For those of us in California who fear we may be losing the culture that was handed down to us from the Enlightenment of Hobbes, Locke, and Smith and of course, our founders, men such as Jefferson and Madison, the rise of Cruz Bustamante may bear some alarming parallels to the career of the fifth century Vandal warlord, Odoacer. By the middle of the fifth century, the citizenry of the Western Roman Empire was exhausted due to their long endurance of unremitting Gothic invasions and more and more burdensome taxes levied to support their besieged armies and bloated government. But the Vandals, Huns, and Goths kept coming across the Rhine, invading, pillaging, and then settling inside the Empire’s borders, oblivious to Roman law and culture. In their desperate attempts at appeasement, the Roman Senate made many of the invading warlords generals in the Roman Armies, ceded new lands to their hoards, and even made several Master of the Soldiers, the Emperor’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Then in 476 A.D. the “Vandal Pirate King,” Odoacer, deposed the boy emperor, Romulus Augustus, More »
It’s pretty clear that, Victor Davis Hanson, is on a roll. Just as communist sympathizers and apologists of the 60s and 70s, together with their press patrons, were successful in making it worse to call someone a communist than it was to be one (never mind the murder of millions), it seems that it has become largely taboo to attack the country’s race industry by anyone other than a member of one of the county’s aggrieved groups. Only people such as Shelby Steele, formerly of the Afro centrists, or Linda Chavez, a potential “twofer” of the Hispanic-American and women’s movements, only those who have gotten fed up with being a card-carrying member of the separatists and race hustlers have been allowed to lodge such a complaint. But remarkably, Peter Collier of Encounter Books convinced Hanson that it is he, a Swedish American, who needed to write Mexifornia, A State of Becoming, a book about our disastrously failed racial politics, because it is he who has earned the authority to do so.
Hanson lives near ground zero for Mexican migration, outside the rural town of Selma in the vast Central California San Joaquin Valley, on a farm founded by his Swedish great-great grandparents in the 1880s. His acreage produces peaches and grapes. In addition to farming, at nearby Fresno State University he teaches More »
“The Americans always do the right thing…after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities.”
Winston S. Churchill
Similarly to this phony outrage over Bush’s state of the union speech, one can only conclude that, in an effort to impose on the rest of us their own sense of shame about defending the nation, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, and Andrew Kohut of Pew Research recently collaborated on a much publicized twenty-country opinion poll called the Global Attitudes Project. Fouad Ajami adroitly points out was it was filled with leading questions like “What’s the problem with the U.S.? Is it mostly Bush, America in general, or both?” And so not surprisingly, the study found that anti-American sentiment is rising precipitously and presumably above pre-Iraq-war levels, even among our traditional allies. However, the results of the study are not really news because, for example, as Ajami also points out, the plot to kill 3,000 Americans on 9/11 was hatched in the 1990s, on Ms. Albright’s watch. The study merely confirms a trend that had been in place for quite a while, More »
