"Now in their fury and impotence, Democrats hit the streets—projecting onto their hated nemesis, Donald Trump, their own past preferences for kingly methods."

Concludes Victor Davis Hanson, laying out the evidence, in "Who Are the Real Kings? Democrats cry 'No Kings' while wielding royal power—raiding rivals, silencing dissent, and crowning heirs without a single vote" (American Greatness).

"From where does all this hatred, violence, and moral vacuity arise?"

"Why did the shooter inscribe his bullets with 'anti-fascist' messaging, cruel taunts, and trans jargon?"

Asks Victor Davis Hanson, in "Was the Current Madness Birthed in the University? America’s descent into violence and moral chaos—from Kirk’s assassination to suppressed crime truths—traces back to the toxic ideologies nurtured in universities" (American Greatness).

Is the hatred caused by the media... Or is the promulgator the Democratic Party and the Left... Or, finally, is the culprit for the madness found ultimately in the elite university?... Why, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, are so many teachers, professors, and college-graduate bureaucrats so eager to gloat over and cheer his death?... Hundreds of thousands of students emerge from campuses not just indoctrinated with contempt for the Western tradition and American exceptionalism, and not just often thousands of dollars in debt from inflated tuition, but also poorly educated by the standards that once defined education. The working classes and high school graduates, supposedly the losers of our society, are not those who are dividing the country. They are not often advocating violence or trying to use any means necessary to overturn the established order. But so often the products of the modern university are doing just that....

Interesting... but Charlie Kirk's assassin dropped out of college after one semester. He'd been a promising student and won a scholarship to study engineering, yet he veered off that path quickly and into an electrical apprenticeship program. Wouldn't that put him in with the "working classes and high school graduates" —  "supposedly the losers of our society" who "are not those who are dividing the country"? Perhaps the assassin had contempt for the very "teachers, professors, and college-graduate bureaucrats" who have been "so eager to gloat over and cheer" his action. We don't know, do we?

The assassin is contemptible — a murderer. But whether his motive aligns with the ideology of the "teachers, professors, and college-graduate bureaucrats" who cheer and gloat, they are contemptible — quite independently. They need to stand in the light and take criticism for the ideas they've taught and enforced.

"Is the Democrat message pure Jacobin hatred for anything pro-American and anything that could be considered pro-President Donald Trump?"

"They’re feral creatures now, lonely, isolated, frightened without leadership, desperate for relevance, without any cogent message, terrified at what’s to become of them."

Writes John Kass, at his own website, in "Democrats Locked in Their Own Hell."

I'm also seeing "Why Democrats Are Losing My Generation/Hint: It’s not because they didn’t go on Joe Rogan" by Joshua A. Cohen (at The Nation): "[P]ut yourself in the perspective of a voter my age; e.g., someone born in the early 2000s. When we grew up, the Democratic Party was defined by a charismatic leader who oversaw a growing economy and ended his term with strong approval ratings. When we came of age, we came to know a Republican Party defined by an unpopular, flailing Trump whose weak leadership defined the most traumatic period of our lives (the pandemic). We had never known a popular Republican president or an unpopular Democratic one. But when Biden’s administration burst into flames...."

And here's Victor Davis Hanson, in "Trump’s Democratic 'Allies'/Democrats’ obsessive Trump hatred blinds them to their own unpopularity, making his counter-revolution seem inevitable—and even normal" (American Greatness):

"The threat to democracy — indeed, the existential threat to democracy — is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime, tenured civil servants..."

"... who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. So, Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote for radical reform in our energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote to end DEI — racist DEI policies, and lawyers in the Department of Justice say they don’t want to change. What President Trump is doing is he is removing federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people."

Said Stephen Miller, at yesterday's press briefing.

Want to see a murder?

Libs in the White House press corps screamed at Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that Elon Musk is “unelected!”

What happens next is a fatality.

I promise you - this is the single best video on the internet today:pic.twitter.com/Nxcw0qTtj1

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 20, 2025

ADDED: In the same vein, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

 

It's the season of fading — click on your favorite view of fading.

A view, yesterday:

 

 

This morning, Real Clear Politics gives us our choice of which of 2 roads diverged in a woods you want to take to view the fading foliage:

 

Maybe we're all running out of steam and continuing to fade. After watching years of this presidential campaign, to be left with these 2 dismal candidates and — knowing they both have terrible problems — to resort to clicking on articles by partisan writers who promise to show readers that the other guy is fading. Pick one. Who do you want to lag behind as the 2 decrepit septuagenarians strain to fail a little less badly than his unworthy competitor? 

Here's the link for Victor Davis Hanson — in case you like the orange foliage... verbiage. Sample: "The final question is... to what degree Biden’s suicidal talk of ending fossil fuels and denial of the Hunter Biden evidence that cannot be denied implode his campaign...."

Here's the link for Maureen Dowd — in case you like beige foliage. Sample verbiage: "Now a lot of Americans seem resigned yet relieved to step back in time with a sentimental old-school Irish pol... Back to a time when the president did not rubbish people like an insult comic.... You can only let King Kong.... smash up the metropolis for so long."

The history of the effort to take down President Trump.

Entertainingly told by Victor Davis Hanson.

It's entertaining because it didn't work and because there are so many steps in this long-term effort, some of which I had forgotten. Like, do you remember Dr. Bandy X. Lee?

I was not a Trump supporter at the time of the election. (I wasn't a Hillary supporter either.) But the effort to take his victory away is something I have always opposed very strongly. America voted, and that was that as I see it. So I greatly enjoyed VDH's retelling of the grand story of Trump's survival.

VDH has 11 paragraphs that begin with the phrase "When that did not work...". And that's why it's funny, and not a horror story.

"Have you read Sophocles’s 'Ajax' ever?... You have a neurotic hero who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor..."

"... and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, 'This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?' It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, 'Shut up and just take it.' Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, 'I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities—deep-state, administrative nothings.' So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, 'If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.' So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that. I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it."

Said Victor Davis Hanson, quoted in "The Classicist Who Sees Donald Trump as a Tragic Hero" (an interview in The New Yorker). Hanson is promoting his book, "The Case for Trump."

"Elites Value Mellifluous Illegality over Crass Lawfulness."

Good headline at National Review for this, by Victor Davis Hanson. Excerpt:

We live in such strange times that the media ignored the most blatant examples of presidential campaign-cycle collusion in memory, while seeking to invent it where it never existed. Remember, Barack Obama on a hot mic not only got caught reiterating to a Russian leader the conditions of Putin-Obama election-cycle collusion, but he also spelled out the exact quid pro quo: promised Russian quietude abroad during Obama’s reelection campaign was in exchange for “flexibility” (i.e., cancellation) of U.S.-Eastern European missile-defense projects. Should Trump ever be caught making the same “deal” in 2020, he would probably be impeached.

I ran into that new piece because I was looking for something else written by Victor Davis Hanson that Meade was reading to me last night.

Ah! Here it is. It's at American Greatness:

Imagine that it is now summer 2024. A 78-year-old lame-duck President Trump is winding down his second term, basking in positive polls. His dutiful vice president in waiting, Mike Pence, is at last getting his chance to run for president. Imagine also that Pence is a shoo-in, facing long-shot, hard-leftist, and octogenarian Senator Bernie Sanders. Polls show an impending Pence landslide.

Team Trump is nevertheless horrified about the slight chance that the nation could conceivably elect an ossified, self-proclaimed socialist....

There follows a very elaborate visualization of the Trump administration doing to Sanders the equivalent of what the Obama administration did to Trump in 2016. We're used to these flips, of course, but this one was very striking to me because time after time I experience weird surprise to see (in flipped form) the things that really happened.

I'd excerpt some of the detail, but it's best experienced as a torrent of outrageous behavior.

"In reaction to the growing globalization of the Roman Empire, elite corruption, the banality of bread-and-circuses, and the end of the agrarian Italian Republic, the Stoics opted out..."

"... choosing instead a reasoned detachment from contemporary life. Some, like the worldly court philosopher Seneca, seemed hypocritical; others, such as the later emperor Marcus Aurelius, lived a double life of imperial engagement and mental detachment. Classical impassiveness established the foundations for the later monastic Christians, who in more dangerous times increasingly saw the world around them as incompatible with the world to come — and therefore they saw engagement as an impediment to their own Christian belief. More and more Americans today are becoming Stoic dropouts. They are not illiberal, and certainly not reactionaries, racists, xenophobes, or homophobes. They’re simply exhausted by our frenzied culture.... Monastics are tuning out the media.... When everything is politicized, everything is monotonous; nothing is interesting... For millions of Americans, their music, their movies, their sports, and their media are not current fare. Instead, they have mentally moved to mountaintops or inaccessible valleys, where they can live in the past or dream of the future, but certainly not dwell in the here and now...."

Writes Victor Davis Hanson in "Monasteries of the Mind," which I'm reading because because it was recommended in the comments to a post I'd put up earlier today. The commenter, Jeff Kuebler, said:

Standing off, interesting--I clicked here right after reading Victor D Hanson's column on people tuning out.

What I'd written was:

Speaking of very, very ugly,* I feel myself drifting away from politics. In the early years of this blog, I had a subheading under the blog title "Althouse" that read: "Politics and the aversion to politics, law and law school, high and low culture, and the way things look from Madison, Wisconsin." The aversion to politics had kind of been the story of my life, and blogging had me just dabbling in actual political opinion. The opinion has always been tinged with the aversion. I'm standing off at some distance observing how other people are political.

_______________________

* The post began with a quote from Joe Biden imagining the world turning very ugly, very, very ugly.

"Trump essentially ran against a united Democratic party, the Republican establishment, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) — and won."

"He was outspent. He was out-organized. He was outpolled and demonized daily as much by Republicans as Democrats. Yet he not only destroyed three political dynasties (the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas) but also has seemingly rendered the Obama election matrix nontransferable to anyone other than Obama himself... Instead of seeing Barack Obama (both his successful two elections and his failed two terms) as the wave of the future, Democrats would be wise to reassess his electoral legacy as a unique phenomenon. In truth, Obama’s legacy is twofold: He took the party hard left, and he downsized it to a minority party of the two coasts and big cities. And then he faded off into the sunset to a multimillionaire retirement of golf and homilies... [T]he Democratic-party strategists are doubling down on boutique environmentalism and race/gender victimhood, while hoping that Donald Trump implodes in scandal, war, or depression.  They are clueless that their present rabid frenzy is doing as much political damage to their cause as is the object of their outrage."

Writes Victor David Hanson in "The Democrat Patient/Ignoring the symptoms, misdiagnosing the malady, skipping the treatment."

Victor Davis Hanson makes "The Case for Trump."

At National Review.

I'll live-blog my reading of it. The subtitle is "Conservatives should vote for the Republican nominee," so this is not an argument aimed at me, but I'm interested to see how he attempts to sell Trump to conservatives.

... [E]ven before the latest revelations from an eleven-year-old Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump crudely talked about women, he had long ago in the primaries gratuitously insulted his more moderate rivals and their supporters...

Trump’s personal and professional life has been lurid — as, again, we were reminded by the media-inspired release of a hot-mic tape of past Trump crude sexual braggadocio. The long campaigning has confirmed Trump as often uncouth — insensitive to women and minorities. He has never held office. His ignorance of politics often embarrasses those in foreign- and domestic-policy circles. Trump’s temperament is mercurial, especially in its ego-driven obsessions with slights to his business ethics and acumen. He wins back supporters by temporary bouts of steadiness as his polls surge, only to alienate them again with crazy nocturnal tweets and off-topic rants....

Hanson begins by digging a deep hole, so it's hard to stick around to see how he will purport to dig us back up out of it.

"Clearly, elite journalists, political advisers, media anchors, and pollsters, for all their analyses, have no idea where, why, and how Trump garners support."

That's Victor David Hanson in National Review with "Trump: Something New under the Political Sun."

I'm of 2 minds here.

1. He's addressing the topic I said I want addressed.

2. He said "garner."

Why is TV "currently inundated with working-class, white-guy reality shows"?

Victor Davis Hanson has 3 theories: 1. "The zoo hypothesis suggests that American suburbanites are amused by exotic creatures," 2. People are "smugly satisfied that they are not like these uncouth white boys," and 3. It's "therapeutic" to experience, vicariously, the "glimpses, premodern though they may be, of unrestrained freedom."

In our upside-down world, the eighth-grade teacher understands that one wrong word, an ill-timed joke, a casual pat on the shoulder can end a career, pronto — while his punk student with the gang-banging parent who shouts profanity at him are mostly exempt from worry. The boss at the DMV accepts the fact that the whiff of a sexual-harassment suit, the rumor of an impending racial-discrimination allegation, the suggestion of inhospitality to the handicapped are more terrifying than the rowdy 16-year-old who pulls in to take his driving test in a monster truck. In our dreams it is better to be an ax man, where it’s Mother Nature, not the local diversity czar, who is after you.

The crabmen and lumberjacks don’t seem to worry about what they say or whom they offend — to the degree that such screw-it attitudes can be hinted about on politically correct camera. 

The agents of political correctness do try to reach into the production of these reality shows (ineffectually, as we saw in the recent "Duck Dynasty" flap), but the point is that these shows depict (or at least purport to depict) a way of life that is (or seems to be) beyond the repressive forces.

"Barack Obama is the most partisan politician since Richard Nixon."

Says Victor Davis Hanson, explaining why call for "civility" is bogus:

His brief Senate record, his health-care partisanship of 2009, his snickering amid audience applause after the “inadvertent” middle-fingering of Hillary Clinton, and his polarizing metaphorical speech (e.g., knives, guns, kicking ass, getting angry, getting in their face, hostage takers, trigger fingers, tearing up) all attest to that.

That Obama is a postracial mellifluent Chicago politician does not mean that he is not a Chicago politician. That he blasts the “fat cats,” the “stupidly” acting police, and the limb-lopping surgeons, or that his attorney general calls the American people “cowards,” is typical, not aberrant. For 2012, President Obama will have raised $1 billion in cash. He knows from 2008 (“cling to guns or religion,” “typical white person,” “gun to a knife fight”) that his own emotionalism and polarization both earn him cash and create the “them” against “us” (minorities, youth, gays, women) binaries that might draw attention away from an agenda that a majority simply does not want. Obama has always used polarizing politics, coupled with calls for bipartisanship, to great effect, and he surely — as we just saw again in October 2010 (“punish,” “backseat,” “enemies”) — cannot stop now....

Indeed, hours after President Obama’s calls for a new landscape of civility, Rep. Steven Cohen (D., Tenn.) was comparing Republican opponents of the health-care legislation to Nazis from the House floor, while Slate published a screed by Emily Bazelon on  “Why I Loathe My Connecticut Senator,” with serial expressions of how she “loathed” and “despised” Sen. Joe Lieberman.