I join with everyone at Red County in welcoming Victor Davis Hanson as an editorial contributor (Click here for his latest piece, "America Abroad and the Elections at Home"). If this is your first time reading his work, you are in for a treat.  

Victor Davis Hanson, is actually Dr. Hanson, a classicist, prolific author on ancient wars and civilizations, and a long time resident farmer in the Golden State's central valley.
 
He is also one of the two or three most influential intellectuals within the Bush-Cheney White House and wider Administration.  President Bush invites him to the Oval Office to talk because the president understands we are a democracy at war, and that democracies at war sometimes survive and flourish, and sometimes fail the test. 
 
Because Victor Davis Hanson understands war and leadership in war, he has become a sort of north star for conservatives and nationalists who understand the stakes in the current global war against jihadists.  Because he is a scholar of such enormous accomplishments, when Hanson writes about Lincoln's long spring and summer in 1864, readers know it isn't some dashed-off, Wikipedia-driven analogy dimly, if at all, understood by the person who penned it, but a wise appreciation of how battles appear to the Commanders-in-Chief who reside at 1600 Pennsylvania.
 
Because he is an esteemed scholar of ancient Greece, when he writes about the nature of democracies and how they conduct war, readers know that his observations are based on the span of recorded history, not the programming on the History Channel.
 
And when Hanson muses on the impact of the massive illegal immigration upon his beloved California, he does so not out of some nativist recoil, but from a profound understanding of the crucial nature of genuine citizenship and how wave after wave of unassimilated new arrivals undermines the capacity of the nation to shape a new generation as committed to Constitutional ideals as the one that went before.
 
Visit Amazon.com and review his books:

• Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
• A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
• Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power
• The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny
• The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece
• Mexifornia : A State of a Becoming
• Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think
 
There are still more, but you should get the picture.  Dr. Hanson thinks about the history of the West and its future.  He is committed to that future.  He knows it is not guaranteed--has never been guaranteed.
 
When Red County set off on its mission to reinvent the modern magazine, I was asked to give its editorial staff a list of America's great writers.  Professor Hanson is the second to join the ranks of the regular contributors.  You now are a subscriber to a journal that, with Lileks, Medved, and Hanson in every issue, is guaranteed to always be worth keeping.