RUTHFULLY YOURS

Victor David Hanson: Thank you very much for having me. I thought I would talk about the mythologies of the election if I could. But before we go, I know you all have had this experience. People have come up to you and said, “Did you have any idea that Trump could win?” Now, everybody lies and said, of course I did. I thought he would be even, but I wasn’t sure. But I had these conversations a lot with Bruce Thornton, and we’d always come to the same conclusion. I don’t know, but there’s something strange out there going on.

And what I meant by that was, when I would walk across the Hoover Institution grounds, anybody who I thought would be voting for Donald Trump would do this. And anybody who wanted to be labeled the maverick, brave, independent scholar, the “go-to” person for the Washington Post, would say, “I’m for Hillary.” And I thought this is really an accurate barometer of what people are thinking, and so I said to my wife Jennifer, “You know every time we have somebody on the farm or we talk to a guy on a tractor, if he speaks English” — and these are all Mexican-American people — “he’s for Trump.” Can’t believe it. People who are not for Trump don’t speak English. And she said, well I have a class with 40 people and there are 38 Hispanics. I said well ask them. You don’t have tenure, but be careful how you ask them. Do it this way: is there anybody in their right mind that would vote for Trump? Seventeen people held their hand up in front of people, and then you saw the statistics that he had two to three points higher minority representation among minority communities than did Romney or McCain. And it was just striking.

The other thing that I think has happened in this election, unfortunately, is — I know I’m not quite unbiased — is that we’ve lost friends and family, relationships. I know that I thought I knew people at the National Review. I’ve been writing there for 14 years, and then I would read things, and I could not believe it. It wasn’t that I disagreed with them or they disagreed with me, it was the level of venom and condescension. I would pick up the Wall Street Journal and read Bret Stephens. I talked to George Will and I could not believe it. And then I talked to people in my family, and the same thing.

But there was one commonality that you may have experienced. That the people who were voting for Hillary or not voting wanted to provoke something. So every time I would see my brother or other brother, they wanted to talk about it. They wanted to put you on the spot. At Hoover when I saw somebody, they wanted to say, “How dare you.” Nobody in this room went up to somebody who they’ve known for a long time and say, “How dare you vote for Hillary.” They may have thought that, but –and it’s thematic of this whole election that Trump’s rallies were supposedly violent, rigged, we know now, by the DNC, and now we see the real violence in the post election. So there were all these bizarre emotions.

One of the things, one other statement before I go into mythologies: This had a lot to do with class. I know people said, “Well how can Trump be a populist. He’s a billionaire.” But he was a billionaire in a way that offended the sensibilities of the coastal corridors. Maybe it was the orange hair or skin or the queen’s accent or his personal tastes and appetites, but whatever it was, people of the elite did not like him for class reasons because he would talk to conservatives and you would look at his agenda and it was pretty conservative, and they’d say, “Well, he doesn’t believe it” or “he was a Democrat.” But they applied a different standard to him that was inexplicable other than they had a class disdain for what he represented.

I thought something was going wrong when I would go up to Palo Alto. I had this unique experience in my life where I live in the second poorest county in the United States, southern Tulare Fresno County, and then I work in one of the most affluent in Stanford-Palo Alto-Menlo Park, and it’s two different worlds. And people up there were convinced that Trump would not only lose but lose in a landslide, and then people out in the foothills of California really thought that he might win in California. I would ride a bike in the month of Michigan, in the month of September in Michigan. I was teaching at Hillsdale. Everybody had a Trump sign, and you would stop and talk to them, and they were just certain he was going to win. I thought this doesn’t make sense. And so I think a lot of you were not as surprised as we otherwise should have been. Because after all, he had no money comparatively speaking. He did not have a ground game. He did not have opposition research. He did not have bundlers. He did not have celebrity endorsements. He did not have establishment. He did not have the media. He had everybody against him. So they say, “Well Hillary won the popular vote.” Yeah, but it’s astounding that he was even close because he had nothing in conventional terms for him other than a message that resonated.

One of the big mythologies of the election was it’s unusual we’ve never had anything this vulgar, this crude in American history. By the standards of American election it was pretty tame. In 1824 basically John Quincy Adams stole the election from Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson got it back in 1828, but if you go back and look at what they called one another. Jackson was supposedly an assassin, a bigamist, his wife was a prostitute supposedly. It reminded me of the Athenian democratic elections and politics where Demosthenes stands up in the De Corona and says, “My opponent, Aeschines, I will not mention the fact that his mother ran a house of prostitution from a cemetery.”

George McGovern called Richard Nixon 12 times in public a Nazi in the 1972 election. 1944, right in the middle of the battles in the Pacific at Leyte Gulf, Franklin Roosevelt said of Thomas Dewey we don’t fight Nazism and fascism overseas just to turn it over to the same people here in the United States. Think of that.

The last time we have seen a Republican fight was Lee Atwater in the ’88 Bush election. Last time somebody wanted to win rather than to lose nobly, and when he got done with Michael Dukakis, he was a wimp and a tank, he had polluted Boston Harbor and he let Willie Horton out thousands of times over again. And that was the last time Republicans said that they were going to do that, and then they stopped so that John McCain wanted to lose nobly like old Ajax, I suppose. Never mentioned Reverend Wright, Jeremiah Wright. You get the impression had Trump run in 2008 we would have never heard the end of Reverend Wright. Had he run in 2012 he would have jumped out and grabbed Candy Crowley’s, I hope, microphone, and he would have reacted.

And I’m mentioning that because that was very important. People you talk to said I’m tired of losing. For people who are wealthy and have connections and influence, losing nobly is an option. But for people at the end of things, a worker out of a job, or somebody who can’t afford to get his teeth fixed, losing is bad. They don’t want to lose. And as one person said to me, if he’s going to lose at least I like him to screw things up. And I think what he meant was we got a Samson now and he’s got his arms around the Philistine pillar, and if he loses, he’s going to tear down the whole damn temple with him. Like that Apple commercial where you run and throw the ball and chain into the screen and smash it. That was a sense of anger that people had over Trump.

As he prepares to leave office in three weeks, President Obama is still trying to shape his legacy. On Dec. 20 the White House announced the withdrawal of millions of acres of Atlantic and Arctic territory from petroleum development. This week Mr. Obama proclaimed 1.35 million acres in Utah and 300,000 acres in Nevada to be new national monuments. But all the soon-to-be ex-president will prove is the fleeting nature of executive power.

These actions, like many others he has taken, are vulnerable to reversal by President-elect Trump. In our constitutional system, no policy can long endure without the cooperation of both the executive and legislative branches. Under Article I of the Constitution, only Congress can enact domestic statutes with any degree of permanence. And because of the Constitution’s separation of powers, no policy will survive for long without securing and retaining a consensus beyond a simple majority.

As president, Mr. Trump can easily reverse the most unwarranted and costly regulations issued in the last few months. Under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a simple majority of each house may expeditiously disapprove such regulations, so long as the president signs the bill. A CRA disapproval would have the added virtue of automatically prohibiting any future, “substantially similar” rule without congressional action.

Mr. Trump can clear the way for Congress by halting all current rule-makings and ordering agencies to stop enforcing rules enacted in the last two years (or longer). After their defense of the administration’s refusal to enforce the immigration laws, liberals would have no legitimate grounds to oppose Mr. Trump’s temporary enforcement halt.

Mr. Obama’s unilateral actions, by executive order, proclamation or memoranda, are even more vulnerable. The courts have declared some void, including the immigration deportation orders. Mr. Trump can simply order the Justice Department to acquiesce in those decisions and save the public the trouble of litigating others. Mr. Obama taunted his political adversaries that if he didn’t get what he wanted from Congress, he would use his “pen” and “phone.” Those tools also work in reverse. CONTINUE AT SITE

Among the Republican priorities in 2017 should be dismantling a culture of bureaucratic control at the Food and Drug Administration that poisons innovation and costs lives. Here’s an idea: Update part of the approval process that was patient zero for distorting data on a drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

We’ve reported on the drama over eteplirsen, which FDA approved in September and is now marketed as Exondys 51 by Sarepta Therapeutics. Midlevel bureaucrats have since disparaged the therapy in public, and some insurers are denying coverage. Much of the confusion results from an April show trial known as an advisory committee meeting. A process that is supposed to provide independent advice to the FDA instead became a venue to mislead a panel of nonexperts—and the public—about the drug’s efficacy.

Advisory committees exist so FDA can solicit expert counsel, but the agency stacks panels with allies whose career currency is prestige and government funding. Such committees usually vote the way FDA wants—and then the agency tends to follow the recommendation. On eteplirsen, the panel voted 6-7 against accelerated approval after a critical FDA review, which was later overruled by agency management in a rare exception amid unusual public scrutiny.

The 13-member committee that checked out eteplirsen included: a psychiatrist, a stroke doctor and several others with no experience in Duchenne. The agency seldom invites true experts because anyone who has ever talked to a drug company is deemed financially conflicted. In rare diseases like Duchenne, that problem is more pronounced because the pool of experts can be so limited.

Yet meet Caleb Alexander, chairman of the committee. Dr. Alexander invited speakers at the meeting to state organizations they represent. He read this statement at least a dozen times but neglected to mention his own conflict of interest: Dr. Alexander has received a large FDA grant, information that is available online. The conceit is that folks like Dr. Alexander are less motivated by pecuniary interests than someone who has consulted for a company. Dr. Alexander voted against approval.

Terrorism isn’t an existential threat?

I have been writing about terrorism now for 13 years. Like many other writers, the tragic events of 9/11 in September, 2001 were one impetus for my inquiry into the goals and methods of terrorism. The other impetus is a growing recognition that terrorism often seems to work exactly as it is planned to do: it so strikes fear into the minds of otherwise good people that they begin to submit to the moral framework of the terrorists and begin to adopt the cause of the terrorists.

Unfortunately, during the Obama Presidency, both politicians and left-leaning journalists have scoffed at the proposition that terrorism poses any existential threat. That is because they define “existential” narrowly to mean anything that could defeat, destroy or wipe out America. They do not, as I do, define existential to include not just living but living “free” and having individual human rights, a fair Justice System and the other Constitutional protections. For me, submission to the ideology of Islamists destroys bit by bit what I see as “free” existence. To the extent that we give in, submit to, respect, tolerate or empathize with the cause of the terrorists, we have lost our freedom and have gone down the road to submission, whether or not our militaries are defeated in “conventional war.” We can look at opinions in the media and the universities to see this empathy, or look at how the Democratic Party is considering a Muslim with contacts among Islamist terror supporting organizations to be the Chair of the DNC.

“Live Free or Die” is the official motto of the U.S. state of New Hampshire, adopted by the state in 1945. How things have changed in American political culture since 1945.

The Left and the Obama administration see an existential threat as one only coming from major nuclear powers. They ignore that Obama’s Iran “deal” will allow Iran to give nuclear weapons to its terrorist proxies.

The Left seems to be mostly concerned that the government will in response to terrorism pass tough security laws that will inhibit the “rights” of Islamists and their supporters or at least be offensive to them. Some naively think that the purpose of terrorism is only to wage an asymmetrical type of warfare against more military strong foes and hence to eventually defeat them, and anything short of that is not an existential threat.

Simonsen and Spindlove, in their textbook on terrorism, entitled Terrorism Today: The Past, the Players, the Future, say that terrorism, by its violence against civilians, brings awareness of the alleged grievance, uses the media to spread knowledge of the cause, and provokes fear, all of which attempt to secure policy changes and weaken government’s resolve. Attaining these policy changes occurs as a fearful people seek to feed the wild animal in their midst, hoping that its appetite for more random violence will be sated.

Terrorism is the modus operandi of Islamists – the overtly violent jihadists seeking to spread Sharia Law and a restoration of an Islamic Caliphate. Obscene acts of violence, often involving suicide bombing are then followed inevitably by apologists and propagandists alleging that Islam is a “religion of peace” and that terrorism can best be fought by more understanding, tolerance, compassion and acceptance of political Islam’s goals.

It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states. That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.

In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.

What happened to the big donkey? Among other things, the Democrats decided to sell their base and their soul to a very bad billionaire and they got a very bad deal for both.

It was 2004. The poncho was the hottest fashion trend, there were 5 million new cases of AIDS and a former Nazi collaborator had bought the Democrat Party using the spare change in his sofa cushions.

And gone to war against the will of the people. This was what he modestly called his own “Soros Doctrine”.

“It is the central focus of my life,” George Soros declared. It was “a matter of life and death.” He vowed that he would become poor if it meant defeating the President of the United States.

Instead of going to the poorhouse, he threw in at least $15 million, all the spare change in the billionaire’s sofa cushions, dedicated to beating President Bush.

In his best lisping James Bond villain accent, Soros strode into the National Press Club and declared that he had “an important message to deliver to the American Public before the election” that was contained in a pamphlet and a book that he waved in front of the camera. Despite his “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond” voice, the international villain’s delivery was underwhelming. He couldn’t have sold brownies to potheads at four in the morning. He couldn’t even sell Bush-bashing to a roomful of left-wing reporters.

But he could certainly fund those who would. And that’s exactly what he did.

Money poured into the fringe organizations of the left like MoveOn, which had moved on from a petition site to a PAC. In 2004, Soros was its biggest donor. He didn’t manage to bring down Bush, but he helped buy the Democratic Party as a toy for his yowling dorm room of left-wing activists to play with.

Soros hasn’t had a great track record at buying presidential elections. The official $25 million he poured into this one bought him his worst defeat since 2004. But his money did transform the Democrat Party.

And killed it.

Costly Midnight Regulations:

The Obama administration has put forth 25 so-called “midnight” regulations, which will cost the economy $44.1 billion, according to a report from the American Action Forum.

Midnight regulations are rules that are published after Election Day and before the next president is inaugurated in January 2017. Earlier this year, the administration estimated that there would be $5.2 billion in regulatory costs incurred during that time.

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The $44.1 billion in regulatory costs have overshot that estimate by more than eight times.

Obama’s job-crushing regulations have stifled economic growth, making him the only president in modern history whose time in office didn’t include at least one year of economic growth at the 3% historical average.

Economy-Crippling Executive Actions:

With less than a month left in his presidency, Obama has launched an initiative to wipe out coal mining and handicap offshore drilling for oil and natural gas.First, he ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to proceed with its controversial Stream Protection Rule. By one estimate, that would make mining so difficult it would make 85 percent of the nation’s coal reserves unrecoverable.

Then, on Tuesday, the president designated most government-owned areas in the Arctic Ocean and a large swath off the Atlantic Coast closed to drilling. That would prevent production of huge reserves of oil and gas.

For the past eight years, the Obama administration has abused the power of the executive branch by issuing unconstitutional, unilateral executive actions to push his agenda. Article I of the Constitution, which grants enumerated legislative powers to Congress — not the president, became a quaint, but outdated artifact from the past under Obama. Hopefully Donald Trump will return the country to constitutional governance.

Record Wave of Pardons and Communtations:

President Obama on Monday pardoned 78 people and granted another 153 commutations, amounting to the most acts of clemency granted by a U.S. president ever in a single day.

White House Counsel Neil Eggleston announced the decisions in an official blog post. He described all the individuals being pardoned or seeing their sentences shortened as “deserving.”

“The 231 individuals granted clemency today have all demonstrated that they are ready to make use – or have already made use – of a second chance,” he wrote.

He also previewed additional clemency decisions in the weeks ahead, saying: “I expect that the President will issue more grants of both commutations and pardons before he leaves office.”

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The White House boasts that Obama has commuted the sentences of more prisoners than all of the last six presidents combined. Most of them were drug offenders, who have a high recidivism rate. As 50 percent of drug traffickers were rearrested shortly after they were released, about half of the Obama release pool are likely return to the streets.

Don’t be surprised if Hillary Clinton, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Anthony Weiner are among those pardoned in the next wave.

From Obama’s perspective, the decision to grant or withhold a pardon is a political and a personal one. Legal considerations do not directly arise.

Like all presidents at the end of their terms, he is concerned about the legacy he leaves for history. Does he want his legacy to include a pardon of the secretary of State who served under him during the entirety of his first term in office?

Because acceptance of a pardon amounts to a confession of guilt, the acceptance by Clinton would, to a degree, besmirch both Clinton and also Obama. After all, Clinton was Obama’s secretary of State. If she was committing illegal acts as secretary, it happened literally on his watch.

On the other hand, if the new administration were to prosecute and convict Clinton of crimes committed while she was secretary, that might be an even greater embarrassment for Obama post-presidency.

In the post-election annals of “woulda, coulda, shoulda,” it will be hard to top departing President Barack Obama’s boast that he would have defeated Donald Trump “if I had run again.”

This, it goes without saying, triggered a tweet from Mr. Trump: “He should say that but I say NO WAY!”

How edifying to witness an American President and President-elect exchanging taunts like two eighth-graders in the schoolyard.

Mr. Obama unburdened himself of this analysis in a podcast with his former White House adviser David Axelrod. Though Mr. Obama is fond of sports analogies, one he seems not to have noticed is that most coaches after a Super Bowl loss don’t blame it on their own quarterback, the diabolical opposition or the media.

Mr. Obama said that Hillary Clinton, who ran as a third Obama term, “played it safe.” People felt the country was on the wrong track because Mitch McConnell threw “sand in the gears” of Washington. His advice to Democrats now is “not thinking that somehow just a great set of progressive policies that we present to the New York Times editorial board will win the day.”

The serious thought inside Mr. Obama’s late hit is whether progressive ideas need revision, or merely need to be recycled with a different messenger, like him. We doubt all Democrats will be as enthusiastic about running again on the economic and foreign-policy record of 2009-2016.