Think Piece of The Day: Victor Davis Hanson

 

This blog is a huge fan of Victor David Hanson. His perspectives as a specialist in classical history always gets my attention.  In his column at American Greatness, ("Trump Winds and Biden Whirlwinds"), he starts off:

Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain. 

The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that. 

. . .

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

. . .

What are the lasting consequences of all this madness? 

The Left should hope that House Republicans are Marquess of Queensberry players and do not emulate the Democrats’ behavior. They should hope that a Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee would not monitor the phone records of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). For if the opposition did gain the majority in November 2022, Joe Biden’s past involvement with foreign monied interests, and the evidence of his shady behavior from his own son’s laptop texts offer a far more convincing case of impeachable offenses—failure to report to the IRS off-the-books income, influence peddling, and abject lying about foreign quid pro quo involvement—than does a single Ukrainian phone call.  All that exposure is well aside from Biden’s deliberate decision not to enforce, as his job requires, federal immigration law. 

Do read the rest here.

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David Horowitz on “Where We Are”

 

David Horowitz of Freedom Center posted an article today on FrontPageMagazine titled “Where We Are and What We are Facing.” He was raised in a Communist family and figured out as a young man that the Communist party was pure evil;  he analyzes today’s crises through that lens.  Here is an extract:

The “social justice” radicals still have the best slogans. They call themselves progressives but are actually reactionaries. They call themselves liberals but are actually bigots. They say they’re for peace when they are organized for war. It is always the same war: to bring down the United States of America.

Thanks mainly to their growing influence, we live in extreme times, where things are not what they are made to seem, and monstrous accusations are leveled at individuals without restraint. As a result, we live in an atmosphere of intimidation, where people can lose their livelihoods, their careers and even their lives if they get on the wrong side of leftist crusaders. That is a terrible thing to have to say in this once free country, but it is something that has become too obvious to deny.

. . .

Forty years ago, I left the left when I saw that it was a destructive force that would never change. Leftists do not tolerate dissenters in their ranks. They suppress politically incorrect ideas and cast out their perpetrators, demonizing them in the process. As a result, leftists never learn from their “mistakes” or take responsibility for their crimes. Thus, in every generation a new destructive crusade for “social justice” is launched, oblivious of the disasters previous radical campaigns left in their wakes.

The leaders of Black Lives Matter proclaim “We are trained Marxists,” as though that were a badge of honor rather than a confession of dangerous ignorance and a kiss of death. Every successful Marxist revolution without exception has established a ruthless police state, which more often than not conducts genocidal persecutions of ethnic minorities. In other words, social injustice on an epic scale. Yet that is the prospect we face in a reactionary left that has learned nothing from the past and is intent on destroying the most tolerant, inclusive, egalitarian society ever created. The good news is that a patriotic movement has risen, rededicated to the propositions that all men are created equal and endowed with God-given rights to life and liberty, and is prepared to defend them.

The full article is here.  

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Fascism: redefining the word

woody.typepad via Steven Crowder/Twitter

  

If you managed to wade through Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, you already know that the term “fascism” has been misappropriated by Communists, Progressives, and other left-of-center isms to mean the opposite of its original far left definition. Several online dictionaries today reflect the switch in meaning, and even the Wikipedia entry shows the difficulty of navigating the origins of the term and its current usage by the political Left as a pejorative.

Today Bookworm (of the Bookworm Room blog) has a piece at American Thinker that summarizes the origin of the left/right nomenclature and the sleight-of-hand in redefining “fascism” – all in the context of a short history lesson. The entire article is here. Below are a couple of extracts:

For months now, the Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington Post: Trump, he asserts, is a fascist.

. . .

Given that conservatives Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”? 

You can blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political “right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives, being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.

. . .

“Fascism,” another historic term, is one that American statists embraced until Hitler tainted it. It first gained political traction in Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini defined it to mean “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” In other words, fascism is purely on the statist side of the continuum.

Savvy readers will have noticed that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state. The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case, for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.

. . .

One more thing: Obama said that the biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure to grab more guns from American hands.  Statists always grab guns because their regimes are fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical government. Trump’s promise to protect the Second Amendment is the antithesis of a statist, especially a “fascist,” regime.

Read the rest here. 

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