RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/13/

Victor Davis Hanson is about as accomplished and credentialed a commentator you can find. He’s an author, a military historian, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a farmer in California. President George W. Bush awarded Hanson the National Humanities Award in 2007. By all accounts and appearances, he is a decent, humble man who spends a great deal of time analyzing our current political moment and discussing what it portends for the future.

Hanson also is a supporter of President Trump. This heresy has earned him scorn from quarters on the Left and the so-called Right. His new book, The Case for Trump, has generated a barrage of criticism from the cabal of NeverTrumpers. Embittered by their humiliating miscalculation of Trump’s candidacy and shamelessly contorting their previous views to be able to contradict the president, these anti-Trump “conservatives” viciously attack anyone who dares to support the president. This includes Hanson.

In a particularly vile hit piece posted on The Bulwark, the new blog of Weekly Standard refugees who were left unemployed after the publication was shuttered in December, Gabe Schoenfeld accused Hanson of defending evil—that evil being President Trump. Bulwark editor Charlie Sykes recently threatened to “raise the opportunity costs” for pro-Trump commentators, Hanson specifically. To do so, Sykes enlisted the facile services of Schoenfeld, an advisor for the failed Mitt Romney presidential campaign, to pretend to write a book review that was little more than an ad hominem attack on Hanson.

Schoenfeld intimates that Hanson is a racist, an anti-Semite, and a Nazi sympathizer.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/the-bulwark-embarrasses-itself-further-with-attack-on-victor-davis-hanson/

Being of a charitable disposition, I early on decided that the kindest response to the Bulwark, the NeverTrump redoubt started by Bill Kristol following the implosion of the Weekly Standard, was silence. If this tiny cohort of bitter and unhappy souls were determined to embarrass themselves in public, the best we could do was turn away. Non ragioniam di lor, as Dante says in another context, ma guarda e passa. It would be cruel to let daylight in upon madness.

I said nothing when, for one of their opening acts, their Editor-in-Chief Charles Sykes pronounced anathema upon me and Henry Olsen, the distinguished Ethics and Public Policy scholar, for the sin of supporting the President of the United States on some issue or other. I was planning to continue to follow Wittgenstein’s advice at the end of the Tractatus and pass over in silence the twisted attack on Victor Davis Hanson’s new book on the president, The Case for Trump, by Hudson Institute Fellow Gabriel Schoenfeld, but the ad hominem viciousness of the piece together with its surreal mischaracterization of Hanson’s argument prompts me to weigh in.

Longtime readers will know that I have had my own innings with Schoenfeld over Donald Trump. I hesitate to speak again not only because calling attention to Gabe Schoenfeld is a little like calling attention to the disheveled fellow you find screaming at passersby on the street outside your office but also because Victor Hanson has himself delivered a devastating response to Schoenfeld’s attack. I cannot improve upon Victor’s definitive retort, but it is worth iterating one or two elements of the exchange.