[News With Views] In his December 2025 commentary for The Daily Signal, "Leaders Fail When the Threat of Radical Islam Is Ignored," Victor Davis Hanson does not merely contribute to the 24-hour news cycle; he pens a digital memento mori for a fading civilization. To review this piece from the perspective of a cultural archaeologist is to see Hanson as a man standing amidst the marble dust of a crumbling forum, frantically sketching the silhouette of a storm that the city's architects insist is merely a light fog. Hanson emerges here as a "Prophet in the Ruins," an intellectual classicist who recognizes that the collapse of a society rarely begins with an external breach of the walls, but with an internal rot of the language used to describe the danger.
From this perspective, Hanson's article is a primary source document on the "Era of Euphemism." He dissects a peculiar 21st-century pathology: the belief that naming a demon is more dangerous than the demon itself.
Hanson begins by mapping a series of violent tremors – shootings in Australia, cancellations in Paris, and executions in Rhode Island. However, his focus isn't on the ballistics or the blood; it is on the lexicon of the aftermath. He observes a recurring ritual among Western elites: the "nanosecond" pivot. Whenever a radical Islamist strikes, the political apparatus performs a linguistic sleight of hand, widening the lens until the specific threat disappears into a foggy generality of "all extremism."
Hanson's critique of the Bondi Beach response is particularly sharp. He views the Australian government's refusal to name the ideology of the killers – preferring to pivot to "white extremism" even when the perpetrators were on terrorist watchlists – as a form of state-sponsored gaslighting. Through the lens of a cultural historian, this is the "Suicide of Clarity." Hanson argues that when a society loses the courage to identify its enemies, it has already lost the will to protect its citizens. |