Now that was a good analysis, and one that rings very true.
Nice article. I see Trump as the rough and very imprecise truth teller in a time of nearly universal deceit. To borrow from Orwell. Social and political truths always have an element of subjectivity, so these are Trump’s truths.
OK, it’s also likely the case, that to wield major political power in the modern world, one can’t be entirely wedded to the truth. Though the deviations are an exceptionally slippery slope.
I’ve seen most of the films Hanson mentions, except the famous, “The Searchers.”
One of my faves is “3:10 to Yuma.” I’ve seen both the 1957 version and the more recent one with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale which is amazing. Bale is the noble but failed (or possibly not failed) tragic hero played against Crowe’s charismatic and ultimately redeemable anti-hero.
He’s more like an anti hero though.
Trum also uses certain tactics and personas that I also used online. Thus whenever Trum supporters or potential trum supporters attacked me as the messenger but supported Trum, cognitive dissonance began building for them.
It’s also why I wasn’t all that optimistic about Trum’s chances in District of Columbia Capital of Evil, Swamp zone alpha. I know the efficacy of his talents and tricks, and I know the powers that be that he sought to compete with and triumph over. Far better than Trum did, given his indecision on Comey and Mueller.
Among his many fine missives, this may be Hanson’s most brilliant.
Ymar,
We’d all pat you on the back but there’s no room for our hand…
I read VDH article yesterday and once again he made me realize how insightful he is. Trump is somewhat of an odd heroic character that has Shakespearic qualities of bombast, cunning, and fanatic persistence. He has surprised me to say the least.
We’d all pat you on the back but there’s no room for our hand…
I treat praise the same as I treat derision and criticism.
Don’t worry, once you pass through the Gate to the Source later on, you can figure it out later.
For now though, the orange frog guy is in need of all the help he can get, if you really think you can beat the Leftist alliance, then show it by action instead of talk.
Talk is just talk.
Among his many fine missives, this may be Hanson’s most brilliant.
After reading VDH’s article, it merely sounds like VDH is setting up a cushion for Trum’s future fall. It is almost like damage control, but the damage that it would have to do is quite extreme given conditions in the USA.
VDH should have picked up the signs of civil war not long after I did, given his background. But I am sure he put much attention to not sounding the panic call on his official presentations and articles.
There are certain things about the Leftist alliance and the Deep State, that Americans do not know. So long as they remain ignorant, they will end up backstabbed just like Mueller and others did to Trum. Sure, the first stab may not work. Maybe the second or third or tenth stab may not work on Dear Leader orange frog.
They won’t give up however.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
I remember your first reaction, GB, to this position I took, some odd years ago.
Trump was the only billionaire crazy enough to try this. Now, if he only had a Congress that kept promises.
Thanks to the MSM I got to like Bush 43. Now I’m becoming sympathetic to Trump 45.
________________________________________________
I guess I’ll miss the man
Explain it if you can
His face was far from fine
But still I’ll miss his face
And wonder if he’s missing mine
Some days he wouldn’t say
A pleasant word all day
Some days he’d scowl and curse
But there were other days
When he was really even worse
Some men are heroes
Some men outshine the sun
Some men are simple, good men
This man wasn’t one
And I won’t miss his moods
His gloomy solitudes
His blunt abrasive style
But please don’t get me wrong
He was the best to come along
In a long, long while….
I’ve used up my free articles on NRO, but a Google search on the title turns up results showing that the conceit is not new, although Hanson is probably the best rhetorician of it.
Americans still think Bush II was behind 9/11 as an inside job. What evidence or reasons they have for this, I have no idea. Seems to be a Demoncrat or Deep State disinfo campaign.
They say Donald Rumsfeld was hiding the 3.7+ ish trillion the Pentagon “lost” the day before 9/11, and the admin was trying to hide it. Well, if they were trying to hide it, why did Rumsfeld and the Pentagon even mention they were investigating it? It would have been easier just to kill the accountants at the Pentagon without telling everyone on tv something that obvious… but I don’t think most Americans learn tradecraft and assassination methods…
This is the type of logic that brought us Hussein and Global Warming btw.
After reading VDH’s latest I’m left with thought that he’s cushioning the blow.
Nice. I especially like the reference to Tom Doniphon since “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is one of my favorite movies. Is Mike Pence the new Ranse Stoddard?
VDH has the wisdom of a man who has thoroughly studied the ancients as well as the moderns.
But references to “modern” Westerns are amusing. By modern, he means classic, not contemporary. The white hat-black hat morality play has disappeared into relativistic, politically correct oblivion. Those films had a great influence on me as a kid who grew up on horseback in TX. Black and white; right and wrong. Manichean! No ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. Which is likely why I became a Trump supporter way sooner than many here.
Frog–The fact that our airways, computer screens, TVs, books, music, video games, and theaters are no longer dominated by lessons in Black and White, right and wrong morality is exactly the point.
The Left has deliberately erased that moral code, that way of looking at the world and the analysis and actions derived from it, and we see the results of this all around us.
Post-modernism. Relativism. Right and wrong is so 19th century.
The main omission in the excellent VDH article is the nature of times we all live at now. This is decline and fall of postmodernism, and also of liberalism and of any other ideology emerging since the Great French revolution, that is, the return to normalcy and to Manichean tragic worldview of the classic Greeks. Such times need heroes not to rectify some local deviations from normalcy, but to overthrow the whole false, immoral world order and to replace it by a moral one, probably, by very rigid and non-compromissing of a Calvinist type moral philosophy.
huxley Says:
April 20th, 2018 at 10:41 pm
Thanks to the MSM I got to like Bush 43. Now I’m becoming sympathetic to Trump 45.
Snow on Pine Says:
April 21st, 2018 at 12:52 pm
Frog—The fact that our airways, computer screens, TVs, books, music, video games, and theaters are no longer dominated by lessons in Black and White, right and wrong morality is exactly the point.
The Left has deliberately erased that moral code, that way of looking at the world and the analysis and actions derived from it, and we see the results of this all around us.
* *
Indeed.
Search out what you can find, give your kids and grandkids old books and old videos, because – per Kipling — at some point we will crash and start over again, and they need to have the tools to work with.
I seriously considered joining the Amish to prepare for the so called EMP global zombie apocalypse meltdown.
Amish teenagers and adults are given a choice, after touring the world, to join an Amish community. It’s not a cult where people get kept in chains (like Hollywood).
They get a surprisingly high retention rate of 85%. Most religions would find it hard to retain that a high a retention rate for children raised in a faith.
A slim percentage of new Amish are converts to the community. Mostly survivalists or people fed up with EMF and modern society.
If the Amish had tai chi lineage instructors, it would have been very very tempting…
Back when I was looking up Hollywood’s Satanic ritual, child pedo, rapist culture in 2007, other people that are Trum supporters or potential supporters now, were paying Hollywood to produce propaganda that they would then imbibe as “entertainment”.
Good thing I got the warning while the early ticket was still up.
Those that got in late on the ticket, just be aware that there’s a bunch of stuff that people discovered that you will need to catch up on.
Probably the best article I’ve seen on Trump. Yes, VDH may be trying to let his supporters down easy, but his explanation makes deep sense going back to classical times and in the mythology of our the US as expressed in the great Westerns. I’d add that the Magnificent Seven is a Westernized (pun intended) remake of Kourasawa’s Seven Samurai which I think adds to Hanson’s point that the problematic tragic hero is not just valid across time but also across cultures.
I liked Ymar Sakar several posts in this thread which point in general to the problems in the US being for deeper than any hero can fix. My take is that key thing Trump is doing which will be impossible to reverse is to reveal the swamp. The Rs, the Ds and the Bureaucracies. (Kinda reminds of the street gangs that ran Chicago when I lived there in the late 60s – the Stones, the Vees, and the Dees.) They out themselves for what they are more every day and the Trump administration is only a bit over a year old.
Another of VDH’s essays on flawed character, which may relate, is his apologia/eulogy for Christopher Hitchens. The tortured soul, good at heart, self-destructive, conflicted man who rises above it all in a vain effort to save Western Civilization. (Grasping at straws IMO.)
One of Victor Hanson’s best writings. Unfortunately, to most who would make the effort to read it, the response will be: “Graecum est; non legitur”.
@ other chuck, thanks for posting that link, I was a fan of Hitchens. The piece he wrote about receiving his lung cancer diagnosis is quite a look into how it all went down.
@sandy, “Kto ty jestes” lol
Hitchens had a flaw. His IQ dropped by more than 2 digits whenever he would write/talk about religion.
Lorenz Gude Says:
April 22nd, 2018 at 10:54 am
The point about Trum being a stalking horse or the trigger to exposing things, is valid.
I just didn’t agree with the overly optimistic sense that having elected a US president, the problems would be fixed. The problem with America wasn’t Hussein or policies. It’s a spiritual problem with the people.
Even the best system in the world, the United States Constitution as originally envisioned by the Founding Fathers and Masons, would not work for spiritually decadent fools, traitors, and incompetents.
VDH will still meet Hitchens later on. Both of them are already slotted for a resurrection. Don’t know for how long, but that’s okay.
The Founders lived in a very different time, and when you read about them and their ideas, and their general level of knowledge of history, philosophy, and political theory, tempered by practical knowledge, the Western intellectual milieu many of them were immersed in, many of them with a solid grounding in and deep Judeo-Christian beliefs, you realize that they were an often highly educated, dedicated, and determined group of extraordinary individuals.
Compared to them most of the politicians and government officials who are our leaders today are poor specimens.
Its not just today’s leaders vs. the Founders.
The Founders wrote about how our American experiment in self-government could only work, survive, and flourish if our citizens were a moral, industrious, and educated people; keenly aware of, interested in, and engaged with the events of the day.
It’s pretty obvious that the Left has made every effort it could to subvert and weaken those qualities of morality, industriousness, and education that the Founders thought were absolutely essential in our citizenry if our country was to survive and flourish.
The Left making every effort, as well, to make sure that we are not made aware of the information we need to know to make key political decisions, essential news of the day, that they are making us blind to, and deliberately leading us away from.
Surveying today’s America, it looks like fewer and fewer of our citizenry are the highly politically engaged, moral, industrious, and well educated people that the Founders saw as essential, and that’s a major problem.
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Now that was a good analysis, and one that rings very true.
Nice article. I see Trump as the rough and very imprecise truth teller in a time of nearly universal deceit. To borrow from Orwell. Social and political truths always have an element of subjectivity, so these are Trump’s truths.
OK, it’s also likely the case, that to wield major political power in the modern world, one can’t be entirely wedded to the truth. Though the deviations are an exceptionally slippery slope.
I’ve seen most of the films Hanson mentions, except the famous, “The Searchers.”
One of my faves is “3:10 to Yuma.” I’ve seen both the 1957 version and the more recent one with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale which is amazing. Bale is the noble but failed (or possibly not failed) tragic hero played against Crowe’s charismatic and ultimately redeemable anti-hero.
He’s more like an anti hero though.
Trum also uses certain tactics and personas that I also used online. Thus whenever Trum supporters or potential trum supporters attacked me as the messenger but supported Trum, cognitive dissonance began building for them.
It’s also why I wasn’t all that optimistic about Trum’s chances in District of Columbia Capital of Evil, Swamp zone alpha. I know the efficacy of his talents and tricks, and I know the powers that be that he sought to compete with and triumph over. Far better than Trum did, given his indecision on Comey and Mueller.
Among his many fine missives, this may be Hanson’s most brilliant.
Ymar,
We’d all pat you on the back but there’s no room for our hand…
I read VDH article yesterday and once again he made me realize how insightful he is. Trump is somewhat of an odd heroic character that has Shakespearic qualities of bombast, cunning, and fanatic persistence. He has surprised me to say the least.
We’d all pat you on the back but there’s no room for our hand…
I treat praise the same as I treat derision and criticism.
Don’t worry, once you pass through the Gate to the Source later on, you can figure it out later.
For now though, the orange frog guy is in need of all the help he can get, if you really think you can beat the Leftist alliance, then show it by action instead of talk.
Talk is just talk.
Among his many fine missives, this may be Hanson’s most brilliant.
After reading VDH’s article, it merely sounds like VDH is setting up a cushion for Trum’s future fall. It is almost like damage control, but the damage that it would have to do is quite extreme given conditions in the USA.
VDH should have picked up the signs of civil war not long after I did, given his background. But I am sure he put much attention to not sounding the panic call on his official presentations and articles.
There are certain things about the Leftist alliance and the Deep State, that Americans do not know. So long as they remain ignorant, they will end up backstabbed just like Mueller and others did to Trum. Sure, the first stab may not work. Maybe the second or third or tenth stab may not work on Dear Leader orange frog.
They won’t give up however.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
I remember your first reaction, GB, to this position I took, some odd years ago.
Trump was the only billionaire crazy enough to try this. Now, if he only had a Congress that kept promises.
Thanks to the MSM I got to like Bush 43. Now I’m becoming sympathetic to Trump 45.
________________________________________________
I guess I’ll miss the man
Explain it if you can
His face was far from fine
But still I’ll miss his face
And wonder if he’s missing mine
Some days he wouldn’t say
A pleasant word all day
Some days he’d scowl and curse
But there were other days
When he was really even worse
Some men are heroes
Some men outshine the sun
Some men are simple, good men
This man wasn’t one
And I won’t miss his moods
His gloomy solitudes
His blunt abrasive style
But please don’t get me wrong
He was the best to come along
In a long, long while….
–Stephen Schwartz, “Pippin”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RxULUT2yD4
I’ve used up my free articles on NRO, but a Google search on the title turns up results showing that the conceit is not new, although Hanson is probably the best rhetorician of it.
Americans still think Bush II was behind 9/11 as an inside job. What evidence or reasons they have for this, I have no idea. Seems to be a Demoncrat or Deep State disinfo campaign.
They say Donald Rumsfeld was hiding the 3.7+ ish trillion the Pentagon “lost” the day before 9/11, and the admin was trying to hide it. Well, if they were trying to hide it, why did Rumsfeld and the Pentagon even mention they were investigating it? It would have been easier just to kill the accountants at the Pentagon without telling everyone on tv something that obvious… but I don’t think most Americans learn tradecraft and assassination methods…
This is the type of logic that brought us Hussein and Global Warming btw.
After reading VDH’s latest I’m left with thought that he’s cushioning the blow.
Nice. I especially like the reference to Tom Doniphon since “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is one of my favorite movies. Is Mike Pence the new Ranse Stoddard?
VDH has the wisdom of a man who has thoroughly studied the ancients as well as the moderns.
But references to “modern” Westerns are amusing. By modern, he means classic, not contemporary. The white hat-black hat morality play has disappeared into relativistic, politically correct oblivion. Those films had a great influence on me as a kid who grew up on horseback in TX. Black and white; right and wrong. Manichean! No ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. Which is likely why I became a Trump supporter way sooner than many here.
Frog–The fact that our airways, computer screens, TVs, books, music, video games, and theaters are no longer dominated by lessons in Black and White, right and wrong morality is exactly the point.
The Left has deliberately erased that moral code, that way of looking at the world and the analysis and actions derived from it, and we see the results of this all around us.
Post-modernism. Relativism. Right and wrong is so 19th century.
The main omission in the excellent VDH article is the nature of times we all live at now. This is decline and fall of postmodernism, and also of liberalism and of any other ideology emerging since the Great French revolution, that is, the return to normalcy and to Manichean tragic worldview of the classic Greeks. Such times need heroes not to rectify some local deviations from normalcy, but to overthrow the whole false, immoral world order and to replace it by a moral one, probably, by very rigid and non-compromissing of a Calvinist type moral philosophy.
huxley Says:
April 20th, 2018 at 10:41 pm
Thanks to the MSM I got to like Bush 43. Now I’m becoming sympathetic to Trump 45.
* * *
My favorite meme from the Obama years:
https://fyiaka411.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/bush-miss-me-yet-billboard-021020104.jpg
Snow on Pine Says:
April 21st, 2018 at 12:52 pm
Frog—The fact that our airways, computer screens, TVs, books, music, video games, and theaters are no longer dominated by lessons in Black and White, right and wrong morality is exactly the point.
The Left has deliberately erased that moral code, that way of looking at the world and the analysis and actions derived from it, and we see the results of this all around us.
* *
Indeed.
Search out what you can find, give your kids and grandkids old books and old videos, because – per Kipling — at some point we will crash and start over again, and they need to have the tools to work with.
I seriously considered joining the Amish to prepare for the so called EMP global zombie apocalypse meltdown.
Amish teenagers and adults are given a choice, after touring the world, to join an Amish community. It’s not a cult where people get kept in chains (like Hollywood).
They get a surprisingly high retention rate of 85%. Most religions would find it hard to retain that a high a retention rate for children raised in a faith.
A slim percentage of new Amish are converts to the community. Mostly survivalists or people fed up with EMF and modern society.
If the Amish had tai chi lineage instructors, it would have been very very tempting…
Back when I was looking up Hollywood’s Satanic ritual, child pedo, rapist culture in 2007, other people that are Trum supporters or potential supporters now, were paying Hollywood to produce propaganda that they would then imbibe as “entertainment”.
Good thing I got the warning while the early ticket was still up.
Those that got in late on the ticket, just be aware that there’s a bunch of stuff that people discovered that you will need to catch up on.
Probably the best article I’ve seen on Trump. Yes, VDH may be trying to let his supporters down easy, but his explanation makes deep sense going back to classical times and in the mythology of our the US as expressed in the great Westerns. I’d add that the Magnificent Seven is a Westernized (pun intended) remake of Kourasawa’s Seven Samurai which I think adds to Hanson’s point that the problematic tragic hero is not just valid across time but also across cultures.
I liked Ymar Sakar several posts in this thread which point in general to the problems in the US being for deeper than any hero can fix. My take is that key thing Trump is doing which will be impossible to reverse is to reveal the swamp. The Rs, the Ds and the Bureaucracies. (Kinda reminds of the street gangs that ran Chicago when I lived there in the late 60s – the Stones, the Vees, and the Dees.) They out themselves for what they are more every day and the Trump administration is only a bit over a year old.
Another of VDH’s essays on flawed character, which may relate, is his apologia/eulogy for Christopher Hitchens. The tortured soul, good at heart, self-destructive, conflicted man who rises above it all in a vain effort to save Western Civilization. (Grasping at straws IMO.)
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/goodbye-mr-hitchens/
One of Victor Hanson’s best writings. Unfortunately, to most who would make the effort to read it, the response will be: “Graecum est; non legitur”.
@ other chuck, thanks for posting that link, I was a fan of Hitchens. The piece he wrote about receiving his lung cancer diagnosis is quite a look into how it all went down.
@sandy, “Kto ty jestes” lol
Hitchens had a flaw. His IQ dropped by more than 2 digits whenever he would write/talk about religion.
Lorenz Gude Says:
April 22nd, 2018 at 10:54 am
The point about Trum being a stalking horse or the trigger to exposing things, is valid.
I just didn’t agree with the overly optimistic sense that having elected a US president, the problems would be fixed. The problem with America wasn’t Hussein or policies. It’s a spiritual problem with the people.
Even the best system in the world, the United States Constitution as originally envisioned by the Founding Fathers and Masons, would not work for spiritually decadent fools, traitors, and incompetents.
VDH will still meet Hitchens later on. Both of them are already slotted for a resurrection. Don’t know for how long, but that’s okay.
The Founders lived in a very different time, and when you read about them and their ideas, and their general level of knowledge of history, philosophy, and political theory, tempered by practical knowledge, the Western intellectual milieu many of them were immersed in, many of them with a solid grounding in and deep Judeo-Christian beliefs, you realize that they were an often highly educated, dedicated, and determined group of extraordinary individuals.
Compared to them most of the politicians and government officials who are our leaders today are poor specimens.
Its not just today’s leaders vs. the Founders.
The Founders wrote about how our American experiment in self-government could only work, survive, and flourish if our citizens were a moral, industrious, and educated people; keenly aware of, interested in, and engaged with the events of the day.
It’s pretty obvious that the Left has made every effort it could to subvert and weaken those qualities of morality, industriousness, and education that the Founders thought were absolutely essential in our citizenry if our country was to survive and flourish.
The Left making every effort, as well, to make sure that we are not made aware of the information we need to know to make key political decisions, essential news of the day, that they are making us blind to, and deliberately leading us away from.
Surveying today’s America, it looks like fewer and fewer of our citizenry are the highly politically engaged, moral, industrious, and well educated people that the Founders saw as essential, and that’s a major problem.