Aristotle (384–322 BC) advanced the idea that “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives--choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
Our world torn by woke ideology—Biden’s “Obamaism” Part II, and the myriad corporate political corruption in our nation, as surveyed partially on the website Unamericanexpress.com. There we learn that AmEx is tying executive bonuses to racial “equity,” managers are financially incentivized to hire minorities, even if less qualified, instituting CRT training, teaching staff that “capitalism is racist,” asking workers to rank themselves on a hierarchy of “privilege,” and giving preferential contracts to suppliers only because the heads of those companies happen to be black.
So much for following Martin Luther King’s admonition to judge humans by the content of their character, not the color of their skin!
Despite this woke insanity, we have been blessed by an antidote--a valorous man who has become the antipode of progressive political hypocrisy. This scholar is now America’s true thought leader, whether the citizen be of Independent, Democrat or Republican persuasion. I refer here to Victor Davis Hanson who was born on the economic margins on a grape farm in Selma, California that in some years allowed for a plentiful grape harvest while in others failed to produce enough grapes to allow for a saleable raisin crop. Like me, but three years my junior, Hanson comes from a multi-generational family of native Californians, his in the Central Valley and mine in L.A..—or as the Australians refer to it, “La-La Land” where everybody is either on the make or on the take, except I’m guessing for Kurt Schlichter.
VDH is an American commentator, classicist, and military historian, but no mythologized hero. Hanson is the real thing. As a young boy he was a cub scout and developed scouting values within a family unit that was decidedly Democrat. As he wrote in The Case for Trump: “I had no interest in proving Trump either a demon or deity…I am conservative on most issues, and as a fifth-generation farmer have written favorably of agrarian populism in a number of prior books and in a variety of contexts. I grew up in the same house where I now live, and in a Democratic household that worshiped Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and would have voted for a yellow dog on the ballot if it had just registered Democrat. All my siblings in 2016 either voted for Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton; all no doubt assumed Trump marked something ominous—and perhaps their own brother too for voting for him in the general election.”
In addition to his classicist training, Hanson is also an accomplished rhetorician. Rhetoric is far from being “empty language” as some in the mainstream media say; rhetoric is the study of all the available means of persuasion and of orators who utilize these persuasive skills. My university colleagues, far left of center politically, still abide by Aristotle’s definition that, “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject...Let rhetoric, then, be a capacity to get a theoretical grasp on what is possibly persuasive in each case. For this is not the function of any other craft whatsoever.”
As an oratorical process, the field of rhetoric holds that it is not necessarily concerned with special genius, but occasionally there are people, in this case Victor Davis Hanson, with true rhetorical sagacity. The field of Rhetoric holds that there are three kinds (eidos) of persuasive appeals: 1) Ethos where the audience is convinced through character that the speaker is worthy of trust; 2) Pathos, where persuasion takes place with listeners whenever they are led to feel things emotionally, personally through the speech act; 3) Logos is the use of logic and reason in one’s argument where one makes clear the truth of the proposition. Since the means of persuasion are through these three components, for a person to master them they must be capable of deducing, displaying a convincing persona of character, on both virtues and feelings. Hanson has clearly mastered all three.
Referring to people who strive mightily and through their efforts succeed, Virgil, the noted Roman poet of the Augustan period, said of tireless strivers like VDH: Possunt quia posse videntur (‘They can because they think they can’).” Hanson no longer just thinks but has proven unequivocally that he can be the go-to scholar to a world-wide audience using a wide range of media and media outlets across many different venues. VDH’s stage includes nearly 1900 articles in Townhall that has also had the insight to publish the work of the great Thomas Sowell…and the questionable sense to publish some of my work. He is also featured in major newspapers, other conservative online websites like American Greatness where he is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He has been the subject of televised interviews with Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institution, C-Span, InDepth, RealClearPolitics, The Tucker Carlson Show and Mark Levin who are both on Fox, Off Script, Newsmax, the Rubin Report, The Victor Davis Hanson Show on Apple Podcasts, Frontline, GBN News (out of Great Britain), The Telegraph (also from great Britain), National Review Podcast, The Count, The Megyn Kelly Show on NBC, 15 different interviews on the Scholars & Sense website hosted by the Channel Player FM, and on the Victor Davis Hanson Official YouTube Channel, to name but a few. Hanson’s rhetorical following may approach several million people if not more!
We are lucky to be of this age, if only because we have Victor Davis Hanson to lead us away from progressive incontinence and toward a brighter and clearer light. As ZZ Top once sang: “He’s bad, he’s bad, he’s nation-wide!”
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