https://www.tr.news/coming-soon/

COMING SOON – TR.NEWS
​Most of you are now probably already aware that I have now been completely removed from Facebook and Instagram as of  (26/02/2019).  The claims and reasons behind this decision given are absolutely false and are being used as an attempt to try and completely silence me for good!
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This of course follows the previous removal of my PayPal and Twitter platforms, however, what is most disturbing is the fact that this recent and biggest platform removal has taken place as I am about to expose the murky elements of the mainstream media and the bias propaganda machine which perpetuates “engineered” news to you, the public on a colossal scale!!

Rest assured that I am fighting back and im now more fired up than ever to stand up to these giants in the name of free speech, democracy and the will of the people!!

TR. News is on the way to you and this is where you will be able to follow my every move and I will continue to bring you the things that the mainstream media giants purposely refuse to.

Please, I urge you to sign up now as this is the only place I will be able to connect with you and if you are able to help and support me in this in any way it will make a huge difference!

https://www.tr.news/coming-soon/

By Olivia Pierson
​[First published on Incite 26/2/19]

It is impossible to sum up with any kind of justified generosity the value of the body of knowledge put forth by Professor Victor Davis Hanson in his lectures, books, columns and public interviews.  The man is simply a modern day phenomenon in possession of an incredible mind that is capable of gifting us with the details of the strengths and weaknesses of the world’s most powerful empires: from ancient Greece to today’s America and everything in between that 2.7 millennia time-line, including the Romans, the Byzantines, the Renaissance Florentines, the British Empire, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.  This softly spoken man is a powerhouse of intellectual accomplishments.

Professor Hanson is a classicist, a military historian, a political commentator and a fifth-generation farmer.  He puts me in mind of the talented, manly eclecticism that so typified Thomas Jefferson, minus the slaves.

​His books include:- The Saviour Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost - From Ancient Greece to Iraq, The Decline and Fall of California: from Decadence to Destruction, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern, The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day - How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and Hanson’s latest work, The Case for Trump.  (This list of his books is far from being exhaustive.)

​If there is one outstanding virtue which Professor Hanson exudes in spades (I know he has many more than one), it is a strong sense of how history connects us with the present moment.  He lives on the same family farm that his great, great grandparents of the 1870s lived on in the San Joaquin Valley in California.  After growing up on the same plot of land which his family saw through WWI, the hardships of the Great Depression and then WWII, he has watched his home town transition from a high trust society to its current lack of neighbourly decency, largely because of unprecedented, illegal immigration through America’s Southern border.  Hanson says in this recent interview with the Hoover Institution’s Classicist podcast:

“Who thought that in 2018 at night you’d hear cock-fighting in the air, as I do when I walk my dogs at night.  We don’t know what we’re going to find - we found a dead body, we found stripped down cars, we find hypodermic needles piled up, we find people beating up their girl friends… that’s what you’d expect from a non assimilated, illegal cohort that comes into your country and the first thing it does is break the law.  The second thing it does is break the law by residing here and the third thing it does is often have a false identity. So all of these things are the realities that a lot of Americans deal with and it’s a world away from Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and Mark Zuckerberg who have these palatial estates and they virtue signal as a way of balancing their apartheid existences.”

This post-modern state of affairs stands in stark contrast to the world in which Hanson was sired and raised.  No better recent historical overview stands than his own personal experience gleaned in just one generation of astute observation, summarised beautifully in his 2018 Christmas piece for the National Review titled, “Remembering a Farm Christmas: where old and young blended together, and diversity was natural, not conscious.”  Here is an excerpt: 

“Diversity was natural, not conscious. Our farm neighbors were Japanese, Punjabi, Armenian, Mexican American, and German. Stereotypes were far more positive than biased. So my grandfather would say in admiration, “No one can farm as well as the Japanese,” and “The Punjabis work into the night”. My aunt would learn recipes for Armenian food and say, “Why cannot we eat such delicious food?” and so on. So-called WASPs were rare in our rural neighborhood."

"To a small boy it seemed that siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, neighbors, workers, and friends drifted in and out all day long, especially during Christmas holidays. There was no such thing as being unwanted, much less any need for invitations. Fear of strangers was absent. People just showed up and my parents and grandparents shoved coffee and desserts in their faces and pulled up chairs. There was no concept of “private space” or “downtime,” much less “quality time” at all. To the contrary, the worst fate was “living alone” or “having no one to visit” or proving inhospitable.”

To witness such a change in one’s own beloved country must be a saddening experience. Yet Professor Hanson keeps hold of a certain dignity that can only be described as a sense of gentlemanliness which comes from good breeding, not of the snobbish variety, but of the old-school American variety that is seeded in one’s DNA from those who forged the modern spirit of the New World after Lincoln’s nation-defining presidency.  His higher education as a classicist professor worth-his-salt only adds to his fair-minded dignity. He is one of the few current intellectuals alive today worth us listening to every single word he has to say or write.   

In today’s cultural climate, which too often reeks of historical ignorance coupled with opinionated arrogance, Professor Hanson is a wonderful antidote.  His ability to illuminate in great detail the civilisations which came before us, with insights to be taken note of, from every civilisation and every war, is pure gold to those of us aware of the always timely adage that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We may even find that there are features of the past worth repeating, for the past is certainly not all bad. But in order to repeat only the best of former times, not the worst, we need to know them as fully as we possibly can. I regard this as the great challenge of our era and we are lucky enough to have Professor Hanson’s knowledge as a lodestar in this worthy struggle. 

By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite 12/2/19]

When everything is racist, nothing is racist. The term “racist” has now lost any credible meaning that it once may have had, simply because it is trotted out more mercilessly than short skirts on desperate fat girls.

It is impossible to describe how absurd it is to watch Americans play out their manufactured outrage over someone who dresses up in “blackface.”  Americans, black or white, who regard this practice as some form of despicable racism have completely lost their sense of judgment.

When I think about Shakespearean actors, such as Laurence Olivier, who had to smear their faces in black makeup to pull off a convincing performance of Othello, I wonder if the Renaissance’s most insightful playwright could’ve imagined how this one might pan out over time? I think not.

​Al Jolson, who was once labeled “The World’s Greatest Entertainer”, regularly performed in blackface, bringing jazz and blues to a wider American audience. It was never done as any kind of put-down or insult to black Americans. It was pure talent and fun-loving on full display – and Americans, both black and white loved it all.

To hear the so-called sin of appearing in blackface stigmatised over and over again in both left and right media outlets, as if it is some kind of shockingly evil practice, is nothing short of laughable.  Who, aside from empty yapping heads and virtue-signalling simpletons, could possibly take this nonsense so seriously?

The glorious world of opera will truly be in dire straits when Japanese folk start becoming hysterical over Western female sopranos donning ‘yellowface’ to play Puccini’s heroine Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterly or the three little maids in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado.  Any racially hypersensitive Orientals on the hunt to take offense could really have a field day with opera. Just think of Puccini’s Turandot, whose Chinese heroine is detached, cold and cruel with a penchant for torture – and whose three advisors are named Ping, Pang and Pong.  The stereotypes in this wondrous work of art are so classically run-of-the-mill that I’m surprised it hasn’t been banned from ever being performed again in the West (I know that is debated from time to time). 

The formidable and deeply patriotic black American soprano, Leontyne Price (now 92), wore whiteface in order to play the role of Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly), as most women must do if a convincing portrayal of a 15 year old geisha is to be achieved.  After the Ethiopian princess in Verdi’s Aida became her signature role, Price famously said, “My skin was my costume”.  This quote of hers has been cited in popular culture by many writers. But much less has been made of her most recent in-depth interview, where an 84 year old Price was asked about her 1961 debut at the Metropolitan Opera where she opened the season as Leonora in Il Trovatore:  

“I can’t even put that into words, my dear,” she answered. “Triumph sounds stagnant to me… because it means you got somewhere and you stopped there. I felt so totally American, that’s the only way I can describe it, so richly American.  My country… and I know I’ve had a lot of successes and everything, my country gave me this opportunity and this space and I was thrilled beyond belief…and I deliberately was happy that it was not my most beloved role [Aida] for many, many significant reasons, it was Il Trovatore, because that stretched being an American to me, farther than making anything an accepted debut. I felt I had conquered the world that night because my country gave me that space and I claimed it – and I will never, ever, ever forget it!”

Significantly, despite Price hailing from humble beginnings in Laurel, Mississippi and living through the much vaunted racial upheavals of the 20th Century, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement, she was not one to even think of playing any kind of victim card, for it was simply beneath her.  (This probably explains why a black woman of such outstanding achievement and fame was never invited onto the Oprah Winfrey Show.)

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it’s high time that this adage was remembered again. Borrowing ideas, tastes, styles, images, clothing and words from other cultures is nothing but the natural flow of human influence which affects us all. That includes blackface, whiteface, redface, yellowface and paleface, but the only people who appear to have egg on their face are the outraged, hypersensitive twits trying to make other people feel guilty about something altogether harmless.

If this silly argument about blackface is now the arena where people flock together to decry racism, either they are collectively off-their-faces or it is entirely safe to assume that real racism is now just something in the rearview mirror, like black slavery.  We should chalk this up to progress folks. 

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​ ​​​​​​​​