Victor Davis Hanson and the Claremont Gang

3,059 words

I have “conservative” friends and family members who enthuse over the political commentary of Victor Davis Hanson. His columns appear on American Greatness ^[2] (AG), where its writers regularly huff and puff against liberals and Leftists.

At first glance, what’s not to like about this fifth-generation Californian of Swedish and Welsh ancestry who is a retired Classics professor, a military historian, and a part-time farmer ^[3] who broke ranks with the Conservative Inc., National Review bottom feeders from the DC Swamp to write and speak in defense of and support for Donald Trump ^[4]?

In addition to his affinity for the blue-collar working class and flyover country, and his contempt for the Clintonista mafioso, there are two big issues that Hanson appears to be on the “right” side of that make him appealing to Right-leaning American readers.

The first is illegal immigration. In 2007 Hanson published the book Mexifornia: A State of Becoming ^[5], in which he chronicled the destruction of California by the flood of illegal Mexican immigration.

The other is the capture of the universities by Left-wing ideologues ^[6]:

Students now leave campus largely prepped by their professors to embrace a predictable menu: the glories of larger government, income redistribution, greater entitlements, radical environmentalism, abortion, multiculturalism, suspicion of traditional religion . . .

Pausing to reflect on what Hanson’s “conservative” appeal means for understanding the current configuration of metapolitics in seeming descent into chaos brings to mind a phrase coined by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890): “a blooming, buzzing confusion ^[7].” It was used to describe a newborn’s experience of the world.

I can’t recall my experience as a baby, new to the world, but it seems fair to suggest that “buzzing confusion” could aptly describe the world of any normal human being after a “walk on the wild side” for a day or two, trying to fathom how the world looks to CNN, MSNBC or FOX News talking heads. Consider, if you will, the helpless confusion of the many Americans who contemplate the preponderant evidence of advanced senility and decrepitude in an obnoxious, bought-and-paid-for dunce installed in the office of chief executive. This is qualitatively, appallingly, mind-bogglingly different. How did this flagrant imposture happen? Why can’t someone put a stop to it? And worse, what sinister machinations operating behind the frozen faces of the octogenarian placemen are underway for the presidential election to be held 11 months from now?

The mainstream media pretends that all is unfolding in a more or less normal, election-cycle way. The intent, as always, is to treat the campaign like the NFL playoffs — analysis by hyped-up bloviators, predictions by “experts,” and fake solemnity by programmed, cable-channel talking heads — as a form of low-brow entertainment to distract the proles from the reality of its outcome’s irrelevance to what the ruling class is really up to.

Confusion — particularly in its continuing “blooming” manifestations — reigns, which makes it increasingly challenging for white Americans to “celebrate diversity” and to distinguish — shades of Carl Schmitt ^[8] — their friends from their enemies.

The establishment propaganda organs add to the confusion by framing ^[9] moral and political language with the memes and stereotypes of groupthink. Groupthink typically proceeds with rigidly uniform patterns of utterances designed to mark those whose utterances break the pattern as enemies of the people, outside of the protection of the state. You can’t help but notice that all the mainstream media outlets use the same talking points and style sheet.

The demonizing intent of groupthink as it comes at us from every direction is infused with the ideology of victimhood: “Black lives matter,” “Hate has no home here,” “No human being is illegal.” Its vocabulary consists of pseudo-social science neologisms such as “systemic racism” and “transphobia,” and edifying but elusive moralisms such as “human rights,” “diversity is our strength,” and “reproductive freedom.”

Certified victimhood is a coveted commodity. Its possession exempts you from the rules that bind the victimizer and lets you jump the queue ahead of the victimizer for access to society’s goodies. Hence the “protection” of “protected classes ^[10].” “Protection,” you might say, is another ruling class euphemism used to justify the imposition of a caste system based on the contrived immorality of the lower caste. “Protection” also ratchets up the politics of victimhood which comes with employment opportunities. Without victims, there would be no need for the growing class of protectors and compliance enforcers who operate their vast apparatus of coercion ^[11].

The question of who gets to become a victim in today’s America is the ultimate power question. Put another way that shifts the question from a passive to an active voice, and puts the focus entirely on the locus of power: “Who gets to decide who are the victims?” The answer to this should clear away much of the confusion manufactured by the usual culprits, the state-controlled propaganda organs.

The October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing response has forced Americans to decide between two sets of victims, the Jews and the Arabs. It has us deep in an emotional turmoil of moral revulsion and makes us vulnerable to manipulation by atrocity language skillfully deployed by the propaganda organs of each side. Beheaded babies, the bombing of schools and hospitals, ethnic cleansing, and genocide? Who really did, and is doing, what? You have to take someone’s word, and who you believe depends on whom you trust.

Putting my cards on the table: Given Benjamin Netanyahu’s ^[14] warm reception for Jonathan Pollard, the most damaging spy in American history ^[15] and the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty ^[16] in 1967, to cite just a couple of the many instances of Israeli perfidy over the years, it’s prudent to say, “Don’t trust anything they say!”

Which brings us back to Victor Davis Hanson, his take on the who the bad guys are, and why he and his ilk are not to be trusted to lecture us about victimhood in the Middle East.

His December 4 AG piece has a promising title: “Weimar America ^[17].” Oh, good — some cultural history to help us understand American decadence. Weimar’s Jewish-spearheaded, “progressive” cultural revolution bears a striking resemblance to the cultural wars in drag queen story hour ^[18], non-binary America ^[19]. Introducing Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld ^[20]. You could say Dr. Hirschfeld was a hundred years ahead of his time as an agent of sexual liberation.

[R]ecognition of transgender identity is no recent phenomenon: Some doctors acknowledged gender-nonconforming people far earlier than most might realize. Perhaps the most important pioneer was German physician Magnus Hirschfeld, who was born 150 years ago, in 1868 . . . Hirschfeld’s approach was all-inclusive. In his view, all “sexual intermediaries” — whether L, G, B, T, Q, or I in today’s parlance — were worth recognizing and protecting. He once calculated that there were 43,046,721 possible variants ^[21] of human sexuality. That was simply another way of saying that the human species was infinitely diverse. “Love,” he said ^[22], “is as varied as people are.”

In keeping with Dr. Hirschfeld’s diversity-of-love theme and thousands of “possible variants of human sexuality,” as one might suspect, variants of a deviant kind rose to the top in Weimar Berlin. That city remains the prototype of cultural decadence. From a synopsis of the book Voluptuous Panic ^[23]: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin by Mel Gordon (2000):

Between 1921 and 1933, Berlin developed a reputation for debauchery unrivaled by any city before or since. Unlike European capitals like Paris, Barcelona, and Amsterdam, where brothel districts were extensive but discreet, in Berlin sexual tourism was a primary industry. On any given evening, over 600 establishments, from massage parlors to sex clubs to cabarets to private torture dungeons, promised unique sights and pleasures . . . Mel Gordon has put together a controversial exploration of Berlin’s erotic demiworld and its relationship to the rise of Nazism.

Now, you might think that the decadence and debauchery of Weimar Germany “and its relationship to the rise of Nazism” would be a tempting topic for a historian with conservative credentials such as Hanson, who is looking to compare Weimar Germany with twenty-first century America.  Instead, he resorts to the well-traveled, explanatory victim-template that turns any and every conflict involving Jews into innocents who serve as helpless targets for the blind hatred of . . . Nazis. There is no explanation beyond the surd of visceral hatred of these cretins for “the other.” History came to a screeching halt in 1945, and every international crisis since is a replay of Hitler and his hate regime ^[24] — Saddam Hussein, Slovdan Milošević, Vladimir Putin, and now Hamas.

It’s all about the Nazis, as Hanson writes ^[17]:

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel . . . As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel, she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.

It seems unlikely that this Queens high school “pack” had much experience “hunting down animals,” but Hanson doesn’t want his Jewish readers to think he’s going soft on these feral anti-Semites. So, the rhetoric is heavy with intonations of predatory brutality by conflating insults and vandalism with murder.

The Nazis had lots of reasons for hating the Jews — the legitimacy of those reasons is a complicated topic for a different discussion — but for not being white was not high, if at all, on the list. Hanson maybe doesn’t know that Hitler’s Japanese allies weren’t white.

That Hanson would allege that the Queens adolescents hate Jews because they “are white” suggests that he is either ignorant of the history of Zionism and Israel’s founding or that his philo-Semitism is impervious to the constraints of reality. The aftermath of Hamas’ 10/7 attack is a clear case of long-standing, deadly tribal conflict. The Queens students and pro-Palestinian demonstrators hate the Jews because they perceive them as a tribe that has persecuted their tribe for decades. The Israeli Jews are clearly the enemy of the Palestinians and openly regard them as such ^[25]. Their history shows ^[26] that from the beginning they intended to expel the Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral homeland. One merely needs to look at the maps of the Levant that Bibi Netanyahu in September waved ^[27] before the United Nations General Assembly last September that show the erasure of Arab Palestine.

How, then, to explain why Professor Hanson has so dutifully turned himself into a megaphone for Israeli propaganda by using the predictable imagery of Nazi Germany? Hamas’ attack in October against the Israelis has blown a wide hole in American Left-Right, liberal-conservative metapolitics. It has split liberal, Jewish Democrats into hostile camps and exposes Republicans, Jews, and gentiles alike to be cheerleaders ^[28] for Netanyahu’s current project of ethnic cleansing the Gaza Palestinians. “Anti-Semitism” is the Republican’s cudgel to beat down that Left-wing rabble of the Democrat Party who refuse to play nice in the Jewish sandbox, and who are applying the German “N”-word to Bibi and using “genocide” to describe the fate of the Gazans, a violation of Jewish copyright restrictions for exclusive use.

For his conservative readers, Hanson aims to keep the horror of “anti-Semitism” flourishing, because it is useful for funneling American taxpayer money into defending Israel and turning the pro-Palestinian demonstrators into present-day Nazis. Hanson claims that the current outpouring of hatred for Israel is a piece of “racist” Left-wing, anti-white ideology. That is a massive howler. Anti-white, “systemic racism” mania emanates from the resentment of black Americans, who have long been unable to overcome their chronic underachievement. Moreover, it has been fomented and organized by black politicians, Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Jewish-run newspapers such as the New York Times. Is Professor Hanson familiar with the 1619 Project ^[29]?

[T] he racist DEI industry ^[17] assumes that all intersectional nonwhite communities are victims of white privilege and supremacy. Therefore, as permanently oppressed, they are declared incapable of being racist themselves. And so they can harass with impunity the supposed victimizers — in this case American Jews, who are declared culpable whites.

What, then, was it that turned American Jews into “culpable whites”?

The dark mood ^[17] [happening in America] is brought on by elite universities, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.

Given the dominating leadership of elite American universities by Jews, and the demonization by Jewish-run media such as the New York Times of white Americans for their “racism” and resisting immigration from “illiberal nations,” the raging anti-Semitism Hanson complains of is largely a Jewish creation, blowback from decades of supporting anti-white movements such as Black Lives Matter and massive Third World immigration.

To understand where Professor Hanson is coming from with his flurry of columns dramatizing the horror of Hamas and demonizing Iran, a country neocons Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham ^[30] want to bomb to smithereens, it is important to first understand the vehicle that disseminates his opinions: American Greatness ^[31].

AG’s publisher and lead editor is Chris Buskirk. If you read ^[32] his biography, a number of things should arouse great suspicion. He is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and has written for the Washington Post. He is a frequent contributor to FOX News, NPR’s Morning Edition, and the PBS NewsHour. How all of this squares with a guy running a site that excoriates the Left and appeals to the MAGA boys suggests that he reeks of the stench of controlled opposition.

Second, you will note that he is an alumnus of Claremont-McKenna College. Claremont is the epicenter of West-coast Straussianism ^[35], the godfather of which is the late Harry Jaffa, an exponent of Leo Strauss’s theory of natural right ^[36]. Strauss, who was Jaffa’s mentor, is widely regarded as the philosophical fons et origio of neoconservatism ^[37]. The details of the internecine quarrels between Jaffa and his East-Coast Straussian rivals such as Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield, Jr. can be found here ^[38], and here ^[35]. But for the present purposes of discussion, I would simply say that the core of Jaffa’s political philosophy focused on Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as the founding document of the United States, with its moral assertion of human equality.

Thus, the ideal of human equality is the centerpiece of the Claremont, West-Coast Straussians such as Hanson. They believe that a multi-racial America is achievable if, somehow, we can purge the Left and return to our original republican form of limited government.

From AG‘s “Our Declaration of Independence from the Conservative Movement ^[39],” dated July 2016:

Today, movement conservatism offers the American people not a choice, but an echo of the Left. Because of this, American Greatness is not an alternative to movement conservatism; it is a refounding of a distinctly American conservatism based upon the self-evident principle of human equality and the rights that flow from it. Just government exists to protect and promote these rights and is therefore necessarily limited, constitutional, and republican in its form.

This “self-evident principle of human equality” means that for the AG Straussians, race realism is out of the question. “Racism” is real evil, which makes the Alt Right movement, like the Left, a political enemy. In a June 2022, Alexander Zubatov wrote a piece for AG ironically titled “How to Create White Supremacy in Seven Easy Steps ^[40].” Step one is:

Dismantle the Idea of Race-Blindness. If our goal is more white supremacy, our big obstacle is that lots of people don’t dwell on race, and when they do notice themselves thinking about race, they try to tamp down the thought.

Race consciousness, you see, is the big problem, because not only does it fuel the Left’s power grab, but it produces the backlash that leads to the rise of “white supremacists” — you know, those terrible people who believe that if blacks and whites were left alone to manage their own affairs, “racism” would no longer be a problem.

Zubatov concludes:

Trump’s election, in other words, was not the genesis of a new white racial consciousness but rather, if anything, a consequence of it, of the Left’s betrayal of the Martin Luther King, Jr.’s colorblind dream, of identity politics run amok, of people being attacked again and again for having had the misfortune of being born white in 21st century America.

White “misfortune” was the elevation of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the victory of the civil rights movement ^[41]. A “conservative” movement that locks on to MLK’s “I have a dream” speech as its guiding light is delusional beyond comprehension. As an illustration, take a look at a December 4, 2023 AG piece by Eric Lendrum, “Doctor, Secretary, Vice-President? This ticket is as close to perfect as it gets ^[42].” Lendrum’s perfect Republican 2024 ticket is Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson as his running mate:

Dr. Carson is the perfect candidate that could draw black men to the Republican ticket in 2024. His life’s story — growing up in poverty, raised by a dedicated single mother, and ultimately achieving the American Dream through hard work and a consistent faith in God — sets the ultimate example for this particular demographic.

I do not doubt that Ben Carson is a fine man with many admirable qualities. But anyone who believes that black men will join white conservatives in a movement to roll back the current welfare state that is loaded up with the perks of black victimhood has no contact with reality. Only white conservatives are enthralled with smart black conservatives.

The Claremont gang is a pro-Israel, heretical sect of neocon Republicans who have embraced Trump — whose four years in power were a disaster for white America, along with lots of favors for Israel. One of his parting shots was to grant clemency to former black Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick ^[43] for two dozen crimes he committed while in office.

Hanson and his colleagues at AG believe that it is possible for conservative Americans to appeal to blacks in order to enlist their help in defeating the Left and returning America to its republican, constitutionally-governed form. They live in a dreamland and offer nothing but buzzing, blooming confusion to white voters who are trying to understand what the enemy is up to.