Victor Davis Hanson has decided that he is an Evil person who tells lies in support of other evil people. He has stopped resisting. He has recognized that this is his nature: to be a one-man definitive refutation to Sokrates's doctrine that nobody does evil knowingly: Gabriel Schofield: Sophistry in the Service of Evil : "Mounting a persuasive case for the presidency of Donald Trump turns out to be a problematic enterprise.... Throughout Trump’s career, blatant racial prejudice has been a continuous thread.... Hanson... acknowledges that Trump was 'likely wrong' in holding the view that Judge Curiel harbored some innate bias.  But Trump, he continues, was merely 'clumsy in his phraseology' and, moreover, his identification of the American-born judge as Mexican was actually 'correct', explaining that there is never a 'commensurate outcry about identifying Swedish Americans as "Swedes" or using "the Irish" for Irish Americans'. From beginning to end, Hanson’s treatment of this episode is an exercise in sophistry. Was Trump wrong or was he just “likely” wrong—Hanson’s equivocating interpolation—about Judge Curiel’s innate bias as a “Mexican”? Racism is America’s original sin, a sin that we as a nation have struggled long and hard to expiate. Yet with a drumbeat of racially charged remarks emanating from the White House, Trump has been setting the nation back to a darker time. Hanson’s casuistry about the Swedes and the Irish, and the gaping hole that is his treatment of Trump’s odious life-long record in matters of race, are worse than sophistry; they are sophistry in the service of a genuine evil. Hanson has also drunk deeply from the gourd of conspiratorial thinking. He goes on for pages about the nefarious 'deep state', which he claims has 'the unlimited resources of government at its call', and whose 'operating premises have embraced multiculturalism, feminism, and identity politics'.... It was not Trump’s but Hillary Clinton’s campaign that was tacitly colluding with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election. Trump, he insists, was actually 'a victim of Russian collusion at the very time he was being accused of it'...

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#noted