Victor Davis Hanson's Truth Bombs

[B-Man]

 

 

Back to the thread:

 

 

Can the current universities be saved?

 

Victor Davis Hanson

VDH is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,”

Tuesday, May 7, 2024

 

Elite higher education in America — long unquestioned as globally preeminent — is facing a perfect storm.

 

Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system.

 

The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated.

 

No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the professoriate.

 

Each year, there are far fewer students entering college. Despite a U.S. population 40 million larger than 20 years ago, fertility rates have fallen in two decades by some 500,000 births per year.

 

Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition increased by 170%.

 

Skyrocketing costs cannot be explained by inflation alone, given that campuses have lightened faculty teaching loads while expanding administrative staff. At Stanford, there is nearly one staffer or administrative position for every student on campus.

 

At the same time, to vie for a shrinking number of students, colleges began offering costly in loco parentis counseling, Club Med-style dorms and accommodations, and extracurricular activities.

 

As applicants grew scarcer and expenses went up, universities began offering "full-service" student-aid packages, heavily reliant on government-subsidized student loans. The collective indebtedness of over 40 million student borrowers is nearing $2 trillion.

 

Worse still, an entire new array of therapeutic majors and minors appeared in the social sciences. Most of these gender/race/environmental courses did not emphasize analytical, mathematical, or oral and written skills. Such course work did not impress employers.

 

Faculty hiring had become increasingly non-meritocratic based on diversity/equity/inclusion criteria. New faculty hires have sought to institutionalize self-serving DEI and recalibrate higher education to prepare a new generation for self-perpetuating radical ideologies.

 

At the more elite campuses, racial quotas vastly curtailed the number of Asian and white students. But that racialist social engineering project required dropping the SAT requirement and comparative ranking of high school grade point averages.

 

As less well-prepared students entered college, faculty either inflated grades (80% are A/A- now at Yale), watered down their course requirements, or added new soft-ball classes. To do otherwise while attempting to retain old standards earned targeted faculty charges of racism and worse.

 

More at the link:  https://www.semissourian.com/story/3039271.html

[BillsFanNC]

 

[B-Man]

 

 

SLEEPERS, AWAKE!

By Scott Johnson

 

The new book by Victor Davis Hanson is The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation. It was published this past Tuesday. The New York Post extracted Victor’s thesis statement from the book for this column (the headline doesn’t come close to capturing the thesis). In the book Victor recounts the annihilation of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan. Victor provides a précis in the publisher’s video below 

 

 

 

 

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/05/sleepers-awake.php

 

Wall Street Journal review of the book:  https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-end-of-everything-review-annals-of-total-destruction-c11777cc

 

 

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[B-Man]

 

 

The Fall of the House of Presidential Persecutions

What will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?

By Victor Davis Hanson

May 13, 2024

 

None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.

 

These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.

 

As such, the current lawfare joins the Mueller investigation of the Russian-collusion hoax. It is a continuation of the laptop disinformation caper and the “51 intelligence authorities” who lied about its Russian origins. It logically follows from the two impeachments, the Senate trial of Trump as a private citizen, and states’ efforts to remove him from their ballots.

 

The E. Jean Carroll case, the Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis local and state trials, and the Smith federal indictment share various embarrassments.

Suspension of statutes of limitations: Carroll and Bragg could only go to court through the legal gymnastics of enlisting sympathetic judges and legislators to change or amend the law to suspend the statute of limitations as a veritable bill of attainder to go after Trump.

 

More at the link:  https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/13/the-fall-of-the-house-of-presidential-persecutions/

 

 

 

 

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[B-Man]

 

 

The Biden Reelection Strategy

Bidenites believe they can reelect an unhealthy, unpopular, and unsuccessful president by any means necessary. And they may be right.

By Victor Davis Hanson

 

Joe Biden polls at or below 40 percent approval. Historically, such unpopularity has made it almost impossible for a president to be reelected.

 

His age advances by the hour. His voice falters, his memory fades, and his gait is reduced to short steps, with his arms, winglike and in tandem, offering balance.

 

Biden is not so much an octogenarian as an unhealthy and prematurely aging 80-year-old. It is America’s irony that he is fit for almost no other job in the country other than President, which apparently allows for a 3-day-a-week ceremonial role while others in the shadows run the country.

 

So how does Biden become renominated and reelected, as polls show he is behind in almost every critical swing state on nearly every issue?

 

Answer: not by campaigning, not by championing his record, and especially not by doubling down on his neo-socialist and now unpopular agendas.

Instead, his campaign is focused on four other strategies to beat Donald Trump.

 

First, left-wing local, state, and federal prosecutors are tying Trump up in court on crimes that have never been seen before and will never be again after the election. All the cases are politically motivated, with many coordinated with the White House.

 

Even if Trump is not convicted by blue-state prosecutors, in blue-state courtrooms, in front of blue-state juries, he will lose critical campaigning time.

Trump may end up paying out $1 billion in legal fees and fines. At 76, the monotonous days in court are designed to destroy him financially, physically, and mentally.

Biden and his operatives know that, in the long term, they may have fatally damaged the American legal system with such judicial sabotage. But short-term, they hope to destroy Trump before the ballots are cast.

 

Second, in his fourth year, Biden is suddenly selling government favors to special-interest voting blocs, or hoping to bring short-term relief to voters at the expense of long-term damage to the nation.

 

For elite college students and graduates, there are now billions of dollars in student-loan cancellations, despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring such targeted contractual amnesties illegal.

For consumers, before the election, Biden will likely drain the last drops from the critical Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices—now sky-high due to his previous disastrous green policies.

If that is not enough, Biden has ordered Ukraine not to hit Russian oil facilities to avoid panic in the global petroleum markets before early and mail-in balloting begin.

Biden will quietly jawbone the Federal Reserve Bank to lower interest rates and reinflate the economy, despite his own creation of hyperinflation that caused interest rates to rise in the first place.

He will pander to Arab-American voters in swing-state Michigan by cutting arms deliveries to Israel, even as it seeks to destroy the killers of October 7.

And if that mollification is not sufficient to win Michigan, he will suddenly slap higher tariffs on imported Chinese electrical vehicles to win back apostate union auto workers.

 

Three, the left learned after 2016 that the only way to beat Trump is to change the way Americans vote.

So under the cover of the COVID-19 lockdown, the left sued in critical states to reduce Election Day to a mere construct, while 70 percent of voters mailed in their ballots or voted by early, rolling balloting over many weeks.

The key was the inability to fully authenticate votes, given the old practice of showing up on Election Day and presenting an ID was declared “racist.”

 

Four, Biden, as he did in 2020, will outsource his campaign to the media, 95 percent of which is left-wing. Talking televised heads will claim Biden is “sharp as a knife” while focusing on Trump’s tweets, Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, and lurid but irrelevant testimonies that permeate Trump’s court appearances.

 

 

MORE at the link:  https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/16/the-biden-reelection-strategy/

 

 

 

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[B-Man]

 

 

Victor Davis Hanson: The Disgrace and Fall of the American Elite Campus
American Greatness ^ | 20 May, 2024 | Victor Davis Hanson

 

These infantile campuses have a rendezvous with adult accountability, both public and governmental. And they won’t like what is coming.

 

Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.

 

Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.

 

The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.

 

More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?

 

Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less.

 

Two, the protestors, deep down, know they are aligning with the murderers and rapists of October 7 and that their chants...

 

(Excerpt) Read more at https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/20/the-disgrace-and-fall-of-the-american-elite-campus/

 

 

 

 

[BillsFanNC]

The mother of all VDH truth bombs.

 

Absolute gold.

 

 

[The Frankish Reich]

On 5/20/2024 at 7:16 AM, B-Man said:

 

 

Victor Davis Hanson: The Disgrace and Fall of the American Elite Campus
American Greatness ^ | 20 May, 2024 | Victor Davis Hanson

 

These infantile campuses have a rendezvous with adult accountability, both public and governmental. And they won’t like what is coming.

 

Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.

 

Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.

 

The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.

 

More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?

 

Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less.

 

Two, the protestors, deep down, know they are aligning with the murderers and rapists of October 7 and that their chants...

 

(Excerpt) Read more at https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/20/the-disgrace-and-fall-of-the-american-elite-campus/

 

 

 

 

First Columbia.

Then Yale.

And yes, friends. The protests have finally hit the Jewel of the eastern Central Valley, that Binghamton of the West, VDH's very own Fresno State. Damn elitists.

https://fresnoland.org/2024/05/01/fresno-state-demonstration/

Edited May 23 by The Frankish Reich

[BillsFanNC]

Finding too busy with reliable sources on Politico.

 

 

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276

[The Frankish Reich]

^^Still excited about that Stallone-Denzel breakaway union thing.

[BillsFanNC]

⬆️ 

 

 

 

 

[BillsFanNC]

In other words, without a fully compliant msm and social media, they can't gaslight as many people like they're accustomed to.

 

Musk taking over Twitter has the blob very upset!

 

 

[B-Man]

 

 

Our Revolutionary Times

COMMENTARY

By Victor Davis Hanson 

 

 

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies.

 

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

 

Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

 

But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

 

Masked left-wing protesters were unashamedly and virulently antisemitic. Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism as well as the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

 

Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel, and defaced American monuments and commentaries.

 

When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant, and hateful the students seemed.

 

The Biden administration destroyed the southern border. Ten million illegal aliens swarmed into the U.S. without audit. Almost daily, news accounts detail violent acts committed by illegal aliens or their surreal demands for more free lodging and support.

 

{snip}

 

Americans are also reappraising their attitudes toward time-honored bureaucracies, the courts, and government agencies.

 

The public still cannot digest the truth that the once respected FBI partnered with social media to suppress news stories, to surveil parents at school board meetings, and to conduct performance art swat raids on the homes of supposed political opponents.

 

After the attempts of the Department of Justice to go easy on the miscreant Hunter Biden but to hound ex-president Donald Trump for supposedly removing files illegally in the same fashion as current President Joe Biden, the public lost confidence not just in Attorney General Merrick Garland but in American jurisprudence itself.

 

The shenanigans of prosecutors like Fani Willis, Letitia James, and Alvin Bragg, along with overtly biased judges like Juan Merchant and Arthur Engoron, only reinforced the reality that the American legal system has descended into third-world-like tit-for-tat vendettas.

 

Finally, we are witnessing a radical inversion in our two political parties. The old populist Democratic Party that championed lunch-bucket workers has turned into a shrill union of the very rich and subsidized poor. Its support of open borders, illegal immigration, the war on fossil fuels, transgenderism, critical legal and race theories, and the woke agenda are causing the party to lose support.

 

The Republican Party is likewise rebranding itself from a once-stereotyped brand of aristocratic and corporate grandees to one anchored in the middle class.

 

Even more radically, the new populist Republicans are beginning to appeal to voters on shared class and cultural concerns rather than on racial and tribal interests.

 

The results of all these revolutions will shake up the U.S. for decades to come.

 

More at the link:  https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/05/31/our_revolutionary_times_151029.html

 

 

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