Historian: The Hypocritical Statue Obsession of a ‘Smug Generation’

Historian Victor Davis Hanson seems to take off the gloves in this article by Kathryn Blackhurst, the lede of which is: “Victor Davis Hanson slams progressives who ‘pick and choose their type of outrage for political purposes.'”

Military historian and political columnist Victor Davis Hanson said the “moral smugness” of this current generation allows it to “pick and choose their type of outrage for political purposes,” all the while adhering to a “double standard,” during an interview Wednesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

In the aftermath of Saturday’s violent Charlottesville rally, Hanson, a Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of classics emeritus at California State University, Fresno, pointed to the progressive liberal protesters increasingly clamoring for the removal of statues and monuments honoring Confederate soldiers and leaders. In Durham, North Carolina, a group of protesters toppled a Confederate statue Monday night, while other cities are calling for the removal of such statues.

“This generation has decided that it’s the most moral and ethical in history and has the right to go back and pick winners and losers,” Hanson said. “I think it’s a progressive project in which they pick and choose their type of outrage for political purposes in the present.”

The problem, however, is that these protesters and activists don’t feel the need to apply the same filters and standards to themselves, he argued. When far-left Antifa activists or Black Lives Matter protesters repeatedly took to the streets calling for retaliation against police officers following high-profile shooting deaths of African-Americans, Hanson noted that such standards weren’t applied to these groups.

. . .

Hanson advised both the Never-Trumpers on the Right and the Never-Trumpers on the Left to “step back and see that people, for a variety of reasons, have a deep antipathy for Donald Trump, and that clouds their empirical judgment.”

Read more: Lifezette.com

Here are clips from two separate exchanges on Fox News from earlier this week — first is Mollie Hemingway taking Steve Hayes to task, and then Laura Ingraham hammering Charles Krauthamer: