Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News

Former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have lots of things in common.

One, they ran the nation’s key intelligence and investigatory agencies under former President Barack Obama. They were deeply involved in the “Russian collusion” hoax. And they participated in the surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition.

Comey and McCabe both signed applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants requesting surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. A report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized Comey and McCabe’s FBI for falsehoods and misrepresentations during its investigation of the Donald Trump campaign.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

The three-year-long effort to abort the Trump presidency — now culminating with a manipulated impeachment effort — has warped U.S. foreign policy toward Russia.

From 2009 to 2014, the Obama administration’s official policy (“reset”) was appeasement of Vladimir Putin’s autocratic Russia. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fashioned a “reset button” outreach to Russia, framed as an antidote to the allegedly unnecessarily punitive policy toward Russia initiated by George W. Bush after the 2008 Russian war with Georgia over the fate of Ossetia. In those ancient days, progressives thought Putin had been treated poorly by the warmongering Bush, and were determined to blame Bush, not Putin, for deteriorating relations.

Incoherent “Experts”

One of the strangest sights of Adam Schiff’s recent impeachment-inquiry hearings conducted under the auspices of the House Intelligence Committee was an array of witnesses who lambasted Trump’s current Ukrainian policy — especially his brief delay in sending lethal aid.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

When a party, an ideological movement, and an entire political agenda are based on hatred, people and policies become warped. The left-wing loathing of Trump has now tainted almost every Democrat’s agenda and unhinged most of the party’s major players.

Impeachment has turned into a cruel caricature of a rare constitutional remedy for presidential criminality. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report proved a compendium of FBI lying, fraud, and vendetta. There is not a single prominent figure in Horowitz’s lengthy report who has not left a written or video trail of anti-Trump bias (James Comey, Peter Strozk, the Ohrs, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith) or has had some sort of questionable financial relationship with the Clintons or their affiliates (Alexander Downer, Andrew McCabe).

Meanwhile, the progressive presidential field is in a sort of collective meltdown, as candidates begin recalibrating and trading accusations as they fear their own early anti-Trump agendas have little public support.

The prior subtext to impeachment—if not smeared or stopped, Trump will win in 2020—was spoken only by hardcore leftists like U.S. Representatives Alexander Green (D-Texas) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Now it is shamelessly voiced by leaders in the party such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), with the twist of fears that Trump will “rig the election” (after Special Counsel Robert Mueller, of course, found that he had not done so in 2016, and Horowitz found that Trump’s campaign aides were largely targeted by the FBI and CIA hierarchy) unless he is impeached.

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Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News

Donald Trump certainly is mercurial at times. He can be uncouth.

But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?

JAMES CARAFANO: HOW IS TRUMP IMPEACHMENT AFFECTING AMERICA AROUND WORLD?

The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?

Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the emoluments clause of the Constitution?

The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35 million investigation, which failed to find Trump guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and failed to find actionable obstruction of justice pertaining to the non-crime of collusion?

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Victor Davis Hanson // The Epoch Times

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Once liberalism and progressivism give way to Jacobinism — and they often do, as we have seen in revolutionary France, China, and Russia — no leftist is safe from the downward spiral to ideological cannibalism. Yesterday’s true believer is today’s counterrevolutionary and tomorrow’s enemy of the people.

We saw something like that during both the Trump impeachment frenzy and the current trajectory of the Democratic debates and looming primaries.

The fury over Trump’s election led to a graduated and escalating series of efforts to remove him by suing three states for supposedly fraudulent voting machines. Then articles of impeachment were introduced. Suits followed citing the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The Logan Act was raised, as was the 25th Amendment. At each juncture, the zeal to remove the president accelerated in direct proportion to the failure of the previous effort. A lack of success was always explained as a result of insufficient revolutionary zeal, not an absence of evidence.

The escalation culminated in the appointment of Robert Mueller and his “dream team” of partisan anti-Trump attorneys. After their failure to find actionable obstruction and any evidence of collusion, Mueller confirmed in congressional testimony that he was largely a tired administrative-state figurehead, a shill for the anti-Trump zealotry of progressive prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

There was a lot of pre-hearing hype about the Democrats’ supposedly stellar academic experts, sort of analogous to the giddiness about the “dream team,” “all-stars,” and “hunter-killer” legal eagles that Robert Mueller supposedly had assembled to pick apart the Trump carrion — and they likewise proved a complete dud.

There were a number of errors that reminded us why Pelosi had originally outsourced the impeachment gambit to the duplicitous but cunning Schiff rather than to the bumbling and clueless Nadler and his Judiciary Committee, who has now all but blown up his inquiry in just its initial hours.

1) By stacking the witnesses 3–1 and ignoring Jonathan Turley, the Democrats only hyped the writ against them that they are biased and unfair. Worse still, the Republicans’ witness Turley, former Bush administration critic who had voted against Trump, came across as the far more disinterested. Could not the Democrats have found one pro-Trump professor who had soured on him and now favored impeachment? Does the self-described “snarky” Karlan have any common sense at all — or even an associate with common sense who might have warned her that her canned, preplanned smear of Barron Trump was not just boorish, but a public relations disaster?

2) We are reminded that, outside small captive audiences on campus, academics are not very good public speakers and usually argue on the basis of presumed authority rather than facts and analysis. The three partisans came across as nasal, whiney, emotional, biased, and self-referential — and their past anti-Trump tweets, and partisan careers, clips, and interviews only confirmed the current stereotypes. On Ukraine, they said the same old, same old thing in mostly the same old ways.

And the three came off like those talking academic heads in documentaries, who sometimes wish to make the most of their 2 minutes of fame by turning up the volume and animation. Turley, in contrast, is a cool veteran of televised news analysis. His op-eds are sober and judicious. And he is a skilled public debater, who knows how to keep calm and analytical. He quickly eviscerated the three with apologetic ease — and deferential smiles. So whose bright idea was it to allow three partisan mediocrities to gang up against Turley, whose  rapier thrusts are well known? Americans love underdog odds, but Turley didn’t even break a sweat in leaving gaping holes in almost every argument advanced by the experts and House panel. He may have given the best solo congressional witness performance in modern memory.

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Victor Davis Hanson // The Patriot Post

One symptom of a society in crisis is the unreliability or even corruption of its own auditors.

After all, when the watchmen have lost moral authority to watch, who can be believed or trusted? Or, as the Roman satirist Juvenal famously put it, “Who will guard the guardians?”

It was recently reported that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered an email to bolster a suspicious FBI effort to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant authorizing the surveillance of Carter Page, a onetime employee of the Trump campaign.

If true, Clinesmith helped the FBI successfully delude the court into granting what was likely an illegal request to spy on the Trump campaign. Clinesmith was reportedly expelled from special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team for cheering on opposition to the Trump presidency by writing “Viva la resistance!” in a text message discussion.

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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Donald Trump promised to shake up U.S. foreign policy. He has certainly done that from the Middle East to Asia. The U.S. is currently engaged in a three-front, maximum-pressure standoff with China, Iran, and North Korea — involving everything from tariffs to possible military action and the strictest sanctions in memory.

At first, Trump critics saw these policy recalibrations as either impotent or counterproductive. Pessimists asserted that China, with a population four times the size of the United States’, was fated for world hegemony. Why antagonize those who might soon control our political and economic future?

Bipartisan experts talked not of the heresy of “stopping” China’s ascendance, but of “managing” America’s relative decline. Translated, the implicit policy conceded that the U.S., in its trade concessions, should overlook systematic Chinese trade surpluses, flagrant violations of world commercial norms, neocolonial provocations throughout Asia, stealing U.S. patents and copyrights, product dumping, currency manipulation, and technological appropriation. Supposedly, the more we appeased China through acts of magnanimity, the more they would reciprocate by becoming like us.

Our classic model for China’s supplanting the U.S. was the prior gradual hand-off of world hegemony from the British Empire to the Americans, as the United Kingdom in the 1940s tutored us on our global responsibilities and tried to play Athenian philosophers to our Roman legions.

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Today’s university students want to “wake” the nation to problems that they and their professors have identified as threatening our very existence. And they issue these periodic alarms in hyperbolic terms: we have just 10, 20—fill in the blanks—years to end fossil fuel use or else die from global warming.

They warn us that there is a veritable war waged on American women who have been limited to a mere 800,000 abortions on average per year. Sexism must explain why only 56 percent of college students are women.

The woke university lectures us that ubiquitous racism, white privilege, sexism, homophobia, transgender hatred, Islamophobia, nativism, and xenophobia supposedly make life deadly for people of color, gays, immigrants, the transgendered, and women. Apparently, such endemic hatred explains why the United States is the most tolerant, freest, most leisurely and affluent country in history for racial, religious, and gender minorities.

To address these supposedly existential concerns and agendas, the university has radically reinvented itself over the last 30 years. The relative and absolute number of tenured and tenure-track professors on campus has nosedived. In their places, the legions of noninstructional  employees and part-time lecturers have soared. The former are mostly highly paid race, class, and gender diversity and inclusion provosts, deans, and czars. The latter are low-paid and largely exploited temporary teachers.

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