Editor’s note: The following is a transcript of Victor Davis Hanson’s remarks upon receiving the Diana Davis Spencer Lifetime Achievement Award, delivered at the 2026 Annual Awards Gala.
Abby Moffat:
Good evening, everyone. It is such a pleasure to be with all of you tonight, and it is with particular privilege to present the Diana Davis Spencer Lifetime Achievement Award, an award named in honor of my remarkable mother, Diana, who is here with us tonight. Her belief in freedom, citizenship, personal responsibility, and the promise of the country continues to inspire our family and our work every day. This award recognizes an individual who, through talent, hard work, courage and conviction, has made a lasting contribution to our country and to the cause of freedom. This year’s honoree truly embodies those ideals. In fact, few people reflect the spirit of this award more fully than Victor Davis Hanson.
Although Victor is unable to join us in person this evening, I’m very pleased he is with us here remotely, which if nothing else, spares him from an evening of Washington traffic and hotel ballrooms. Victor, it is wonderful to have you with us.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Thank you for having me.
Abby Moffat:
Thank you. For decades, Victor has been one of the most important and distinctive voices in the American intellectual life. A classicist, a historian, a bestselling author, a senior fellow at Hoover Institution. His scholarship on ancient warfare, classical civilization, and political history has shaped generations of students and readers. And his commentary on modern America has helped countless Americans better understand the moment we are living through. Often by reminding us of the clearest perspective on today’s challenges can sometimes be found by looking back thousands of years. But what has always distinguished Victor is that he’s never been simply an academic.
He has remained deeply rooted in the things that sustain us. Victor comes from five generations of California farmers, a family shaped by the land and by the value support through working it, discipline, resilience, humility, stewardship and responsibility. Even after achieving extraordinary success in academia and public life, he remains connected to the world and to the rhythms of family, work, and community that formed it. Thomas Jefferson wrote that cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. He believed that independent attachment to place and personal responsibility formed the moral backbone of a free society. Victor’s life and work reflect exactly those virtues. Whether writing about ancient Greece, military history, education, citizenship, or the challenges facing modern America, Victor has consistently defended historical truth, common sense, and the values that sustain free societies. And he has done so with remarkable courage and independence. At a time when intellectual conformity is often rewarded, Victor has remained refreshingly willing to speak plainly, think independently, and challenge fashionable assumptions with scholarship, moral clarity and conviction.
Even those who disagree with him recognize the seriousness of his work and the integrity of his convictions. Perhaps equally important, he has done all of this without sacrificing civility, something increasingly rare in American public life. That combination of scholarship, patriotism, humility, and plain spoken wisdom has made Victor a deeply trusted choice for millions of Americans. And it is very much in the spirit of the organizations like IWF, which understands that freedom depends upon citizens willing to defend enduring truths and trusted institutions, even when doing so is unpopular or rather difficult. Victor’s legacy extends well beyond his writing and scholarship. It lives also the example he has set as a father to William and Pauline, farmer, teacher, and citizen, a life that reflects the same integrity and steadiness that defines his work. Victor, your work has strengthened our national conversation, deepened our understanding of history, and reminded so many Americans why this country and civilization that has shaped it remain worth defending.
It is truly an honor to present you with the independent Women’s 2026 Diana Davis Spencer Lifetime Achievement Award. Please join me in congratulating Victor Davis Hanson.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Thank you very much for that kind introduction. I think all of us are big admirers of the Independent Women’s Forum because, in these contentious times, they have stood for tradition, and values, and ethics within the framework of women.
And they never said you have to stay home and have children, although without women doing so, we wouldn’t have a nuclear family. We wouldn’t have a demography that is still under consult, still robust compared to most places in the world. They didn’t say you had to have a career or a title or an education, but if you did so, you would enrich the United States. I think one reason that we are preeminent in the world today is because we have so many women that have chosen careers, and yet they also said we don’t have to choose between one or the other. You can do both. And we’re even further enriched by women who can do both.
And this is very important at this time because we’re facing not just a political opposition, but an ideology that we thought had been somnolent or dead, but it’s revert, and this idea that capitalism is bad, the consensual government is passé, that the United States is just one of many nations and not preeminent. And in all of these cases, it’s women who—I feel—as writers, educators, politicians who let them—fight to remind us all that the great succession, big chain of generations. And we in this generation have an obligation to honor the people who came before us, people who died in Gettysburg or Okinawa for what we are now, but more importantly to pass on something better than what we receive.
And that’s innate to the nation of women, to the nature of womanhood. And I’d just like to finish very quickly with an anecdote.
I’m speaking from my farmhouse as the fifth generation, and I have the same name as Lady Diana Davis Spencer, Victor Davis. The reason I have it is because my mother and I was close. I had a wonderful father. I was very close to my mother, and she taught me things that all through my life have come to a great advantage.
She was born in this house, and my grandfather had never gone to college. He had no boys. He had two daughters and another one who was disabled, and he sent them—he mortgaged this farm that I was speaking from and sent them to Stanford University in 1939 and 40 and then when they graduated, he insisted they get a graduate degree. My mother got one of the first law degrees in Stanford. Her sister got a master’s in English. And then he insisted they’d come back to the Central Valley and marry their high school sweethearts who then he insisted also had to go to college even though they were farming.
And I say that because, all through my life when I had periods of crisis, I turned to her. I said, “Well, I have a Ph.D. in classics and there’s no jobs.” And she said, “Well, I had a law degree and I was a woman and the only job that I was offered was a clerk. So I came home and I raised you and I didn’t go back to work until I was 40. So you come home and you farm until things change and then you go back and use your degree. But there’s no disadvantage. It’s an advantage to be farming. You’ll be well-rounded and save you from being heuristic and error.”
So I did. And then when I went back as a professor, she had gone back and was the second woman in the Central Valley to be a superior court judge and the second woman in the state of California to be a state appellate court judge.
I said, “It’s kind of weird that people are nicer to you when you have degrees.” She said, “Yeah, isn’t that funny? You haven’t changed, but did you talk to the secretary today and did you talk to the janitor? And remember that these people are as important as you are, and you don’t ever rely on your titles instead of your abilities.” And then I thought of that a lot, and then I had a daughter, a beautiful daughter at 26 who died of leukemia. And I was remembering once when I was young, I said to my mom, “Before we three boys were born, you had a daughter, Georgia Davis, and she died.” “Yes, she did. I had measles and we didn’t …” And I said, “Well, what did you do?” She said, “I went on. And I wanted more children in her name and her honor, and that’s why you’re here.” So we remember that.
And so when I lost my daughter, I remembered what she said, and it was a great source of comfort. And then, very oddly, at 64, she at the height of her power—she was being considered for the State Supreme Court—she got a benign brain tumor. Of course, it was a misdiagnosis, and it was cancerous, and I asked her what that felt like because she died shortly after. She said, “Victor, you always play the hand that was dealt, and you do it with dignity and the dignity you can teach people that may have the same experience.”
And I remembered that last year; I had been diagnosed with a benign tumor, and then it turned out to be cancerous, kind of a difficult one to treat. And people said to me, “Are you upset that it was misdiagnosed or you were upset that you bled during the operations?” I said, “No, you deal with a hand that’s dealt.” And so I would just like to, in her honor and your honor as well, to thank women. Because I think sometimes we underestimate that behind every man, whether he’s happy, sad, or failure or success, but behind every man was a woman.
Thank you very much. I’m greatly honored.