurmountable problem: Merrick Garland had likely decided to appoint Jack Smith as a special prosecutor to investigate the Trump files that the FBI had swooped into Mar-a-Lago looking for 3 months earlier on August 8, 2022. In other words, knowing that Smith or a generic special counsel would very quickly be appointed (Smith was sworn in a little over two weeks later, on November 18, 2022), suddenly Biden and Co. preempted that announcement, in fear that Biden had done virtually the same thing as Trump—albeit without presidential declassification power and for at least 14 years in possession of classified files. Had the attorneys and Biden not come forward, Trump and others would have asked whether Biden had not also removed files. So to get out in front of the formal announcement of the Smith appointment, they preempted, misleadingly and disingenuously, preening that civic virtue had prompted Biden’s “voluntary” disclosures and “cooperation”. A final note: one of the more disturbing moments in Biden’s catastrophic press conference was his flare up at Hur’s revelation (“How dare he bring up that!”) that in formal interviews an enfeebled Biden had not remembered the general date of his son’s tragic death from a glioblastoma brain tumor on May 30th, 2015 at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC. Biden went on to vent at Hur. But Hur was simply documenting his analysis that Biden was severely cognitively impaired, and not as VP Kamala Harris claimed, gratuitously smearing Biden. But who exactly had serially lied about Beau Biden’s demise, by claiming that he had died while on duty in Iraq, serving in the Delaware National Guard as a Judge Advocate? Joe Biden. He has still a bad habit of directing attention away from grieving families of fallen soldiers, by claiming that he too experienced the same nightmare. Biden had been pilloried in the media to cease such false narratives about his son’s tragic premature death due to natural causes back in the United States, years after his deployment in Iraq. But to no avail, he continues spinning such myths as he did repeatedly as late as last year. Sadly, doctoring family tragedies for his own purposes is not new to Biden, as Jack Fowler noted in 2019. The tragic death in a December 1972 traffic accident of his first wife and daughter, and the injuries of his two sons, was raised for decades by Biden—but in a completely false context of blaming an innocent truck driver, Curtis Dunn for the death. Dunn was innocent of any culpability. No matter, Biden in his serial retelling for years repeatedly smeared Dunn as drunk driver (“an errant driver who stopped to drink”) who had killed his wife and daughter. Biden finally gave in to the repeated pleas for decades from the truck driver and after his death, his family. Or as a 2010 Mark Bowden Atlantic essay on Biden noted: “For many years, he described the driver of the truck that struck and killed his first wife and their daughter in December 1972 as drunk, which he apparently was not. The tale could hardly be more tragic; why add in a baseless charge? The family of the truck driver has labored to correct the record, but Biden made the reference to drunkenness as recently as 2007, needlessly resurrecting a false and painful accusation.”

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

83 million? Donald Trump in furor stormed out of a New York courtroom for a while, in the defamation suit brought by author and dating/boyfriend/sex-advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. It was just settled against Trump for $83.3 million! The Carroll suit was largely subsidized by Reid Hoffman the billionaire capitalist, and mega-donor to the Democratic Party and leftwing causes. The subtext of Trump’s rage, aside from the outrageous monetary size of the defamation ruling, is that he was facing—and angered—a leftwing claimant, a quite hostile leftwing judge, and a leftwing New York jury. The civil suit serves as a mere preview of four additional leftwing criminal prosecutions, leftwing judges, and leftwing juries to come—all on charges that would never had been filed if Trump either had not run for president or been a liberal progressive. Yet here we are. The E. Jean Carroll case is the most baffling of all five. She, the alleged victim, did not remember even the year in which the purported sexual assault took place, nearly three decades ago. Observers have pointed out dozens of inconsistencies in her story. It was never clear what were the preliminaries that supposedly (Trump denies meeting her) led both, allegedly, willingly to retreat together to a department store dressing room, where during normal business hours the alleged violence took place. Moreover, the sexual assault complaint came forward decades post facto—and only after Trump was running for and then president. Carroll eventually sued him for battery, but well after the statute of limitations had expired and thus the case seemed defunct. Her claims of defamation injuries arise from being fired from her advice column job at ELLE magazine. She claimed that Trump’s sharp denials and ad hominem retorts led to her career ruin. But the loss for anyone of a column at 76 does not seem such a rare occurrence, and the absence of a salaried job in one’s late seventies for four years does not seem to equate to a $83 million hit. And note the allegation that her dispute with Trump led to her firing was strongly denied by the very magazine that cut her loose. But then another strange thing happened. In 2022, a new law (“The Adult Survivors Act”) was passed in the New York legislature. It also post facto established a twelve-month window (beginning six months from the signing of bill) that permitted survivors of long ago alleged sexual assaults suddenly to sue the accused long-ago perpetrator—regardless of the previous statute of limitations. That unexpected opening suddenly gave Carroll’s prior unsuccessful efforts a rebirth. And she quickly refiled with the help of arch-Trump hating billionaire Hoffman. Yet the bill may have been introduced with Trump particularly in mind—given the legislator who introduced it, Brad Hoylman-Siga, was known as another Trump antagonist. More interestingly, he had earlier introduced and had passed another Trump-targeted bill. That “TRUST” act had empowered particular federal Congressional committees to have access to the New York State once sealed tax returns of high-ranking government officials—such as Trump. That bill’s generally agreed subtext was a green light for anti-Trump members of Congress to obtain legal access to Donald J. Trump's tax returns. So there is an eerie feeling that the New York legislature may have abruptly passed legislation that was aimed at the past conduct of Donald Trump but only after he entered the political arena. While these are not quite bills of attainder, there is something unsettling if they are post facto laws aimed at targeting the most famous and controversial man in America and the leading candidate for the presidency. In essence they were targeted statutes designed to make Trump’s prior legally unactionable behavior suddenly quite legally actionable. Trump will be subject to such special treatment all summer and fall. Prosecutors Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis will synchronize their court business for maximum effect. Trump again will face leftwing prosecutors, judges, and juries on charges that are politically driven, involving alleged behavior that is either usually not criminalized or not to the same degree as Trump’s case. (Do we remember the nearly $375,000 federal fine belatedly leveled at an exempt Obama but only five years after his 2008 illegal garnering of, and not reporting, foreign campaign contributions?) The stakes are higher each day as Trump closes in on the nomination and thus becomes the hope of half the country to end the Biden madness. Somehow Trump will have to stay calm, give no opening to his legion of hostile prosecutors, while conducting a nonstop campaign against Biden (and for a while Hayley), and while fighting to keep his name on various state ballots. So what we are witnessing is not even the extralegal efforts of Steele/Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie/DNC/Hillary Clinton in 2016, or the 2020 “Russian disinformation” ruse/change the voting laws/infuse half a billion dollars to absorb the work of the registrar machinations against Trump. We are way beyond all that. The legal system itself, hand-in-glove with leftwing politicos (compare campaign boasts of James and Willis, or prosecutorial visits to the January 6 committee and the White House) is turning the process of balloting and elections into an embarrassing farce. Still, Trump will have to soldier on. He must stay controlled amid the tsunamis, not play into the hands of his accusers, and remember that he may soon be the only eleventh-hour hope to stop this mockery of American law, customs and traditions.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

What Are “They” Afraid That a "Dictator”/President Trump Might Do? As Joe Biden’s political viability implodes, the exasperated Left has yet a new narrative: front-runner Trump and his extremist/semi-fascist/Ultra MAGA 160 million are out for “revenge” and “retribution—and that Trump might well become a “dictator” and “trample” the Constitution. Ok, let’s examine what a supposed dictator Trump might do if he were to be elected this November? 1) Will he hide the fact that in 2024 he attempted to hire a foreign ex-spy to work with Russian sources to create a fake anti-Biden dossier (while sneakily hiding his payments behind three paywalls), seed it with the media, and hatch lies that Biden was a “Putin poodle” and “Russian asset”? 2) Would a Trump president weaponize a vengeful FBI to begin contracting with X and Facebook to suppress stories he feels will hurt MAGA candidates? Would his FBI alter FISA warrants to go after his leftwing opponents? Would he and his FBI henchmen have leftwing newspapers blacklisted from X? 3) Would Trump’s future Secretary of State round up 51 right-wing ex-CIA “authorities” to swear and lie on the eve of the balloting that the Russians created the Stormy Daniels nondisclosure agreement? 4) Maybe Trump will get his DOJ to go easy on any future accusations of tax fraud on behalf of his sons by weaponizing the IRS. 5) Maybe Trump will dictatorially cancel student loan debt on the eve of the 2026 midterms. Or would he dare by fiat drain the strategic petroleum reserve merely for Republican advantage in the midterms? 6) Maybe a dictator Trump might appoint a special counsel to investigate the entire Biden family. Would his legal counsel consult with local and state Republican prosecutors to coordinate 90 or so more indictments against ex-president Joe Biden? Will he order the FBI to sweep down on one of the Biden residences to hunt for more missing classified files that Biden removed as a senator and vice president? 7) Will he postfacto declare the 2020 riots to be an armed “insurrection” and retroactively start trying, convicting, and jailing the some 14,000 who were arrested and released—on charges of rioting, looting, arson, murder, and assault, in addition to “illegal parading” and conspiracy to burn a federal courthouse, a city police precinct, a historic church? Would dictator Trump keep in preventative detention indefinitely those arrested in 2020 for rioting and violent protest? 8) Maybe dictator Trump will refuse to discuss all medical questions concerning his 78-year age. 9) Will Trump minions in the media and military start talking about rooting out “leftwing rage”, or Antifa and BLM “domestic terrorists” from the military ranks? Would Trump order the Pentagon to discharge any soldier who refused to get one of his Operation Warp Speed COVID mRNA boosters? 10) Will dictator Trump protect some 500 “sanctuary cities” from ignoring federal laws—as they nullify the endangered species list or federal gun registrations statutes? 11) Would dictator Trump’s America destroy the southern border deliberately and invite in 10 million illegal aliens from countries he thought would ensure new conservative voters? 12 ) Would dictator Trump's America start seeing red-states removing the names of Democratic candidates from the ballot? 13) Would dictator Trump start jailing ex-Biden officials who refused Republican congressional subpoenas? 14) Would dictator Trump’s America turn over $50 billion in weapons and supplies to terrorists like the Taliban? 15) Would dictator Trump’s America see an epidemic of big-city lawlessness, as conservative prosecutors deliberately let out felons convicted of smash and grab and car-jacking, and exempted theft and shoplifting from punishment? 16) Would dictator Trump start shaking down foreign governments to send $30 million into the Trump family coffers? 17) Would dictator Trump camp out at Mar-a-Lago for 3-4 days a week, and turn the presidency into a pastime job? So what exactly would a “dictator” Trump do that our "civil libertarian” Joe Biden already has not done?

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Who Are the Real Insurrectionaries? Part Three For four years, there followed serial, often illegal, efforts to ensure that a now President Trump failed and was not to be reelected—most notably by the 3-year-long Russian “collusion” hoax, finally and reluctantly debunked by a $40 million, 22-month sideshow investigation of Robert Mueller’s “dream team”. No matter, soon followed the Hunter laptop “Russian disinformation” hoax, in which the FBI and “51 former intelligence authorities” sought deliberately to mislead voters on the eve of a debate and election, by first lying to the public, and then hiring out social media censors to suppress accurate news accounts that the laptop was indeed genuine. Recall too “Anonymous.” He was later revealed to be Miles Taylor, a relatively minor Homeland Security official, whom the media nevertheless had inflated into a “major” Trump appointee, heroically and internally disrupting the business of the Trump administration. Taylor earned star status, a New York Times op-ed, and a book deal, as he boasted that “The dilemma -- which (Trump) does not fully grasp -- is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them." Frustrate an agenda?—as in free-lancing by deliberately blocking an elected president’s order? We know that Trump’s “worst” homeland security “inclinations,” in retrospect included the internal efforts to stop Trump’s efforts to build a wall to restore border security, to stop catch-and-release, and to redirect refugee appeals to one’s home country. Then there was the legion of retired 4-stars who violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice by claiming Trump was Hitlerlike, a veritable Mussolini, enacting Auschwitz-like policies, a liar, who should be removed the “sooner the better”, and on and on. The call of premature removal by a distinguished admiral was reminiscent of a similar urging from Obama-era Pentagon lawyer Rosa Brooks. Just 11 days after the Inauguration (that witnessed mass and often violent anti-Trump demonstrations, and Madonna’s “dream” speech of “blowing up” the White House), Brooks called for Trump to be removed either by impeachment, the 25th-Amendment, or a military coup. Still again that scenario was reiterated by retired officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling, who in August 2020, three months before the election, called on Gen. Mark Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs, to order the military to intervene to ensure Trump was escorted out of the White House. As for Chairman Mark Milley’s own China phone-call caper, Res ipsa loquitur.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Who Are the Real Insurrectionaries? Part Two Hillary Clinton was joined in her later efforts to deny the legitimacy of the 2016 election by a large chorus of elected House members, and ex-president Jimmy Carter. Carter in 2019 echoed her charges: “And there's no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election. And I think the interference although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn't actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.” Here we have an ex-president election denialist accusing the then president of being a veritable traitor as well as an election rigger. We do not recall any outrage at the time. During the 2016 electoral-college process, third-party Green candidate Jill Stein, de facto acting as a DNC surrogate, claimed the 2016 ballot count was illegitimate. She thus sued in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin claiming the voting machines were rigged. (To my knowledge the companies involved like ExpressVote XL did not sue Stein, Dominion-Voting-Systems-style for $1 billion). Stein’s denialism arose mostly in reaction to the Clinton campaign that had loudly claimed “experts” found that Clinton tallies in those states did not meet her campaign’s pre-election expectations. At the same time, Democrats organized a media/publicity campaign— headed by about a dozen Hollywood “stars” appearing in nightly TV commercials —seeking to flip electors into “faithless” electors. In other words, they urged electors to violate their oaths, and not to reflect the uncontested majority votes of their states. Instead they were begged to vote for Hillary Clinton, who had lost their respective states’ popular vote. All this activism arose despite a July 2020 Supreme Court ruling clearly reaffirming the constitutionality of prior state laws that had declared faithless electors illegal. In other words, the Left organized a well-funded effort to overturn the 2016 election by creating faithless electors. They sought to deny the people’s majority votes in their states, and they continued despite a recent prior Supreme Court ruling that this ploy was patently illegal. Just four months after the Inauguration, Clinton boasted that she was part of the “Resistance”, a direct echo to the armed French armed effort —La Résistance—against the Nazi occupation. I suppose Hillary thought she was one of the heroic Democratic maquis and Trump of course Adolf Hitler. Leftwing fact-checkers bristle when such comparisons are made between the 2016 and 2020 election denialism. But the real difference between the two elections’ denialism was that the organized “resistance” to an “illegitimate” president who had “rigged” and “stolen” the 2016 vote continued throughout the Trump administration, often in illegal fashion. To be continued…

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Who Are the Real Insurrectionaries? Part One Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows just ordered Trump’s name removed from the primary ballot in May. She claimed he is guilty in her view of “insurrection”—a crime Trump has never been charged with, much less convicted of. Her evidence, mostly gleaned from popular news accounts and video reports, would not stand up in a court of law. Bellows has no law degree. She was appointed by a majority vote of the Democratic-controlled Maine legislature, not through a popular ballot. Her legal expertise seems to be derived from years of political activism with the ACLU. We can see where the ultimate trajectory of this usurpation is going—once a single official decides to remove the leading primary and general election candidate of the opposition from the ballot by fiat. Tit-for-tat will likely follow and would unwind the republic. Take Bellows’ action and then apply it to any future candidacy of Hillary Clinton. And by these new rules she surely would fail to qualify to have her name on a state ballot. Remember, in 2016 Hillary Clinton illegally hired a foreign national (by law forbidden to work in presidential campaigns), Christopher Steele, to create a “dossier” of smears and fake-news accounts, aimed at destroying her presidential opponent Donald Trump by extra-legal means. Clinton hid her illicit payments to Steele behind the paywalls of the DNC, the Perkins-Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS. Her leftwing associates and partisans in the waning Obama administration, the DOJ, State Department, FBI, and CIA worked hard to brand the slurs as credible, as they variously passed them off and leaked to the media on the eve of the election. They and Democrats in congress later engineered the appointment of a special counsel, whose investigations consumed two years of the Trump administration’s term, before finding no “collusion”. Even three years after the election in 2019 and the special counsel’s findings, Clinton could still persist that Trump was an “illegitimate” president: “He knows he’s an illegitimate president”. She also declared that year that the 2016 election had been “stolen”: “I think it’s also critical to understand that, as I’ve been telling candidates who have come to see me, you can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you”—de facto asserting the balloting was fraudulent. She was prepping the battlefield for 2020. So Clinton continued her denialism right up to the eve of the 2020 election, further claiming the 2016 election was rigged, “There was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level.” To be continued…

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

The Colorado Insurrection Donald Trump is being erased from the Colorado primary (and general?) ballot, by warping the 14th Amendment, and in a way never envisioned by its creators. So now can one be guilty by fiat of Confederacy-like “insurrection,” when he has never been charged with, much less convicted of, such a crime? How can a buffoonish January 6th riot become an “insurrection,” when no one was armed, there was no plan to seize power, and protestors were advised by the purported insurrectionist leader “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”? As far as election insurrectionary interference, why did liberal journalist Molly Ball label the leftwing effort to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election a “cabal” (e.g., “That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information”)? And why did Ball double-down and further call it a “conspiracy” (“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans, of CEOs, Silicon Valley billionaires, street protestors…Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”)? As far as efforts to nullify the popular vote, do we remember the pathetic 2016 ensemble of C-list Hollywood celebrities (e.g., Martin Sheen, Debra Messing, James Cromwell, BD Wong, Noah Wyle, Freda Payne, Bob Odenkirk, J. Smith Cameron, Michael Urie, Moby, Mike Farrell, Loretta Swit, Christine Lahti, Steven Pasquale, Dominic Fumusa and Emily Tyra)? They were drafted by leftwing groups to cut commercials urging the electors to reject their constitutional duties of reflecting their states’ popular votes, and instead, as faithless electors, to vote instead for Hillary Clinton, the loser in their respective states’ popular votes. How did they rationalize that anti-constitutional gambit? Well, remember Martin Sheen’s shameless sophistry to ignore the Constitution and the election results? “As you know, our founding fathers built the Electoral College to safeguard the American people from the dangers of a demagogue, and to ensure that the presidency only goes to someone who is to an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” So what makes a high elected official an insurrectionist? Current or past advocacy for using violence against the government, as represented by, say, the Supreme Court? Or urging on more protests that had already turned violent, eventually leading to 35 deaths, 1,500 injured police officers, $1-2 billion in property damage, and a torched courthouse, police headquarters, and iconic church? Attempting to break into the White House grounds? Sending the president into a secure underground bunker? If so, remember Kamala Harris’s summer 2020 boasts about the protests that, she knew (contrary to “fact checkers”) had already a long history of violence: “But they're not gonna stop. They're not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I'm telling you. They're not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they're not gonna stop. They're not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they're not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they're not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.” What was the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer intending, when in 2020 he incited a throng at the very doors of the Supreme Court, warning of violence to come to two justices whom he called out by name? “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” “Hit you”? Now we have ballot suppression to add to the long list of farces, hoaxes, and lies all designed to destroy a candidate who otherwise might win popular support for an agenda the majority of Americans have consistently supported. So the leftwing Colorado Justices join the “Russian collusion” spectacle, the Alfa Bank “pink” hoax, the “Russian disinformation” laptop ruse, the precedent breaking two impeachments of a president in his first term, the caper of trying an ex-president as a private citizen in the senate, and the ploy of raiding an ex-president’s home. What exactly is the Left doing? They accept they have no majority support for the current President or his agenda. They fear the voters will elect a Republican. They are horrified that it might be Donald Trump, whom they especially loathe. And they are terrified that Trump might do to them what they would certainly do if they were in his position. The Left is mightily frustrated that after controlling all the sources of information, communications, and institutions (e.. CEOs, traditional and social media, entertainment, the Internet, Silicon Valley, academia, K-12, foundations, sports, and popular culture, etc.), and having a vast advantage in fund raising and money, they still cannot stop the will of the majority. And the Left wages lawfare because they assume the Right is either too timid, too incompetent, too preoccupied, or too principled to reciprocate in kind—especially given they gloat that there were never any consequences for all the past hoaxes and ruses they perpetuated. But this time they may have jumped the proverbial shark and shown themselves to be the true and only insurrectionists that will face the consequences of any angry public in November 2024.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Harvard Says to Us, Get Over It? Most of the nation witnessed three haughty, morally obtuse Ivy-League presidents humiliated in their groupthink televised House testimonies. But more than 700 Harvard faculty did not. They are circling the wagons to ensure that their benefactor President Gay’s job (and for some of them, perhaps theirs too) was not in danger. They just signed a letter (e.g., “The critical work of defending a culture of free inquiry in our diverse community cannot proceed if we let its shape be dictated by outside forces”), reaffirming support for President Gay—even as she reels from charges including an inability or unwillingness to condemn and punish serial and overt anti-Semitic behavior and speech on her campus, plagiarism, a history of suppressing campus free expression, and hounding conservative professors on dubious pretexts. We should also remember that today’s elite campus believes it is the sole property of the current faculty, students, and administrators, who at the moment happen to occupy it—and not also of the “outside forces” of the alumni, of the donors, and of the many boards of overseers and trustees (not to mention of the taxpayers who provide multibillion-dollar subsidies to it). I think we can all agree on one thing: Harvard most certainly does not stand for “defending a culture of free inquiry”—at least as it applies to unfettered and free debate over, say, controversies such as Israel, DEI, affirmative action, grading standards, Christianity, Western Civilization, climate change, abortion, fossil fuels, transgenderism and sports, illegal immigration, or firearms. There was a reason, after all, why The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranked Harvard dead last out of 248 universities in protecting “free speech”, and why Gay’s Harvard is infamous for bending to pressure to disinvite guest speakers, attacking any who do not abide by approved vocabulary, ostracizing faculty deemed insufficiently supportive of DEI agendas, and student mobs hounding professors whose published research they do not like. Given the gargantuan Ivy-League endowments and multibillion-dollar annual influx of “research” grants to elite institutions, these presidents and their universities apparently believe they are to be exempt from all criticism and enjoy a birthright to endless federal money. Again, the only thing that can save the elite universities from themselves, and from their descent into the modern Dark Ages is to return once again to inculcating civic education, ensuring free inquiry, offering inductive courses—and showing some concern for their own middle-class taxpaying benefactors. Yet it is hard to imagine the current intolerant woke campus will change course unless we have a serious discussion about curbing the government's multibillion-dollar subsidies to elite higher education—winding down the massive research grants, tax-free endowment income, tax-deductible private gifts, and $2 trillion in federally subsidized student loans. In other words, why should we pay for institutions that despise us, and masquerade as disinterested universities when they are proud indoctrination centers and emissaries of what they think will be a brave, new, and more or less unrecognizable America.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Our Three Blind Mice ​​​​​​“Three blind mice. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run…” The recent testimonies of the three university presidents (Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and [soon to be departed?] University of Pennsylvania’s Liz McGill) concerning their inaction about endemic anti-Semitism on their campuses have probably done more damage to higher education than any recent event in memory. (And note there was not a white, male, heterosexual supposed oppressor to be found among the enlightened). We know they know they failed because two at least clumsily tried damage repair over the next few days that only confirmed their initial stupidity. And a herd of other scared university presidents suddenly have now issued their own memoranda professing their supposed zero tolerance politics for anti-Semitism on campus. Still, do not believe that any are too sincere given they remain for now still more afraid of their DEI/woke/hard left faculty and students than they are of alumni, donors, or us the taxpayers. But note the following: 1) The three blind mice could not even lie well. Like nearly all contemporary university presidents, they have long revoked admissions, suspended students, or relieved faculty from teaching for any language, expression, or advocacy they considered incorrect, which translates as anything not compatible with wokism or DEI. Invoking ‘freedom of speech’ to disguise their moral cowardice is pathetic when they have never on their campuses believed in freedom of speech. One incorrect word about someone trans, a misplaced pronoun, or a clumsy reference to a non-white student, and the offender would be punished immediately—followed by the usual performance-art, virtue-signaling, “this is not who we are”/“there is no place for such hatred on this campus” memo from a careerist dean or bully provost. Instead, they have excused their censorship by arguing that in their campus enclaves, as in a corporation, they have the right to set their own codes of behavior—without taxpayers subsidies. But the issue is not so much “free speech”, but the equal application of rules and laws. These presidents adhere to systemic prejudice, in which free speech and rules of behavior are predicated on ideology as well as race and ethnicity. Worse still, they cloak such neanderthal reactionaryism in gobbledygook progressive platitudes. In their ridiculous white-oppressor/non-, white-oppressed reductionist world, advocating the destruction of Israel, and the Jewish people with it, is no big deal. Indeed, it pays dividends among their DEI and foreign student constituencies. So they are upset not that they have de facto institutionalized anti-Semitism to such a degree that it is now inviting physical assaults on their own students, but that they have been caught and called out on it. Bottom line: the nation learned that these people don’t care about their own campuses cheering on mass rape, mutilation, and beheading or calling for the extinction of Israel and all the Jews in it, because Jews as whites are on the wrong side of their victim/victimizer DEI binary, and suffer the additional wage of anti-Semitism. There is no career upside in their twisted worlds in defending Jews in Israel—or anywhere—from precivilizational barbarism. 2) All of these elite university presidents supposedly were once top scholars, seasoned faculty, and experienced deans and provosts. In other words, they are the purported best and brightest of what academia now has to offer us. And it turns out to be not much at all. Note in minutes they were utterly eviscerated by Republican congressional representatives with no such academic credentials, but with plenty of intelligence, logic, street smarts and common sense acquired from politics or business or non-academic experience. When the president of Harvard or MIT is rendered a moral pygmy and intellectual lightweight by our local congressional representatives, it warns us of what higher education has become and perhaps reminds why academics should be kept as far away from governance as possible. (Professors—e.g., a Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama—usually have proved poor if not dangerous presidents). After such skilled grilling, we owe a great deal of respect for the abilities and moral sense of these Republican House members. 3) The only reason the three showed any remorse or the next day tried to reset, was transitory fear of financial consequences, as in being blamed for a temporary drop-off in donations. But that reality underscores that we the people do have power over even our elite and private universities and can rescue them from themselves, if we understand that those who feign a supposed disdain for money are the most eager to acquire it, as we saw with the Bankman-Fried trio. In other words, the taxpayer can reign in a Harvard or MIT—should the U.S. government condition billions of dollars in annual subsidies to campuses on non-discriminatory policies, reconsider tax-exemptions for university giving, tax their endowment income until higher education is truly disinterested and non-partisan, and remove the government from the $2 trillion student loan racket that ensures tuition inflation, administrative bloat, and generations of youth suffering from arrested development.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Another Debate and then No Mas A very few of us watched the last debate. Synopsis? Whatever candidate you were for before the debate, then  you were likely for after the debate as well. Why were Ramaswamy and Christie still on stage? Neither has any chance of being nominated or elected. Both screamed and yelled and sucked up much of the air time. Ramaswamy’s schtick seems to be that he will dare to say what no one else will, but other than the shock value, the content is either empty or irrelevant. And there will be no limits to his invective, including ordering Christie off the stage to have a “meal”. We said stuff like that at Selma High School circa 1968. Christie posed as the stage’s moral mentor. But he still can never quite sermonize away why he went from close Trump advisor, one-time possibly nominated Trump Attorney General, and an architect of the Trump (disastrous) strategy in 2020 debate one, to unsurpassed Trump hater? When he went enthusiastically for Trump in 2016, there was no record of governance. Now there is, as there was in 2020 when he continued his animated pro-Trump endorsements. Was it January 6th? The current rail-roading indictments? He never quite says. Christie of course kept claiming that Trump was unfit for the presidency and might well land in jail. But the reason he was roundly booed after each such outburst was that he also said nada about the weaponization of the law by prosecutors Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis. The four respectively either ran political campaigns promising to get Trump, used ossified or irrelevant statutes to tag him with an indictment, or are pursuing him for the identical “crimes” that Joe Biden has committed but is apparently exempted. Is overestimating the value of Mar-a-Lago (Trump in fact likely vastly underestimated its value) with no ensuing injured party, a more egregious sin than receiving foreign-birthed money from the Biden shake-down consortium or destroying 30,000 federally subpoenaed emails and the devices upon which they were sent and received? Or à la the unpunished Andrew McCabe, lying to federal investigators on four occasions? And on and on. De Santis likely won the debate because he needed only to refer to his record in Florida rather than engage in hypotheticals. Haley remained calm as Ramaswamy attacked her relentlessly, and she fits the bill of a presentable moderate for the right of center, moderate donor class, which is looking for any momentum anywhere by anyone other than Trump. Her heart did not seem in it to refute the RHINO charges, either because she feels that is what earns her donor infusions, or she is really a Bush/Romney/McCain Republican and proud of it, or she knows her grace and calmness, not her views, are what attracts recent attention and some support. In the end, the problem is that all four more or less ignored the two putative candidates Biden and Trump and turned their fire on each other. Like the proverbial mice who must bell the cat, they all know that they must unite around one non-Trump candidate, but also like the mice they expect someone else to sacrifice his or her candidacy—and so far none on stage will do that. And two of them wouldn’t matter if they did drop out and endorse one of the two remaining ones. Surely the RNC must be capable of finding some sort of venue that narrows the final debates down to the two leading contenders, rather than showcasing the fireworks of candidates who will be forgotten in 3 months? And for the finale, what was the logic of a TV host with a usual audience of 100,000 or so, and almost impossible for most viewers to find? The NewsNation moderators were excellent and even the post-debate commentary was fine. But again, why outsource the most important last debate to a conservative station with the smallest audience among the contenders? In general, the four debates were a flop. There were always too many on stage. Trump never participated. Few gave a comprehensive rejection of the Biden disastrous four years. And the loudest and most animated and most talkative were always those with the least chance of winning.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

October 7 and the Touchstone of Hate The almost immediate posting after October 7 of the BLM poster glorifying the hang-gliding murderous entry into Israel only confirmed what most of us knew anyway. Black lives matter and the entire diversity/equity/inclusion conglomerate rabidly hate Jews. Their response to October 7 revealed their pseudo-education in  “anti-colonialism”, “white supremacy”, and “settler” oppression. It is hard to find a major university where an academic on news of October 7 has not vented hatred for Jews. And that loathing is growing, as we witnessed the recent mobbing of a Jewish restaurant in Philadelphia (“Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”) So much also for the leftwing myth that being anti-Israeli is not anti-Semitic, as if a Stanford instructor first asked Jews whether they were pro-Israel before separating them out in his class, or as if UCLA students who hit a pinata screaming “Beat that f---ing Jew” forgot to say, “that f---ing Israeli”. Most recently, Christine Blasey Ford-era feminist Rep. Pramila Jayapal called for balance in contextualizing the mass rape of Israeli women (“However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians ”) and claimed stuff just happens in war (“I think we always talk about the impact of war on women in particular”). But Israeli women were not just raped in a time of war by soldiers, horrific as that would have been. They were mass raped, mutilated, executed, and desecrated by Hamas thugs who broke into Israel at a time of holiday and peace and deliberately fixated on the unarmed, the elderly, children, infants, and women to do their precivilizational worst, from sexual torture and mutilation to decapitation and necrophilia. Only a moral monster would seek to equate all that to the collateral damage to civilians. Gazans are deliberately used as shields by Hamas, while warned, with leaflets and texts, to vacate the war zone by uniformed soldiers responding to a mass, unprovoked killing spree by invading terrorists. All the UN’s feminist groups, the architects of #Metoo, and the university gender studies crowd are mostly silent about this daily mounting evidence that one of many sick terrorist strategies of Hamas has been to sexually torture and injure Jewish women to incite fear and promote terror. Now we learn that one reason why Hamas broke the ceasefire and stopped the terrorists-for-hostages-exchanges was fear of discovery that younger Israeli female captives in their custody have been sexually assaulted. Given that Hamas survives mostly by its international propaganda machine, it apparently feared such disclosures might incite a smidgeon of doubt from its Western leftist useful idiots (it likely would not) and thereby lessen pressure to call off the IDF. The one common denominator to all this anti-Semitic hatred expressed by BLM, the international socialists, the Middle-East student organizations, and the DEI university faculties is freedom to spread venom as protected classes of victims, despite their own privilege, tenured careers, subsidized education, and elitism. That special exemption is best exemplified by cowardly college administrators. In response to overt anti-Semitism on their campuses, they on spec retreat to the notion that, while they would like to stop it, they just cannot, given their principled devotion to free speech. In fact, most of them long ago made sure there was no free speech at all on their campuses. And we all know that if any unhinged group substituted gay/trans/black/Latino for Jews in their venomous demonstrations they would have been long ago expelled with the tag-along boilerplate “this is not who we are” letter to the faculty from a careerist dean or upwardly mobile provost.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Don’t Do Unto Others What We Would Have Done to Them? Once more, it gets even creepier how the projectionist Left is daily still shrieking about impending Trump “revenge” and “rage”, or about Trump’s purported enemies lists to come, or about his planned weaponization of the bureaucracies. The fear is in direct proportion to Biden cognitive decline, sinking polls, and walls-are-closing-in family corruption. Should we laugh or cry about the transparent hypocrisy? After all, who tried to wreck an administration with a 22-month-long Russian “collusion” fraud, suppressed a laptop with the lie it was Russian “disinformation”, or impeached a president for a phone call correctly identifying the Biden family’s operation in Ukraine as utterly corrupt and at the expense of U.S. interests? Do we recall that the Obama-Biden nexus—from 2009-17, and from 2021 until now—cemented the reputation of FBI as a partisan operation, rebooted the Pentagon as an agent of woke change ferreting out “white rage” and “white privilege”, reinvented the DOJ as a Biden family protection service, politicized the CIA so that it, along with the FBI, interfered in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and warped the IRS by suppressing evidence of Biden family tax fraud? What Lois Lerner, Eric Holder (self-identified as Obama’s “wingman”), and Loretta Lynch left undone was taken up by Merrick Garland. Does the New York Times, or Joe Scarborough or any of these strange pundits raging about Trump rage to come remember how the “Logan Act” farce was used to destroy Michael Flynn? Or the Foreign Policy essay of Rosa Brooks, a former Obama-era Pentagon lawyer, about how to drive out Trump without waiting for the 2020 election, by either impeachment, the 25thAmendment—or a military coup? How about the “kill Trump” porn that saw celebrities, actors, and academics envisioning decapitating, stabbing, shooting, exploding, or incinerating the orange man? How about Anonymous’s confessions about how fellow bureaucrats were trying to undermine and sabotage the operations of the Trump administration from within? Or the Pentagon’s retired 4-stars calling for Trump to be removed the “sooner the better”, or labeling him a Mussolini or Nazi-like figure? Who paid Twitter millions to censor the news of political opponents? Who paid foreign national Christopher Steele to peddle a fake dossier to destroy the 2016 Republican candidate? Do we remember Biden’s Phantom-of-the-Opera harangue about his “ultra-MAGA” and “semi-fascists” political enemies? Were not the twin pillars of Biden’s current foreign policy team, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, once respectively knee-deep in the anti-Trump Alfa Bank-ping hoax and the “51 Intelligence Authorities” laptop scam? Again, the reason the media and politicians are terrified is that they are convinced Trump would do exactly what they would do in his place—and what they would do utterly suddenly horrifies them.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

“Beat the F---king Jew” and the American Campus October 7 and its aftermath have confirmed to the general public that the American university is not just dysfunctional but corrupt—a sad reality known by many on campus for years. University presidents have no obligation to weigh in on the weekly news, and probably should not. But that is not the ethos of academic administrators. Instead, they gratuitously opine on almost everything—at least if such virtue-signaling resonates with their leftist faculty and students. So, they are quick to write performance-art memos on Supreme Court abortion or affirmative action rulings, trans issues, the Trump danger, the Covid lockdowns and vaccinations, the George Floyd aftermath, BLM, the 2016 and 2020 elections, January 6, fossil fuels, climate change, etc. But on October 7th? Most did not utter a peep until alumni, donors, or both forced them to belatedly issue some anemic “on the one hand, on the other” mush. Otherwise at MIT, when DEI/woke/pro-Hamas students make it unsafe for Jewish students to walk in certain places, campus officials warned Jewish students to stay away—rather than outraged administrators declaring that the campus would never concede no-go, apartheid corridors to anyone. MIT now admits that foreign students harass Jews, interrupt classes, and violate their own rules that call for suspension. But they claim they cannot kick them out, because their student visas might be revoked. So, they would rather have serial anti-Semites on campus than back in the Middle East. In essence, they give more latitude to foreign pro-Hamas law breakers that to wayward American students. Such campus anti-Semitic hate protestors claim they are only anti-Israel, even though they harass Jews per se, without interest in learning of their particular attitudes about or relationship with Israel. At UCLA, protestors whack a Netanyahu piñata, screaming “Beat the f—king Jew”.  Note: they don’t yell “Beat the f—king Israeli.” Why? They really do hate Jews and they know their anti-Semitism resonates with the DEI/woke student and faculty crowd, which long ago branded Israelis “settler colonialists” and lumped Jews into the increasingly stereotyped and caricatured possessors of “white privilege”. The step is quite small from long-institutionalized racially segregated campus safe spaces, graduations, and dorms to administrators currently warning Jewish students that certain areas are unsafe and thus no-go for them. What will the pro-Hamas protestors not do? Tear down U.S. flags on Veterans’ Day? Shut down the Manhattan Bridge? Storm Grand Central Station? Deface the White House wall? Trap Jewish students in a library? Hijack classes? Rip down posters of the captives of Hamas? Chant monotonously that Israeli Jews should be wiped out “from the river to the sea”? (The chant surely does not mean to include the 21 percent Arab population of Israel.) Substitute blacks, Latinos, gays, or trans for Jews as the targets of any of these hateful campus outbursts and currently invertebrate administrators would be issuing serial memos declaring that “hate has no place on this campus” and promising expulsions for any student guilty of such “hate speech.”

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Stanford/Silicon Valley/Leftwing Politics Intersectionality The House Judiciary Committee just revealed how the Department of Homeland Security worked with Stanford University to form a “disinformation group.” Their agenda was to monitor and suppress unwelcome news during the 2020 election cycle. This so-called “Election Integrity Partnership”—how ironic a name—partnered with Stanford’s Internet Observatory to prep the election news cycle for Joe Biden. Takeaways: More evidence that the Left has perverted academia, government bureaucracies, and Big Tech to sabotage a free media. And still more evidence that a once great Stanford University continues in free fall—after the Stanford lecturer Ameer Hasan Loggins’s in-class, anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students; the four-day hiatus before the university could condemn the Hamas massacre; the climate of fear for Jewish students on campus; the Stanford Law School/Judge Duncan fiasco; the recent leveraged resignation of president Marc Tessier-Lavigne; the Bankman-Fried Stanford law professors’ connections to their convicted felon son’s cash transfers from his historic Ponzi scheme; the Theranos debacle; and the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” embarrassment, etc. Six months ago I wrote a warning about the increasing power of the Bay Area triad of Silicon Valley, Stanford University, and Bay Area politicians—and cited their efforts to undermine freedom of expression. https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/5/silicon-valleys-moral-bankruptcy

Silicon Valley’s moral bankruptcy by Victor Davis Hanson Victor Davis Hanson on the pestilence in northern California. newcriterion.com

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

The Incredible Lightness of Barack Obama Joe Biden is caught in a quadfecta of corruption, cognitive decline, a failed agenda, and eroding polls. Amid this apparent vacuum, an opportunistic Barack Obama — who used to be more discreet in managing his third term—is reentering the arena. Last week, he came out as the overseer of the Biden administration’s AI agenda, even as his foundation’s “Democracy Forum” was warning Americans about the need for “inclusive capitalism” and the pathologies of “material consumption”—all this from a multi-mansioned multimillionaire. Now, Obama is weighing in on the Gaza war by undercutting his third-term presidential proxy. Yet just as he seems somewhat clueless about the contradictions of an erstwhile “community organizer” turned into a hyper-capitalist, consumption-addicted elite, so too Obama has little self-awareness about how much of Biden’s unpopularity derives from his continuation of Obama’s own agendas on the economy, border, crime, race, foreign policy, and energy. His apparent obliviousness continues with his most recent odd assertion that, “The occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is [sic] unbearable.” But Obama surely concedes that Gaza has been autonomous and free of Israelis since 2005, and governed by a “one man, one vote, once” Hamas clique since January 2006. Obama added that, “If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth, and you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean – that all of us are complicit to some degree.” In truth, Obama’s blanket accusation is absurd. Over the last 17 years, an autonomous Hamas has managed to create both a hierarchy of billionaires ensconced in luxury Qatari hotels, and the most sophisticated subterranean tunnel city in the world—but little else except corruption, poverty, and violence for all concerned. Obama again seemed unaware of his own confession when he lectured, “nobody’s hands are clean” and “all of us are complicit”. Not quite, Barack. Those most culpable for the current catastrophe are Obama and his team, who invited in Robert Malley to be their point man on Hamas; cooked up the “Shiite crescent” misadventure; snubbed the grass-roots Green Movement that sought to overthrow the Iranian theocracy; invited the Russians back into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus; fled Iraq and fueled the ISIS caliphate; lifted sanctions on Iran, giving it a multibillion-dollar war chest that armed to the teeth Hezbollah and Hamas; estranged the U.S. from Israel; and created the media echo chamber that empowered the disastrous Iran Deal. The rest was history.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

The Torn Away Campus Scab—and the Sore Beneath How strange that at the 11th hour, a few college presidents, three weeks after the October 7 massacres, are finally issuing some criticism of the anti-Semitism that they, and their faculties had long ago tolerated and thus fueled. Their concern arose only when their campuses are heading to Kristallnacht-like violence—with students displaying the same Sturmabteilung combination of widespread ignorance and visceral hatred. Their faculties’ are no longer shy, in Heidegger-like fashion, in supporting Hamas as they contextualize its mass murder. PhDs especially cannot differentiate an autocratic side that beheads and rapes, hides under hospitals and schools, uses its own civilians as shields to protect terrorists while deliberately upping its own civilian body count, and sends rockets into civilian centers—from a democratic state that does not, but drops leaflets and warns civilians to keep away from impending attacks against the Hamas targets hiding in their midst. Or as 100 Columbia faculty put it of the mass murdering by Hamas terrorist gunmen (“military operations”)—and the Gazan civilians (“a people”) who tagged behind for the spoils: “military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but rather it represented a military response by a people”. So 85 years later, Jewish students find themselves under siege in a library. Jewish dorms require security officers. Posters of Hamas’s kidnapped captives are routinely torn down at campuses. Hundreds of thousands of “students”, at the nanosecond they heard news of the mass murder of Jews–but before any retaliation from the Israeli Defense Forces—massed to cheer the mutilations, rapes, and executions. Now pro forma faculty committees will be appointed. Reports will be filed. “Concern” must be aired. On- the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand recommendations will be applauded. And the universities will remain the American bastion of anti-Semitism, as higher education continues to erode to pre-high-school levels. Why? No college president dare wishes to concede that the fusion of its guest students from the Middle East and its DEI industry is at the heart of visceral hatred of Jews. No college president will dare return the curriculum to legitimate classes in history, literature, philosophy, languages, math, and science, and thus discard mostly worthless therapeutic courses on popular culture and -studies classes fixated on race and gender. Such gut courses, after all, are designed mostly for virtue signaling, mediocre faculty and for the increasing majority of students accepted without reasonable (or if any) SAT scores or competitively ranked high-school GPAs. In other words, the standards that colleges once insisted to the public were necessary all these decades to ensure meritocratic and top-flight study are now repudiated by their own creators as having been either worthless or racist or both. So why is the Harvard or Cornell president finally being forced to address anti-Semitism after weeks of their campuses cheering for the death work of Hamas murderers? The answer is self-evident. Universities presidents know all too well that the monsters they have long birthed are now overt and on the move. So they are frightened that the public knows what they have been up to. True, campuses obviously are afraid of the mass exodus of irate Jewish-American mega-donors who longer wish to subsidize higher-education’s hatred of Israel or Jews in general. But they will still calibrate whether such funding losses will be more than offset by even more billions of dollars pouring in from the Middle East on news of universities’ near institutionalized anti-Semitism and support for Hamas. Universities are also a bit anxious that their Ivy-League, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. tony brand is going the way of Bud Lite, Target, and Disney—given the public has encountered their recent graduates in the media, and in the workplace, and is, to put it mildly, unimpressed. In other words, the universities are losing support also from upper-middle class donors, and are starting to see just how quickly among the general public they have reduced their brand to one of mediocrity. Or is it worse than that? Will a Stanford or Harvard BA soon certify not a superb general education, or expertise in a demanding major, but instead stamp the graduate as mostly uneducated, arrogant, and foolish for paying so much for so little? Will the working student moonlighting at a community college who aced multiple-choice factual exams be rightly seen as better educated than the subsidized Ivy Leaguer who churns out half-literate essays on decolonization on spec? How can it be any other way with weaponized-studies classes, an arrogant campus sense of entitlement, and a toxic political landscape that is now exposed to the public as anti-Semitic, race-obsessed, and weepily passive-aggressive when occasionally called to account?

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Our Immoral Monsters Students at UCLA, some of them perhaps on foreign-student visas and others on some sort of taxpayer-funded support, are now marching with a new controversial and disputed chant: “Israel, Israel you cannot hide, we charge you with genocide”. But how strange that the same crowd that charges Israel with “genocide”, for replying to the mass murdering of its citizens on October 7, has a signature English-rhyming chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. That jingle is tailor-made for Western-residents eager to parrot the Hamas charter. Despite the usual denials, that mantra is a euphemism for destroying the state of Israel and those within it. They are then to be replaced by a nation of Palestinian Arabs from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean—in other words, requiring a genocide, or what happened on October 7 expanded to encompass all of Israel. When professors faced little in the way of consequences for calling for Jews to be separated from their classmates, or advocating that the children of “Zionist propagandists” should be singled out, or claiming Israelis were “pigs” and “excrement,” what do we expect would follow? Something like what just happened at the Cooper Union campus in New York? There, some 50 Jews were locked in the library to protect them from raving pro-Hamas protestors pounding on the windows, zombie-like in their hatred, as if they were hired extras for The Walking Dead. Why was Biden press-secretary Karine Jean-Pierre matter-of-factly denying the anti-Semitism was a problem (50% of hate crimes victims are Jews [2% of the population]), and why appoint Robert Malley to anything—unless the hatred of Israel is deeply engrained among the Left? It is, after all, the effective goal of the new DEI/Middle East/Jacobin nexus to demand the mass killing of Jews and the extinction of Israel. That agenda is randomly evident in the BLM glider posters, or the “river to the sea’ chants, or the August 1988 charter of the now idolized Hamas— ″Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam invalidates it, just as it invalidated others before it″ / “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” Is the current war in Gaza City, thus, the “Jihad” that Hamas had always promised—or did they mean just the one-sided surprise murdering of unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly? We are reversing the Nazi sequence of the 1930s. Then cadres of thugs physically attacked Jews in gruesome efforts to shock all Germans into supporting their anti-Semitic agendas. In today’s America, leftist intellectuals and their useful idiots on campuses are at the forefront as shock troops. They are seeking to acculturate the nation to widespread, commonplace hatred of Jews in hopes of birthing brownshirt street violence of the sort we are already beginning to see at Cooper Union and elsewhere. We have not yet reached depths of tabloid Jew-hatred of the Der Stürmer sort. But the New York Times and The Washington Post, along with other major news outlets, as tensions rose, ran with the incendiary Big Lie that the IDF had intentionally bombed a hospital “killing 500 Palestinians”. That lie was compounded when our addled President weirdly seemed to lament that Islamic Jihad could not shoot straight: “It’s that old thing: Gotta learn how to shoot straight.” The logical subtext to Biden’s remonstrations is that if Islamic Jihad had just hit their target—civilian Jews in Tel-Aviv—then the ensuring global fury and protests, and his cancelled meetings with Arab leaders (all recipients of massive US aid) would not have occurred. I suppose as well Biden would not have sent $100 million in fungible money to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip—had the terrorists just learned “how to shoot straight” and not hit their own hospital parking lot. The war in the Middle East will not end soon. It is not easy to root out the Hamas death squads from their subterranean tunnels and cities and their human-shielded mosques, hospitals, and schools. It will be tricky to deter Iran and Hezbollah from entering the fray. Meanwhile each day expect the campuses and streets to get a little bolder, a little closer to reifying their “river to the sea” chanting—as all the more Hamas erodes. After all, there are no consequences to death chants. Even when the protestors incite violence, they correctly understand no college president will call them out. Even when Rep. Tlaib incites mobs at the Capitol by shouting the lie that IDF leveled a Gazan hospital, she knows she is a protected “victim”—and her lies mere competing narratives. When will they stop? Not until the Democratic hierarchy disowns the growing Hamas wing of its own party. Not until universities become more afraid of the donor class than they are of the DEI/pro-Hamas bunch and their protected hatred. And not until a sane administration stops inviting to America those who despise their generous host. None of that will happen soon—if ever. So for now we Americans are like Diogenes the Cynic, stumbling around in broad daylight with a torch looking for just one honest college president, one truthful US president—all in vain.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

The Hamas One-Eyed Jack Gruesome details of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians continue to come to light. Hamas gunmen who have been captured or found wounded are quite candid in taped interviews about their killing spree. They apparently remain unapologetic about the heinous crimes they have committed, given they correctly assume that their mollifiers in the West—from the General Secretary of the UN to university presidents—have issues with unequivocally damning their mass killing. Daily such people offer timely re-instruction about their kindred predecessors between 1939-45, and thus how and why the world then was and is now again so willfully blind to the Final Solution The testimonies of Hamas killers—along with the helmet-camera and mobile-phone live-streamings taken by hundreds of the murderers, in the proud photographic tradition of the Einsatzgruppen (the mass murders were likely videoed to provide incentives for enlistment in Hamas)—confirm the emerging pathologists’ reports on the dead from Israel. This multifaceted evidence confirms a picture that all the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Harvard, in the streets of New York and Los Angeles, and in the halls of our Congress can no longer deny—if they even made such at attempt rather than cheered it on. It is hard to think of any precivilizational act that Hamas did not relish. Their death work included but was not limited to executions, torture, beheadings, desecration of corpses, rape, necrophilia, incinerating people alive, dismemberment, and hostage-taking. The captured killers mentioned that their Hamas leaders expressly ordered them to behead and mutilate. All that and more are what Ivy League and Stanford students apparently believe to be legitimate forms of “resistance”—and by their support have now become party to. The Democratic Left is screaming “proportionality” and “stop the cycle of violence” at Israel to cease their retaliatory attempts to destroy Hamas. Their apparent theory is that Hamas has an inherent right to invade and commit barbarities while continuously shooting thousands of rockets hourly and with impunity at Israeli civilians—and yet any response that inadvertently kills Gazan civilians, perhaps most likely impressed Gazans used as shields by Hamas, constitutes a war crime. So in the unhinged West, it is now a more moral act to launch rockets designed only to kill civilians than it is to take out those killing pads. From the Hamas prisoners’ own admissions, and from their videos of the attack, it is additionally clear that many Gazancitizens were eager to tag along in the killing, torture, and looting—albeit only once it became clear to them that the targets were mostly unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly, and the IDF was not there in force. It was again analogous to the Eastern Front of World War II, when Baltic and Ukrainian prisoners, thugs, and Einsatzkommandos eagerly joined with the SS to murder Jews—and often outdid their death instructors. Purportedly, free apartments and $10,000 bounties were offered by the Hamas leadership to Gazans who brought back Israeli hostages. And at that moment, though not now, there seemed to be hundreds of takers zealously following the Hamas death squads into Israel—including a few who had been prior guest workers in border kibbutzes. That picture of eager civilian involvement was apparently confirmed by videos that emerged from the Gazan street, as the Israeli captives and dead were spit upon, struck, and reviled by civilian mobs—at least in the heady days after news of the easy killing of Jews in Israeli but before the IDF aerial response. No doubt public opposition to Hamas is impossible for Gazans; but the idea that a vast majority of civilians became sickened by Hamas and ashamed of their subhuman killing is so far not demonstrable. Similarly, the idea that any Western leader should accept at face value the casualty figures from Hamas ought to be evaluated in light of Hamas leaders still swearing that their henchmen did not murder civilians or commit atrocities in Israel. In Hamas’s world there were no beheadings—and an Israeli rocket hit a hospital, killing 500. For the truth, instead listen to what the killers themselves recited. Watch their own triumphalist videos taken in medias res. Read the placards and listen to the chants at pro-Hamas rallies on campuses and in American cities. And the picture emerges of a death cult, proud of its macabre civilian body count in Israel and of the public support it thereby won—at least until the IDF demonstrates in Gaza the wages of such one-sided murdering. So yes, much of the acclaim for Hamas is not just found in its ferocious barbarity, but also fueled by a feeling that the killers are “winning” the propaganda war. Thus their cowardly but useful idiots of the West increasingly ally with the  “oppressed” oppressor that can both butcher and claim victimhood simultaneously—and not only get away with it, but win global support for it. And this is all the more reason why Israel must crush and thereby humiliate Hamas—as a lesson to its numerous enemies that the price for butchering innocents will always be too steep for even mass murderers to pay.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Israel vs. a Death Cult Here are three critical considerations that must be understood about the current Israel-Hamas conflict. It is a sort of half-war. It consists of a military trying to defeat an organized clique of passive-aggressive, media-obsessed tribal murderers. It is not really a war. This ‘war’ did not begin with a military assault. It is nothing like the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, or indeed most other conflicts. It broke out with a surprise assault by between 1,500 and 2,500 gunmen of the Hamas death squads. During peace and on a holiday, they entered Israel in a long-planned hit operation to murder civilians and take captives, focusing specifically on butchering the most vulnerable—the elderly, women, children, and infants—and in the most grotesque fashion imaginable. Their desire was to be as savagely pre-civilizational as possible—the more macabre the manner of murder, the more fertile their sophistry that they were reduced to such repulsive blood lust by their worse “oppressors”. It would be as though gruesome Mafia hitmen had claimed they were forced to become animal-like due to even worse systemic anti-Italian bias. Even the Mexican cartels do not claim they are led to behead because of the injustice of the Mexican government. By preplanned design, women were raped, and children and infants were burned alive, bound and executed, and (yes) beheaded. The dead were often mutilated. Some 1,400 Israelis were butchered, the vast majority civilians. Some 3,500-4,500 were wounded. Hamas never planned to stage a preemptive war against the Israeli military. Its only agenda was to send killers to unprotected villages to murder the unarmed as they slept—in the manner of Nazi Einsatzgruppen and other mobile death squads on the Eastern Front. Almost immediately they counted on using hostages, human shields, and the media to avoid any accounting from the IDF. To distract from the murder mission, Hamas launched some 5,000 rockets—all intended as terror weapons to strike civilians, in the fashion of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on London. What followed is the most asymmetrical “war” in memory. The IDF is the only military in the world told to be “proportionate” in its use of retaliatory force—not the U.S. after 9/11, and not Ukraine after February 24, 2022. No Arab army or terrorist cadre has ever waged a war under the rules of “proportionality”. Can anyone remember a conflict, other than ones involving the U.S. or Britain, in which the attacked in its response is expected to first phone or drop leaflets warning its target areas? Does Hamas do that when it launches its rockets at Israeli cities? It is not an anti-colonial struggle. Gaza is not anyone’s“colony”. It has been autonomous since 2006-7. No free Israeli Arab Muslim citizen would willingly emigrate there to live under the dictatorship of Hamas. And for good reason. Gaza has been the recipient of aggregate billions in cash from the Gulf monarchies, Europe, the US, the UN. and expatriate remittances. The more money came in, the less Hamas had any intention of using it to serve its people. Most of the gifted funds were used to build the world’s largest subterranean city of death, to buy drones and rockets, and to pay gunmen to kill Jews. Essentially Hamas is an enormous mafia-like, shakedown and hostage-taking operation that threatens the general peace, the moderate Arab nations, the Western democracies, and Israel with terrorist operations and kidnapping unless sufficiently bribed to behave. Usually, soldiers wear uniforms in battle and their far away civilian overseers do not; Hamas killers in action wear anything, but their distant leaders in safety often prefer uniforms. So, Hamas is primarily neither a government nor even an armed force designed to fight other soldiers, but rather some eerie updated SS or Mexican-like cartel. Was that reality at the time unknown to Gazans who once voted them into power, or to its unhinged supporters on the streets and campuses of the US who celebrated its murder missions and damned Israel—even before Israel responded? Only Hamas is deliberately targeting civilians. Hamas fires its rockets at Israeli civilians from hospitals, schools, UN facilities, and mosques. Again, note the logic: Hamas assumes that Israel fights wars more humanely than Hamas itself does, and so will both try to avoid Hamas’s Palestinian human shields, and of course never itself employ such a barbaric tactic—since, among other humane reasons, Israeli civilians would attract, rather than deflect a Hamas rocket. The Israelis avoid collateral damage; there is not even such a concept for Hamas: all of its attacks are primarily aimed at civilians. Collateral damage for Hamas follows from accidently encountering the IDF. How Orwellian that the world demands that Israel, in its efforts to prevent Hamas rocket launches aimed exclusively at its civilian population, must not hurt a single civilian who is impressed to shield the rocket launchers. Note well: Hamas’s air campaign is specifically designed to kill civilians—Israel’s to avoid them. In Israel rockets are used to shield civilians; in Gaza civilians are used to shield rockets. Hamas seeks to force the Israeli military to violate the rules of war; Israel accepts that there are no rules that Hamas gunman would ever follow. The odd result is that a sick world is more accepting of deliberate mass murdering by Hamas than occasional accidental collateral damage by Israel.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

“It’s That Old Thing: Gotta Learn How to Shoot Straight.” Here it is: we give billions of dollars to Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority—presumably as “please be nice to us” protection / insurance money. All three autocracies then run with the lie that a terrorist/jihadist (our media prefers “militant”) rocket, in flight on its way to kill Israeli civilians, which had fallen short at a Gazan hospital parking lot, was in fact an Israeli “war crime” of bombing a hospital building that wiped out “500 civilians.” That was not just a multifaceted lie, but a monstrous and demonstrable one. What followed was weary boilerplate. You know the now half-century-old drill: the usual riots and mobs throughout the Middle East sprout up on cue, shouting hatred of Jews and death to the U.S. Our terrified aid-recipient Arab autocratic governments snub a visiting American president. Our worried diplomats show contrition (Secretary of State Blinken promptly suggested lowering our flags to half-mast at our embassies abroad in sympathy with the hospital victims of the supposed Israeli air strike). At home the tired left-wing campus and urban demonstrations erupt—along with a dramatic takeover of the Capitol building, all confident in the usual legal exemptions extended to such left-wing protests. (But wasn’t it established by AG Merrick Garland that storming the Capitol and disrupting congressional proceedings was an “insurrection“ designed to destroy democracy and thus punishable by felony charges likely leading to considerable prison time— with congressional investigations and criminal charges looming for any elected official who purportedly encouraged such an insurrection, as Rep. Rashida Tlaib did for this one?) All this madness was followed by the predictable Biden reaction of printing and sending yet another $100 million of fungible “please don’t hate us” money to terrorist-run enclaves—even as Iran confidently awaits its promised $6 billion ransom payment. Again, the Biden message is that if Islamic Jihad had just hit its intended target and only killed more Jewish civilians, then there would have been no problem (cf. confirmed from the mouth of Biden himself: “It’s that old thing: gotta learn how to shoot straight.”): just shoot straight, terrorists, and then no riots, no snubs, and for now no need for more American Danegeld. At some point, will someone state the obvious: the more a bankrupt America appeases the Middle East, sends aid and money, takes in its refugees, and lectures democratic Israel, all the more the Arab world shows contempt, and all the closer we get to a theater-wide war— predicated on the idea that a loud but contemptibly weak America is at the mercy of unstable governments and unhinged throngs? And thus it can neither protect its friends nor advance its interests. Perhaps the Arab world is trying to tell us something and we should listen. I think their own conduct and actions convey a warning/message to us something like the following: ​‘America needs to stop the Biden empty rhetoric now. On what evidence exactly can you Americans claim that Hamas does not have wide support in Gaza? After all, Hamas certainly resonates even on your own American campuses. And the methods some of us choose to slaughter Israelis are our own business, not yours. And by the way, leave it us to deal with our own fellow-Islamists in Iran.’ In response to the implicit messaging of our “allies” and the Islamic street, we do need to stop the empty rhetoric, but in the Jacksonian ‘don’t tread on me’ sense: vastly increase our defenses, prepare for the worst, return to maximum fossil fuel production, stop importing oil and hatred of America from theMiddle East, cease unrestricted immigration and yank visas, enforce our immigration laws—and allow Israel to defend itself from pre-civilizational murderers.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Gaza and the Corruption of Language “Apartheid”. Like most leftist smears, it reflects projection. Arab citizens inside Israel—over half of whom are Muslims—vote, run for office, and have organized political parties. As a fifth of the population, they enjoy more security, prosperity, and freedom than do their counterparts in the surrounding Arab nations. In contrast, can one envision non-Arab Christian or Jewish residents of Gaza voting, running for office, forming political parties, or criticizing Hamas? This projected charge of apartheid, it applies to Hamas, which considers anyone other than Arab Muslims as inferiors to be kept out of Gaza. “Ceasefire”.  A ceasefire, truce, or armistice rarely ends the conflict for good unless both sides are worn out, and mutually agree that neither can win and the war is thus regrettable—a rare phenomenon in military history. More often, ceasefires are mere breathers for one or both sides to frantically resupply and rearm for rounds two, three, four… Ultimately, wars—even those that last decades—end when one side loses and the other wins (often most clearly via‘unconditional’ surrender), or both suffer such calamitous losses that each believes victory is unachievable and will in the future continue to be so. Unless the antithetical political agendas that lead to war are resolved, then breathers and truces and time-outs eventually ensure lengthy or multiple wars. Victory leading to the loser’s abandonment of political agendas more often leads to lasting peace. “Disproportionate”. Can anyone recall a war won by proportionate measures? When war is proportionate it more often turns into a Stalingrad—or perhaps an Ukraine—until one side finds a disproportionate response that will change endless stasis to victory. World War II was not won by a proportionate response to Pearl Harbor. And what would be a proportionate response to the murder of a thousand civilians? Under the logic of “proportionality,” ought the Israeli state then invade Gaza and likewise murder a thousand of its civilians? The whole concept of a “proportionate" response to an unprovoked massacre of women and children asleep in their homes and during a peace is absurd. “Civilian casualties”. In this war, almost all intentional civilian deaths are due to Hamas. The civilian dead consist of three unfortunate categories: 1) Over a thousand Jewish civilians, at a time of holiday, butchered by invading Hamas killer squads. 2) Gazan civilian shields whose homes and places of work are deliberately used to protect and enable Hamas rocketeers and shooters to wage war with impunity—in the expectation that Israel regards Gazan life as more valuable than does Hamas, and therefore won’t retaliate to missile launches by indiscriminately killing civilian shields. Hamas expects, even hopes, that they will be killed and thus bring them political advantage by their numerous deaths. 3) The general population of Gaza. The charter of Hamas ensures that its apparat will wage perpetual war at any cost against Israel. Hamas has no interest in a two-state solution, lasting armistices, or using billions of dollars in foreign aid to ensure modern power, water, and sewage plants for its people. Instead, it treats its own population as expendable and subordinate to its own tunnel-making and rocket-launching. “Cycle of violence”. This phrase almost suggests that violence is organic, autonomous, without culpability, and thus not incited by one side. War, however, never works that way. Instead, there is usually definable 51% and more culpability on one side. In the case of October 7, who invaded the country of another to enact a year-long preplanned plan of savagely murdering and mutilating women and children? Was Israel intent on violence or was Hamas? Did Hamas call up their intended targets and urge them to flee before they arrived? Is that IDF trait even conceivable within Hamas? While Hamas spent the year planning the precivilizational massacres of Jewish women and children, Israel—naively convinced that Hamas was concentrating on domestic affairs rather than its usual savage agenda of torching, stabbing, and shooting Jews—was at the time negotiating détente with Saudi Arabia and inviting nearly 20,000 Gazans a day to enter Israel to work and earn a living? “Innocents”. All collateral damage is tragic, and, for example, children in Gaza are obviously innocent. But, while any noncombatant can be an innocent civilian, not all innocent civilians are created equal. Their collective innocence or guilt may not be absolute, but it can be fairly determined by their support for the agendas of its combatants and government. That is—whether they are empowering something like the SS or trying to stop it. If bands of Israeli soldiers surprise-invaded Gaza with orders to grab hostages and focus on murdering women and children and then desecrating their corpses in hopes of psychologically devastating Gazans, they would likely be brought up on charges by the IDF or shunned and ostracized by their own people. In contrast, when hostages were paraded in Gaza, civilians there seemed to enjoy spitting on and striking them. The return from Israel of the Gazan hostage-takers and murderers was met by ecstatic crowds. The German population, similarly ruled by a “one man, one vote, once” dictatorship, was ebullient over Hitler’s success from 1939 to 1941, but lost their enthusiasm from 1942 to 1945, and feigned innocence (out of alleged ignorance or powerlessness) after the war was over. So too, Gazans on Saturday, October 7 were enthralled on news of a thousand murdered Jews—only two weeks later to pose as innocent civilians not deserving retaliation for the inhuman violence against the innocent that they had so recently and so eagerly supported and cheered on.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

How Will the World React to Gaza? Hamas has always repelled most of the civilized world. But the world was either too scared or too woke to say just that. But now Hamas’s premodern violations of all human norms have relieved most nations of any pretense of having to support it—at least for now. “Necklacing” and “baby burning” were its most recent contributions to its standard terrorist repertoire of hostage-taking, raping, beheading, and executions. Most people will now hope Hamas gets what it deserves, while elites offer empty platitudes about “ending the cycle of violence” and “proportionality”. As for the “world community” of the UN, the Davos crowd, the universities, the BLM fraudsters, and the DEI mafia endorsing what Hamas has done—they just indict themselves all the more, and slowly commit reputational suicide. And whatever an NGO, a UN commissioner, an international court, or an American foundation preaches to Israel, it is worth nothing, and they themselves know that, and more importantly they privately know why. So what is America’s position now? Well, there are two Americas. The unstable, crazy, left-wing America now in power, and the traditionalist conservative one with a chance to take over in 2024. The Left wishes to virtue-signal to the world its European sophisticated nihilism and to send its Ivy-League-stamped diplomats around the globe bloviating about the “rules-based order”, the “peace process”, and ending “the cycle of violence”—to yawns from its hosts who put up with the sermons for the checks to come. Most abroad like the American Left in power. It predicably likes to print money and give it away. As penance, it yearns to be lectured by its hosts for Americans’ nonexistent sins of “imperialism” and “colonialism”. It opens its borders for unchecked entry by all those whom the world’s dictators drive out. It is a left-wing gravy train of anti-American fellowships, university billets, and speaking gigs even for its country’s worst enemies. The problem the world has with the American Left is that in a crisis it does not understand its role of being unpopular Roman enforcers rather than European-like, dreamy Greek philosophers. So, for now, perhaps expect Joe Biden in about 5 days after the start of ground operations to pressure Israel, revisit Blinken’s earlier deleted tweet telling them to “seek a ceasefire,” and lecture them ad nauseam that “disproportionate violence solves nothing”. In sum, it is a very dangerous thing for a country to be an ally of a fickle America when it is run by the Left, as Israel knows all too well. The world ostensibly hates the American Right (and authentically hates the bogeyman Trump for crudely cleaning up a few of the messes it had created). But it quietly prefers the Right as well, since it is recently much less sermonizing, less intrusive, less likely to fly pride flags, paint George Floyd  murals, and demand gender studies programs as it flees in weakness and shame from Kabul, and occasionally takes risks to rid the world of the likes of a Soleimani or an ISIS. So, bottom line: what will the U.S. do from now until January 2025? Unless attacked, it will likely do little other than politely beg Israel to pull back and gently request Iran to simmer down. Both will nod and ignore. What it will it do after 2025? Return to its natural Jacksonian, don’t-tread-on-me, no-better-friend/no-worse-enemy deterrence—with everything on the table. And that current interval makes the next 15 months very dangerous indeed for Israel, for us, and for the world at large. How about Iran? If Israel hunts down and destroys Hamas, Iran will scream more, send more money and arms to terrorists, but likely stay out of Israel. If they unleash a rocket barrage from Syria or Lebanon, they know they run the risk of seeing Damascus  or Beirut without power, water, and an airport—or, depending on the number of rockets launched and the damage they do, seeing the same done to Tehran and its nuclear projects as well. So Iran knows it has pushed the US and Israel to the limit—and is wondering who or what might restrain the two nations now that they’re beyond it. And the answer, it fears, is that for right now no one might restrain either. Theocratic Iran’s problem is not just that it is anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and anti-civilizational. It is viscerally hated for good reason by most in the West. And no one would rue anyone taking out its nuclear facilities or more—a fact well known to Tehran. Iran does not know whether a beleaguered Russia and China would or could protect it, given that the former is broke and tied up, and the latter wants calm, not chaos,  in its oil lanes. The Arab world? The Gulf monarchies, Jordan, and Egypt will become the shrillest critics of “Zionist” aggression in Gaza. But they would become even angrier denigrators of Israel if it were to let up and let Hamas get away. For now, they see a smoldering Gaza as a win/win/win: Israel earns the pan-Arabic street’s fury and gives its Arab critics street cred; Israel takes losses in  destroying Hamas; and Arab patrons at no cost are relieved of their unbalanced, greedy, corrupt, treacherous, dangerous, and mostly despised Hamas client. Qatar and Turkey are different, more insidious. For all their claimed Western affinities and alliances, even more than other Islamic regimes they seem to detest the United States and Israel. And our “allies” like this are probably the most zealous supporters of Hamas in the Middle East. By hosting U.S. bases, and adopting a Western veneer, both feel they deserve some exemption from being seen for what they really are: two of the greatest enemies of the Israeli state, and increasingly America as well, whom they feel is so easily manipulated and duped. Russia? Russia is broke and its arsenals depleted. It is tied down in Ukraine, and needs Iranian drones, and is forging arms agreements with Turkey. But Russia also deeply and silently loathes its own Middle East “allies”, especially given its own internal problems with radical Islam. Until Ukraine it was willing to allow Israeli pilots to go over Syria and after Hezbollah as they needed and pleased, and it still may. It would like the U.S. to experience another Kabul somewhere in the Middle East, but otherwise will leave the fate of Iran up to its enemies. China’s only interest in Hamas is making sure that there is not a wider war (which might not just target the U.S. and Israel) that would hamper its own oil imports from and profiteering in the Mideast—and its plans for Taiwan. It has some curiosity about finding a way to hurt the U.S. in the general unrest and turmoil, just as it currently enjoys our border left wide open for terrorists and for the means to ensure our 100,000 yearly fentanyl deaths. True, if it had its own way, China would prefer Hamas disappear as an irritant to its stable mercantile exports and oil imports. Like Russia, it has its own Muslim problem, and, similarly, the more it shows concern for third-world Islam abroad, the more it can get away with abusing and exploiting Muslims at home. China appreciates the pan-Muslim mindset that on one hand hates and attacks the conciliatory West because Europeans and Americans sincerely listen to its absurdities, but on the other leaves alone anti-Muslim Russia and China because they kill rather than show patience with radical Muslims. China most likely does not want Iran and radical Palestinians pushing Israel to the existential edge, given that any delight it would receive in seeing Israel go up in smoke would be more than offset by the consequent destruction of 40 percent of the world’s oil exports. Europe is somewhat similar in its reaction to the silent Arab regimes. It has long played the role of the proverbial blowhard mouse that suggests to fellow mice that some other mouse someday somewhere must bell the Hamas cat, but given that there were no takers in the West or among  allies in the Middle East for that suicidal role, it would prefer Israel to run that risk for the “common good” and perhaps even pull it off.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

The Late, Great Hamas Finally Got Its Wish–And . . . ? Ever since Hamas was “elected” to run Gaza, and then followed the usual “one election/one time” Middle-East formula, it has bragged nonstop that its agenda was to erase Israel off the face of the earth (cf. the wall map in the office of our Representative Tlaib). Its unabashed nihilist boasts resonated throughout the Palestinian “movement.” Its fiery threats delighted the Arab street. Indeed, Hamas was soon celebrated as the most “authentic” of the radical Palestinian terrorist movements. Which cadre of thugs could top its end-of-days rhetoric, its assured and steady supply of money and weapons from Iran, its satanic eagerness to mutilate and dismember, and the sanctuary and financial wherewithal offered to it by our “ally” Qatar? None. Since it was viewed as the most “volatile” and creepy of the Palestinian factions, and the most useful to Iran, the Obama and Biden Administrations appeased its murderers. Was it not part of their hare-brained grand strategy of empowering theocratic Iran, and its Syrian, Hezbollah, and Hamas hirelings? Their campaign (remember the “they literally know nothing” media and the Obama “echo chamber” created by a boastful Ben Rhodes?) was to forge these disparate Islamists into a crescent of resistance to Israel and any “moderate” Arab regime (recall the Obama-Biden transitory hatred of the Gulf sheikdoms). The result would be “creative tension” —as well as payback for the Israeli election of Netanyahu. Through this formula, Obama believed he could always pressure Israel to grant concessions to radical Palestinians, thanks to the looming threat of an ever menacing (and soon to be nuclear) Iran, with help from Obama’s other friends—the then Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and his pal, the neo-Ottomanist and anti-Semite Erdogan of Turkey, Obama’s self-described personal liaison to the Islamic world. Yes, of course, this was sheer madness—if perhaps characteristic of Obama’s well-known orneriness. Perhaps someday soon, a few disinterested historians might even record that the current nightmare in Israel is the logical end-result of what Barack Obama, John Kerry (remember his Trump-era Paris reconnaissance with the Iranians?), Ben Rhodes, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Malley, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and a host of other incompetent but otherwise haughty and dangerous people once conjured up. A defiant, and empowered murderous Hamas was one of the many dividends of their appeasement and grand Middle-East schemes—given the eagerness of the Obama and Biden administrations to send hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, despite warnings from their own experts that such cash would enhance terrorism and abet the  evil work of Hamas with an American financial stamp of legitimacy. Hence, a soon to be nuclear Iran, freed from sanctions, had enough money  (remember the nocturnal cash pallets on the Tehran tarmac?) to fund its surrogate global death squads. Hamas has killed Jewish civilians for nearly two decades, always escaping the full wrath of Israel retaliation by appealing to the amoral consciousness of leftwing European and American governments. It counted on ample help from both Iran and Arab regimes, along with Turkey, which always screams “instability” at the first sign of Israeli retaliation. The blustering Hamas has now murdered 1,000 Jews in their homes, preferring especially to gun down children, reportedly behead babies, torture the doomed, rape the helpless, execute the elderly, and brutalize women—and topping the killing off in good SS fashion by gleeful dismemberment and desecration of Jewish corpses. So, they finally got their wish for their own version of the Holocaust, for what they had always bragged would be the “final” Israel-ending war—as their cowardly elders announced last Saturday from their protected enclaves. Yes, Hamas promised their mass killing of innocents would ignite the Muslim world, incite simultaneous attacks on Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and perhaps Egypt—all as their planned anniversary replay of the Yom Kippur War’s first 48 hours. And it may—or may not. The ebullient people of Gaza seemed initially enthralled at videos of mutilated Jews, and showed their zeal by spitting on hostages carried back home for supposed Roman-like triumphs before their public sacrifices. Videos of the gruesome killings of Jews were hot downloads on Gaza mobile phones. Now mutilating dead Israelis, now boasting how brave their sons were in slaying unarmed jews inside Israel, Gazans assumed a shocked Israel would capitulate. Would not its megaphones in the West characteristically protect them and restrain Israel? Could not they themselves always ensure a few thousand of their own civilians be sacrificed as expendable human shields of their missiles pads, and thus become necessary fuel for their boilerplate accusations of “war crimes” that usually curtailed Israeli retribution? But now the Israeli retaliation seems oblivious to all that. It may not be like the past incursions into Gaza that were manipulated by a cowardly Hamas to gain media sympathy for “collateral damage” that they themselves had engineered. Predictably, as Israel ramps up the air attacks and prepares for the ground assault, the global media is showing a concern for civilian collateral damage in a way it never quite did for murdered Jewish innocents and beheaded infants. Western governments are terrified of Middle East killers who may return to their previous attacks on their European citizens. After all, Western leftwing suicidal immigration policies have  ensured large unassimilated Muslim populations. Millions have fled the self-created violence and tyranny of the Middle East only to cheer it on from a safe distance in their adopted Western homelands, whose welcoming of these “refugees” is now so often reciprocated with sheer contempt for the apologetic hosts. Nonetheless, the Gaza crowds of 48 hours ago who were boasting their sons murdering with impunity and spat on bound defenseless women, are now aggrieved. But they might as well be barking at the moon about the supposed “unfairness” of the Israeli air counterattack. Among the rubble of once Hamas high-rises they are weeping for media cameras, calling on a corrupt and anti-Semitic UN for accustomed relief, threatening on spec the West with who knows what (is it now infant beheading or body dismemberment?),  and in general suddenly quite unhappy about their “final” war they just recently boasted was all but won. Will the heroic legions of Hamas who beheaded and raped now pour out in the streets to fight the IDF and push them into the sea as promised? Perhaps not? Some final thoughts: Why has Iran gone from bragging three days ago about its training and tutelage of the Hamas killers suddenly to pleading that while it is certainly delighted about the beheadings, rapes, executions, and mutilations, it technically had no actionable role in ensuring them? The truth is that a Hamas right now is alternately threatening and begging Western governments, beseeching its suddenly mum Iranian suppliers, whining that Hezbollah and the PNA have not yet sufficiently shared the bloodletting of this war, and generally railing for more jihad from a few of its increasingly so-so, nonplused Middle-Eastern sponsors. Hamas fears it may have boxed itself in, with two American aircraft carriers between it and Iran, with private satisfaction from many Arab states that their nuisance Hamas might at last have committed suicide through its mass homicide, with even fanatic supporters hard-pressed to make their “moral” case for the beheading of babies, and with a half-million IDF soldiers headed their way to deliver upon them divine justice, perhaps in the Lincolnesque Second Inaugural sense of  “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Translated, that means for the first time in its existence an unholy Hamas may not get out of its self-created rendezvous with what it has so duly earned, given there is now no assurance of third-party relief and thus no restraint on Israel. Even a shaken and shamed Biden administration—guilty of an open border and its de facto support for Hamas and Iran, but suddenly scared of a furious election-cycle American public—may for a while not call off Israel. The arrogant but half-educated Harvard crowd, the European Islamists, the woke and pampered anti-Semites on Western campuses, the AOC socialists, the pro-Hamas Squad, the BLM chorus who cheered on the Hamas glider death attack, of course CAIR, and all the usual suspects for now are as furious as they are impotent—petulant that for once, just this once, and for a while longer at least, no one is listening to their oh so tired amoral defense of the indefensible.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

They Kill, While Our Government Tweets and Deletes…. If wild reports are true that the inhuman Hamas will execute dozens of civilian hostages, and if it is further accurate that there are rumored Americans among them—and if Americans then are to be executed by Hamas—aside from a military response, the United States will have to change radically its policies in the Middle East. In the last 32 months they have been proven utterly disastrous. Hamas has gone full ISIS, and is now in addition reportedly beheading captured Israeli soldiers. Note that the Mahmoud Abbas, “president” for life of the  PNA, and a recipient of U.S. aid, has been cheering on Hamas. So of course have the usual suspects, such as the hard Western Left, the Ivy-League pampered student crowd, the Squad constituencies, the Taliban, Qatar, especially Iran, the parent of the current mass killing, and even Turkey. Is it the mass mutilations, the rapes, the desecrations of corpses, the beheadings, the murdering of women, the elderly, and children, that so excites them all—as if they were gleefully watching sacrificial victims marched up to the top of an Aztec temple in ancient Tenochtitlán? Or rather is their frenzy due to unspoken terror that Hamas at last has gone too far in its premodern savagery? There are now no more of its patrons with the power to call off the IDF. And so they may finally get the existential war that Hamas always for decades had bragged about and begged for. And the proper response to all this here in the U.S.? All monies to the West Bank and Gaza should be immediately cut off. The Iran transfers, if our State Department’s pleas are correct that they are not yet finalized, should be stopped immediately. Sanctions and embargos should be placed on all Iranian exports. The alternative would be to keep subsidizing those who provide the wherewithal for murderers, rapists and precivilizational mutilators. If it is true that Hamas killer-masterminds have been residing in Qatar, and, as often has been alleged, enjoying Qatar as a financial clearing-house for terrorist operations, and given Qatar has been blaming Israel for its own murdered, then why do we persist in basing the United States Central Command (USCC) and United State Air Force Central Command (USAFCC) at Qatar government facilities? There are, of course, realist arguments for our relationship with Qatar. But the world in the Middle East has now irrevocably changed and we need to make the necessary adjustments and separate from this de facto Al Jazeerist enemy. Expect some terrorists to attempt to join the swarm at our open border. And soon “refugees” from Gaza and the West Bank will be likely demanding asylum here in the Great Satan. In reaction, we should not only bar all travel from Palestinian territories into the US, as well as from Iran and Qatar, but yank all visas of any of those nationals who currently reside in the U.S. and send them home to enjoy the advantages now offered on nightly video displays in their own native countries. The national security team of this administration—gifts from the failed Obama administration that is responsible for much of the current Middle East mess— remains confused and inept. And that’s a charitable assessment. It of course starts at the top.  Joe Biden is neither physically nor cognitively up to the task of Commander in Chief in a crisis. He has more or less disappeared other than offering an occasionally brief appearance where he mumbles about standing with Israel and then vanishes again. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently deleted a tweet calling for an immediate cease-fire–music to the ears of Hamas and Iran. Why? Does he believe it is moral to allow Hamas to murder 900 Jews, beat their chests about such savagery, and then head home with human trophies to be tortured and executed without a response? Blinken  noted that he and the Turkish foreign minister had talks that led to such an absurd statement. And what about Turkey, the erstwhile Obama key to the Middle East? Its intrusive armed drone was shot down recently in Syria by the US Air Force and remains an unapologetic pro-Hamas partisan. And whether long-term it can remain in NATO—long opposing Sweden’s entry, chronic overflights of the Greek islands in the Aegean, supplier of weapons to Russia, threatening to send missiles into Athens, a security risk anytime it receives US weapons—is a real concern, given it has the largest, non-US army in NATO and hosts a nuclear-armed U.S. base. Blinken also blasted critics who deplored his outreach to Iran, disparaging them as misinforming and misinformed. He is petulant because he knows that the Iranian expectation of an upcoming $6 billion US-driven cash transfer (another sick idea to buy back hostages from a murderous Tehran) gives them in the here and now fungible opportunities to send more cash and arms into the hands of anti-Israeli terrorists. As far as Iran’s role in the Hamas orgy of killing, Blinken also declared that there is no evidence of "anything that shows us that Iran was directly involved in this attack, in planning it or in carrying it out.” No one but you, Secretary Blinken, believes that. When one remembers Blinken’s Palestinian Affairs office in the State Department and its even worse ceasefire tweet, which, like Blinken’s, disappeared without comment, the appointment of the Iranian megaphone Robert Malley (currently under investigation by the FBI) as our point man on the bankrupt Iran Deal, and Blinken’s recent brag about all the hundreds of millions of dollars we have sent to the Palestinians, the picture is one of partisan incompetence. That pattern goes all the way back to the 2021 Chinese humiliation in Anchorage of both Blinken and Jake Sullivan. Or perhaps both were suspect even earlier when we recall it was campaign honcho Blinken who on the eve of the 2020 election apparently thought up the nasty idea of calling on ex-interim CIA director Mike Morell to round up 51 intelligence “authorities” to lie to the American people that the Hunter Biden laptop under FBI wraps was somehow a product of “Russian disinformation” and not authentic (a claim even Hunter Biden could not make). That gambit was designed to fuel Biden in the upcoming debate and indeed warp the election itself. And it did. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has a similar politicized record, as one of the principles seeding the 2016 Clinton-campaign lie that a mythical Trump server was communicating with the Russians and thus proof of “Russian collusion”. Sullivan, remember, just a week before the Hamas slaughter assured us that "The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” So Hamas kills, while we tweet and delete….

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Israel, Our White-House Absurdities, and the Left’s Empire of Lies The Biden administration is furiously trying to contextualize its past, unsupportable policies that have sown global chaos, especially in the Middle East. But the more it spins, the clearer its culpability. Does it really believe that the long-agreed-upon U.S. green-lighting of $6 billion in sanctions relief to Iran has had no role in Iran’s terrorist support of Hamas, whether psychological or material or both? Do they think we are that stupid? Even a first-grader might surmise that if a terrorist state knows that an impending $6-billion bonanza will shortly arrive in its coffers, then it will more readily in the here and now send arms to Hamas—on the logical assumption that those costs soon will be more than covered, while making the additional assumption that the United States is complicit in its own fungible use of sanctions relief cash, and thus not innately hostile to Tehran’s self-professed agenda.  In short, Tony Blinken is either a naif, a fool, or to use his words “misinforming”. These administration's megaphones who deny such fungibility always end up mouthing the same arguments as the lying and murderous theocracy in Tehran. But then why not—given the Biden-appointed Robert Malley, previously known as Obama’s ISIS advisor (and we remember how that worked out in Iraq), and a self-declared expert on Hamas rapprochement, eagerly accepted the offer to restart the disastrous Iran deal and normalize Iranian-American relations? And Malley was indeed eagerly at work—until he was stripped of his security clearance for his alleged unlawful dissemination of classified documents, and in addition fell under further scrutiny allegedly for treasonous efforts to insert pro-Iranian activists into the State Department. What also was behind the initial, natural instincts of the State Department’s  “U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs”? On news of the attacks, our State department in Pavlovian fashion immediately posted: “We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.” Yes, as lots of us predicted, that insane virtue signal would eventually be taken down—but only in response to Americans outraged at its amoral inanity. Was our government’s first inclination to stop Israel’s counter-responses to systematic Hamas murdering? Should Israelis accept another 800, 1,000, or 2,000 dead women and children in the interest of abiding by the instruction of the American “Office of Palestinian Affairs” to avoid “retaliatory attacks”? For that matter, does the Biden administration admonish Ukraine to refrain from “retaliatory attacks”—since, in its logic, responding to Putin’s “terror” with Ukrainian counter “violence” would “solve nothing”? Or is it just Israel, a democratic ally, that deserves these sermons? Or do they not reflect the embarrassing reality that there is a core Democratic base—the toxic Squad, AOC's Democratic Socialists, the fusion media, and some of the identity politics caucuses—who are Hamas apologists, even if that bankrupt ideology descends into ignoring or condoning the abject slaughter of civilians in their homes? And are we really to believe, as told, that resumption of hundreds of millions dollars in aid to the Palestinians was also not fungible and used to aid the current murderous agendas of Hamas? But do not just believe supporters of Israel about that reality. Instead, read what dissidents in the State Department themselves warned at the time of the dangers of Biden’s resumption of aid to the radical Palestinians: “We assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza. There is less but still some risk U.S. assistance would benefit other designated groups.” The administration is, of course, back peddling furiously, given its prior appeasement of Iran and Hamas, if not an outright tilt against Israel—again policies that reflected the embarrassing core constituency of the Democratic Party. Americans should not listen to what Biden’s team now conveniently says, but instead to what it actually does in the upcoming weeks when it is under fire by its base in the new woke Democratic Party, as the Israelis have to go into Gaza, end this toxic death machine, and confront the Hamas global propaganda machine. A hard rain is soon going to fall abroad. And the United States better get its house in order, whether defined as standing with its few dependable allies left, securing its own oil and gas supplies, protecting its borders, un-woking and rebooting its suspect military, recalibrating its all too often incompetent and politicized intelligence bureaus—and thus preparing for a world turned upside down.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

A 50th Anniversary War? Why did Hamas stage a long-planned, carefully executed and multifaceted attack on Israeli towns, soldiers, and civilians—one designed to instill terror by executing noncombatants, taking hostages, and desecrating the bodies of the dead? And how were the killers able to enter Israeli proper in enough numbers to kill what could be hundreds and perhaps eventually wound what could be thousands? a) Ostensibly, radical Palestinians wanted to stop any rumored rapprochement between the Gulf monarchies—the traditional source of much of their cash—and Israel, by forcing the issue of Arab solidarity in times of “war”, especially through waging a gruesome attack aimed at civilians and encompassing executions and hostage taking. Iran likely was the driving force to prompt the war—given its greatest fear is a Sunni Arab-Israeli rapprochement. b)  Arab forces have had only success against Israel through surprise attacks during Israeli holidays, as in the Yom Kippur War (i.e., was it any accident that the present attack began 50-years almost to the day after the October 6, 1973 beginning of the Yom Kippur War?). And so they struck again this Saturday during Simchat Torah, coming at the end of a weeklong Jewish celebration of Sukkot—in hopes that others will join in as happened in 1973. (So much for the Arab warnings not for Westerners to conduct war during Ramadan). c) Hamas may have reckoned that recent Israeli turmoil and mass leftist street protests over proposed reforms of the Israeli Supreme Court had led to permanent internal divisions and thus a climate of domestic distraction if not an erosion of deterrence. But, more importantly, in a larger sense the Biden administration has contributed both to the notion that Hamas was a legitimate Middle East player, and to the perception that the U.S. was backing away from its traditional support for Israel—to the delight of Hamas—based on the following inexplicable policies: 1) In February Secretary of State Blinken had bragged that not only had the Biden administration resumed massive aid to the PLA cancelled by Trump, but cumulatively had transferred $1 billion—even as Palestinian authorities bragged that they would continue to pay bounties to the families of “martyrs” (i.e., those killed while conducting terrorists attacks against Israel). And millions of American dollars also went into Gaza, run by Hamas—despite the Biden administration’s efforts to keep mostly quiet the resumption of such inexplicable support. In this regard, note the current shameful State-Department (“U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs”) website news release that was posted after today’s attack. It ended with this quite embarrassing, morally equivalent admonition: “We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.” "All sides?" "Refrain from retaliatory attacks?” So Israel is the moral equivalent of terrorists executing civilians and brutalizing their corpses? And the IDF then is not supposed to retaliate against these killers? This Biden State Department insanity cannot stand. So expect some apparatchik to take down this Munich-like posting as soon as possible. 2) The Biden administration had recently released some $6 billion to Iran through a prison swap deal that saw South Korea hand over embargoed Iranian money to Qatar—despite Tehran’s  increased anti-Israeli rhetoric and its loud brag about the escalation. We should assume money for rockets (Hamas claims they have launched 5,000, and have received 100,000 of them via the Damascus airport) and weapons in general for Hamas were supplied by Iran, which again is likely the chief catalyst for this surprise attack. 3) Almost immediately, after his inauguration Biden mobilized to resume the bankrupt Iran deal. And in unhinged fashion he appointed the anti-Israeli bigot, pro-Iranian journalist Robert Malley as America’s chief negotiator. Note that Malley is now under FBI investigation for security breaches, involving disclosing classified U.S. documents and also for allegedly helping pro-Iranian activists and propagandists land influential billets inside the U.S. government. In short, there was a general Hamas and Iranian perception that the Biden administration had resumed the discredited Obama madness of empowering Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. This discredited agenda was to “balance” the power of Israel and the moderate Arab Gulf governments to achieve “creative tension”, exacerbated by Biden’s loathing of the government of Benjamín Netanyahu (who has been snubbed by Biden and never invited for an official visit). Note as well that the Biden administration has siphoned off key weapons and munitions from stockpiles inside Israel to transfer them to Ukraine. The so-called “War Reserve Ammunition—Israel" is all but depleted of just the sorts of weapons needed in the present crisis. In this regard is there not a pattern here? Upon the ascension of Biden and his woke military agendas, we saw the following: the complete humiliation of the U.S. in Kabul in its most shameful flight in 50 years and greatest abandonment of equipment in its history; followed by Vladimir Putin’s opportunistic invasion of Ukraine; followed by China’s new belligerence and escalating threats to Taiwan; followed by Turkey’s new de facto alliance with Russia and recent drone encounter with the U.S. air force in Syria; followed by the Hamas/Iranian inspired attack on Israel—with more to come unfortunately. And will Biden finally get the message from the attacks on the Ukraine and Israeli borders, that borders matter and we too are being invaded, with the encouragement of the Mexican government and to the advantage of the cartels whose fentanyl exports kills 100,000 Americans a year? What to expect in Israel? Expect the following: the usual Hamas/terrorist selling and/or execution of Israeli hostages, the use of Israeli hostages as “human shields” in Gaza,  the bargaining/sale of the remains of Israeli dead, occasional killings of Jews inside Israel by Arabs who falsely believe there will be a winning Middle East-wide existential war against Israel. And finally, a devastating Israeli counter-response that will eventually earn a U.S. rebuke. What should the U.S. instead do? It should quit talking to Iran and restore full sanctions against it. It should cut off all aid immediately to all the Palestinians. It should undertake a 1973-like massive arms lift of key munitions to Israel and warn Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and others in the Middle East not to intervene or else, given that Israel will need several weeks to deal with Hamas and Gaza. And if it shows any hesitation or weakness, other terrorist groups will opportunistically jump in.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Here we are 78 years after the end of the Holocaust and once agains thuggish killers dressed in black are pulling Jewish elderly, women, and children out of their homes and executing them, and then throwing their bodies into the street. But in 1945 we were fighting the SS murderers, now we are sending millions in subsidies to their modern Hamas killer squad counterparts. We the American people should demand not one more American cent to these Gestapo and SS killers.

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Suddenly after three years, a number of angry former Trump appointees—some on the prompt of potential or real book promotions, or in anger about firings, or their own legal exposure—are replaying all the supposedly atrocious things Trump said in private to them between 2017-21. If, in fact, they are accurate, then by all means they were certainly atrocious things to have said even in private—and should never have been spoken by a president. But what is mysterious about their outrage are three other considerations that we hear nothing about from such now quite public critics: 1) Is there not a difference between atrocious bluster in private and public, methodical weaponization and destruction of our institutions? Can such critics at least say they deplore the weaponization of the FBI (e.g., the contracting of old Twitter to suppress the news, the admitted lying under oath of its interim director Andrew McCabe, the convenient “amnesia” on 245 occasions of James Comey while under oath, and the bureau’s current fixation with parents at school board meetings, traditional Catholics and pro-life activists)? Or the corruption of our intelligence officials who were knee-deep in the fraud of “51 former intelligence authorities" who willingly lied, on the prompt of the current secretary of state, about a laptop—deliberately so to influence a presidential debate and election? Or the entire collusion hoax that was hatched by the Clinton campaign, with help from the FBI, DOJ, and CIA? Or consider two of our top intelligence officials who lied admittedly under oath, such as Brennan and Clapper? Does not all that pose a danger to democracy? Or the politicalization of the DOJ that was ready to exempt, save a brave dissenting judge, Hunter Biden and by extension the Biden clan from real legal jeopardy. Was it not wrong in 2020 for retired 4-stars officers to attack in venomous terms and publicly their commander-in-chief? If not so, why then is there a statute at all in the uniform code of military justice prohibiting just that? 2) As far as “dangers to the democracy”, cannot some at least cite the radical changes in voting laws done in key states in 2020 under the guise of Covid, or the infusion of $419 million by Mark Zuckerberg to appropriate the work of registrars and voting officials in key states? Or the “cabal” and “conspiracy” to ensure the Biden 2020 victory as boasted about in stunning detail by liberal Time writer Molly Ball? Who tried to cancel student loans without a vote of congress, or drained a great deal of the strategic petroleum reserve solely to boost approval before the midterms? Or the 2016 leftwing effort to pressure the electors not to vote according to their constitutional responsibilities and instead throw the election to Clinton? Can't they at least cite the 120-days of looting, riot, arson, attacks on law enforcement, and deaths that were largely exempt from punishment—violence that included an attempt to storm the White House grounds to get at a president, and the torching of a police precinct, federal courthouse, and iconic DC church? Or cannot they deplore the 2015-17 macabre threats to Trump’s person by celebrities (beheading, shooting, stabbing, incineration, blowing up, etc.)? What actually had Trump done in his first moments in office when DC rioters went berserk during the inauguration and Madonna screamed about blowing up the White House? What had he done in his first few days that prompted ex-Pentagon lawyer Rosa Brooks to write in Foreign Policy (“3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020”) an outline of how to destroy his presidency before it started by either the 25th Amendment, impeachment—or a military coup (cf. also the later August 2020 pre-election letter of retired officers Nagl and Yingling, calling on Gen. Milley to intervene following the election with the 82nd Airborne to remove Trump from office). What had he done in his first few months in office in earn 58 House members voting to impeach him? 3) Who injured the country and the lives of its people more, the 4-years of Donald Trump or the 2.5 years of Joe Biden? Who engineered the exempt crossing of 8-million illegal entrants that will have repercussions for decades? Who has been largely silent about nearly 100,000 annual fentanyl deaths and the direct role of an open border in them? Who engineered the disastrous and deadly flight from Kabul, timed for the narcissistic public stunt of a cheap 20th-anniversary triumph celebration of 9/11—according to The Washington Post? Who called the accidental killing of 10 civilians during the Kabul mess a “righteous strike”, or phoned his PLA counterpart to warn about his own commander in chief, or unlawfully hijacked the chain of command? Who spiked fuel prices, interest rates, and inflation that have caused untold misery to millions of Americans? Who is silent about the destruction of the criminal code in our major cities that has helped unleash an unprecedented crime wave? That list of current catastrophes that go unnoticed could be expanded. So yes, if these recent accusations about crude and cruel Trump private conversations are true, then let us all deplore what Donald Trump said in private to his closest aides and appointees. But let us also consider that those who voice these expressions of outrage seem to stay silent about the concrete damage to our institutions and country that was neither rhetorical nor spontaneous—but all too real and planned. https://cnn.com/2023/10/02/politics/john-kelly-donald-trump-us-service-members-veterans/index.html

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

Special Counsel Jack Smith added new indictments against Donald Trump, among them conspiratorially “unlawfully discounting  legitimate votes.” Was Smith here referencing Stacy Abrams who for years claimed she was the real governor of Georgia, barnstorming the country to overturn the vote count? Or maybe Smith referred to ex-president Jimmy Carter? He “discounted” the 2016 vote by claiming Trump won only due to the “Russians”? Or did Smith mean Hillary Clinton who discounted Trump as an “illegitimate” president, prompting her to join the “Resistance” against an elected president? Or maybe Smith meant the Hollywood crowd who cut commercials after the 2016 election, begging viewers to pressure the electors to refuse their constitutional duties to honor their states’ popular vote, and instead in insurrectionary fashion vote for Hillary Clinton? Or was Smith thinking of the 32 Democratic House members and Sen. Barbara Boxer in January 2005 who tried to toss out the legally certified vote in Ohio to swing the election to John Kerry? Or maybe Smith was referencing Molly Ball’s 2021 Time essay? She bragged of the 2020 “cabal” and “conspiracy” hatched by Democrats, Silicon Valley, and corporatists to spend half-a-billion  dollars to change state voting laws, censor the news, modulate the 2020 street protests, and absorb the work of state precinct workers?

@VDHanson - Victor Davis Hanson

What does a corrupt DOJ do? Have its ridiculous plea deal set up for Hunter thrown out by honest judge? Drop campaign violation charges against Dem donor, crypto crook Bankman-Fried? Beef up indictments against Biden’s leading 2024 opponent? Or all 3 in a week?