Victor Davis Hanson Interviews David Mamet

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This is Victor Davis Hanson on the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm solo today with one of our interviews.

Jack and Sammy will be with us soon.

And it's my pleasure to announce that David Mammet,

I think probably the greatest combined screenwriter and playwright and author in America still living, is our guest.

And today is the pub date of his new book, The Disenlightenment, Politics, Horror, and Entertainment.

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So it's my pleasure, David, that you're with us.

Thank you very much.

Disenlightenment,

and I looked at the essays and

we've been told as college graduates that the Enlightenment saved Western civilization and

the post-Enlightenment in its anti-religious sense.

But

what is this use of the prefix disenlightenment?

What's your...

Do you see the Enlightenment as

that it was necessary and now it's become, I don't know.

Not at all, Victor.

I mean,

it's kind of ironic.

It's a homage to

the horror and the tragedy of wokeism of the people who have taken the Enlightenment and chased it down the road to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Yeah.

Do you think, is it the equality of result, the idea that we're going to make everybody equal or else?

What is it about woke that you find the most scary or the most disturbing?

The emphasis on individual appearance, sexual orientation, or is it this Marxist idea that we have this binary between victim, miser, and victim, and then we put everybody in this category?

Well, you know, I thought I came up with this idea, but I was reading

Tom Sowell's book.

It's not disassembling America.

It's dis...

I've forgotten it, but

he's talking about the same thing 15 years ago, and he's talking in piecemeal about the various perfidies, the destruction of the border,

the equality of results rather than equality of opportunity, the marginalization of men, et cetera, et cetera.

So what I'm doing in the book is I'm looking at these various

horrors and perfidies and crimes and absurdities and blasphemies

and trying to take an overview and saying, what does it all mean?

Where do they come together?

Okay.

What in the world do the transsexual people have in common with the free Palestine people?

Free Palestine people want to kill them, right?

What in the world do the open border people have in common with the let men and the women sports?

It doesn't make any sense.

So as a playwright, what you're trying to do, what one is trying to do, is take disparate scenes or disparate ideas and reduce them to a through line, saying what is actually happening all the time.

And that's what a play is.

It's the, as Aristotle said, it's the quest of the affronted protagonist to solve a problem, the clarity of which increases the farther he goes until he finally realizes, oh my God, it was there in front of me all the time.

Is it the common enemy, the unifying common denominator with all these disparate causes and initiatives and agendas, is it the white male capitalist Western idea that they hate, and all of these are manifestations of it?

No, I think it's a lot worse than that.

I think what I said, I finally began to achieve some clarity after working on all those essays and making the book over a couple of years.

Is that I said, I, aha, I finally recognized the totality.

And the totality is the open city.

Paris in 1944,

Naples in 43, 44.

Tolstoy writes so beautifully about it in War and Peace, right?

Moscow in 1812.

So what we have is a civilization that is decamped.

And the administration, the Nazis, for example, leave Paris and the Allies haven't shown up.

And so you have different groups who are trying to achieve power.

But my mistake was in

first writing the essays thinking, wait a second, what is the Biden, what is the power the administration, the Biden administration is trying to do?

Because obviously someone is shaking the country apart.

So there's going to be nothing left.

So I realized it wasn't an administration, the Biden administration was a coup that then left town.

The Obama, Marxist, Islamist Bidens were a coup that then decamped.

So what you had was a vacuum of power, an open city in effect, where just as in Paris, the Marxists were on this street, the Batanists were over there, the Résistants were over there, the Trotskyites were over here, the blah, blah, blah, blah, everyone was saying, leave me alone.

I'm going to loot.

I'm going to do those things I want to do.

I'm going to settle my scores.

And once in a while, the Marxists, the Stalinists and the Trotskyites would get together to gang up on the hoop blah blah, and sometimes they would fight each other.

But what I was looking at in the in the Biden, the years of the Biden

horror was the absence of an overriding power

under which different groups are looting.

They're looting, they're killing, they're looking for power.

And sometimes they coalesce and sometimes they fight each other.

But

the absence, so that

the resistance to Trump was resistance to the idea of a unifying power.

Because if the unifying power comes in, you can't give $2 billion.

Sally says, you know what?

I'm going to give $2 billion to my friend Stacey Abrams.

She's saying, there's no president there, right?

He's in the other room drooling.

Okay.

And so they've decided we got the auto-pim.

Sally says, I want to give $2 billion to my friend Stacey Abrams, right?

Jimmy says, well, Jesus Christ, okay, you want to do that, but

you know what I want to do?

I don't like war.

I want to pull out of Afghanistan.

Right now, right now, we just get out.

Right.

Billy says, well, that's ridiculous.

And Jimmy says, yeah, okay, it's ridiculous.

But on the other hand, you want to put men in women's sports.

I'll vote for you, you vote for me.

And so what you have is a cabal

stirring the witch's cauldron of

you get to do this, I get to do that.

Okay, okay, okay.

And just as in Paris and just as in any open city, you also have people settling scores.

The FBI comes in and says, you know what, fuck Trump.

That's what I want to do.

In the middle, just like

in the open city in Moscow, you had people who didn't have any plan, but they wanted to kill the guy to whom they owed 10,000 rubles to.

So that's what I come to in the

thinking brings me to at the end of the book.

What we're looking at is an open city.

There's nobody home.

You look at Fox News every day with Android CNN.

All the Dems are screaming, but we have to have a message.

We have to have a message.

Well,

they don't even have a party anymore, right?

They do have this.

I asked this question in a podcast.

Why would they do something like open the border, lie about it, let in 12 million people?

That's going to take a generation.

I mean,

each person is almost guaranteed a Supreme Court appeal.

And then you look at the decriminalization in these blue cities.

Everybody's leaving them.

They're wastelands.

These prosecutors, you know, the Karen Fox.

And

then you look at the mayors.

And they're destroying women's sports.

You mentioned that.

So it seems like they just, somebody said, I don't like these people.

I don't like, I don't know, middle America or the average conservative or I don't like people who play by the rules and I'm going to destroy the system and it's going to take them a generation after I leave to clean up these cities to deal with the homeless to deal with the illegal immigrants to get the murders out and this is what I want I want to destroy I want to just throw as much crap as I can and the free Palestine people as well they've destroyed the universities I mean we've got 300,000 Chinese

Kennedy School of Government's got Communist Party members from China.

We've got all these Palestinian people who have helped with gutter money, you know, these Middle East studies programs.

And I think it's kind of a nihilism.

They're saying, well, you know, you guys think you're in control and you go do your little pedestrian nuclear family lives and you think you're, but you know what?

We don't need...

a popular vote.

We don't need public support.

We're down on 2080 on every one of our issues, but we have institutional power.

We have the media, we have the foundations, we have academic, we have, and we can do a lot of damage to you.

We're not constructive, but we can damage you.

And I think it's

almost an, I don't know, it's out of Satyricon, Petronius of Satyricon or something, just a chaotic, destroy the system.

And they hate it.

They hate everything about it.

I guess I'm prejudiced because I'm at the campus and I looked at the Hamas camps for four months.

I walked by and I, every time I would walk by, I'd say to one of these very affluent Middle East students, I said, the rules are that you can only camp one day here.

And then I looked at the Jewish students and they were counter-protesting.

They were all well-dressed.

They had a little tiny table.

It was immaculate.

And they, when you walked by, they said, would you like to hear about

what happened on October 7 and the response?

And you said yes.

And you went over there in a very polite term.

Meanwhile, the people over here, 10 times their numbers, camping with signs that said, be quiet, protesters asleep in their little tents.

And they were screaming and yelling, and they were defying.

And then you had these impotent faculty and administrators walking by, and you'd say to them, look what they're doing.

And then they went to the colonnades at Stanford, and it was sandstone historic, and they painted Hamas, you know, globalized the infida fada, everything.

And then a week later, you saw these Mexican-American maintenance people with tweezers trying to pick out every little piece of paint because they couldn't sandblast it without injury.

And these kids were walking by grinning.

And it was almost

an assault on every aspect of a university of rules.

And they were saying to them, you're not going to do anything to us.

You're not going to touch us because of your liberal pieties.

And

we hate you because you're weak and you're appeasing us.

And

if it hadn't, Trump is the only person, I think, in the Republican Party.

I can't imagine a Mitt Romney or a late John McCain or a Bob Dole or the Bushes doing what he did.

He basically said, you think you're going to do that?

I'm crazier than you are.

And we'll see who wins.

And

that's where we are right now.

Yeah, it's absolutely where we are.

You know, Shelby Steele said something one time.

He said he was in the camp.

Where did he go?

Did he go to Berkeley?

He went to some, he was in Ohio.

When he went to

the University of Utah, I think.

Yeah, he was in some place.

In San Jose State.

He labored for San Jose State for years.

And he was absolutely brilliant.

He was the best person in the English department.

And he started to voice conservative things.

And they tried to, believe it or not, and I taught 21 years at the CSU system.

And you really have to try not to get tenure.

It's pretty much a given.

And they tried to take it.

They tried not to to give him tenure, even though he'd published more than the entire department.

They hated him so much because he was a confident, black, successful conservative, and they couldn't stand that.

And these were white liberal elites that went after him in a very racist fashion.

Yeah, no, but I'm referring to when he was a student.

He was a student.

A university, graduate student at University of Utah, I think.

He was a student somewhere, and he was a radical, right?

And he was very black power.

And he said he came into, they came into the president's office and he was smoking a cigarette, Shelby said, and he was

jabbering at this blah, blah, blah.

And he dropped a cigarette into the carpet and ground it out with his foot, right?

And what he said was, in effect,

it was one of the things he most regrets in his life.

But what he seemed to say at the fence, it scared him to death.

Right.

Because what happens to a kid, if the kid knows it's supposed to be disciplined and you don't, the kid becomes terrified yeah and he says wait a second somebody better be in charge here because if these effing fools aren't going to step up it better be me and so that's what happened to a lot of these kids because they've never been disciplined they've never been given any generation after generation too right well yeah

your parents as well i mean this was going on when i was at college in the 60s and so

so

part of the problem is the democratic party just crumbled as soon as somebody on the left said blah blah blah um free Palestine.

All the Democratic Party, just like a table tipping, went to the left.

And so then the people who were nobody, the squad and example, said, oh, wait a second.

You want to give me power?

Okay, I'll take it.

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You know, we're talking everybody with David Mammet, and we all know him as our premier playwright, but I don't think a lot of us appreciate his screenwritings.

At least some of, you know, I was thinking some of my favorite movies of the last 40 years, Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Hoffa, The Edge.

And one I don't, you know what I want my favorite one was Ronan.

That you

yeah, yeah, I really love that movie.

I first met you, David, at Shelby Steele's house.

And this is

Obama was campaigning in 2008, and he was in Philadelphia.

And I didn't know at the time that you had written a screenplay for Untouchables.

And I said to you, I can't believe this guy.

He got in front of everybody and he said, we're going to bring a knife to a gun,

we don't bring a knife to a gunfight.

And have you ever heard anything?

And you very quietly said, yeah, I've heard that before I wrote it.

And I didn't know that.

So it was,

that's how I first met David Mammet.

And I had no idea.

I knew you were a screenwriter, but I had no idea at the time that you've not only the range of your audience is amazing from people who go to the theater to the average American that love these movies that you wrote and in a way that appealed to them.

And so we're very lucky.

We're going to be right back with David Mammet.

He's got a new book out, The Disenlightenment.

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And we're right back again with David.

David, are you optimistic, neutral,

wary, pessimistic about the next three years of the Trump administration?

Can he make any headway at all?

Well, you know what it is, is, and you said it very early on, I think

on the 6th or 7th, you said, we haven't won the fight, but now we're in a fight.

They're going to have to get beaten several more times.

And that's where we are.

We're in a fight.

So in a real fight,

we don't know where it's going to come out.

We just know what our...

what we're going to do, which is we're going to fight and we're going to do the best we can.

And after that,

it's with the gods and Rebecca West said it's not if you were in a fight it's not whether or not you fought but if you wouldn't fought

had had had it come to you right had it's not what whether or not you went well that's what she said right you the question is if it's necessary to fight and some so uh would you stand up and fight and the answer for us on the conservative side to the largest extent and to differing extents is yes right?

That we're fighting for the life of our country.

And we've just seen this phenomenal

resurrection of the ability to fight because had they stolen another election, the country would have been over.

And

so the question, as you said, are we going to win the next couple of fights?

And we'll see.

Yeah, it's going to be

it's going to be very difficult.

Only, I mean, all the traditional

levers of power, the presidency and for now until the midterms, at least, the House and the Senate, although thin margins, for all the criticism of the Supreme Court, it's more conservative than not.

But all of that and the popularity of the issues, as I said earlier, it's pledged against this administrative, these institutional powers.

One thing about the university I've noticed, it's kind of like a mossy rock.

It looks really impressive, and you turn it over and it's ugly underneath, worms and decay.

And I don't think they're going to win this because just from my experiences at Stanford,

every issue that they are contending with Trump,

they're going to lose.

For the 2022 Supreme Court, they have separate graduations.

They call them auxiliary, but you and I know that if they had a European-American separate graduation, they would shut it down in two seconds as racist.

They have theme houses by race.

They're violating the Supreme Court.

They had a People's Liberation Army colonel that was on the faculty a few years ago.

They didn't report Chinese communist money.

Betsy DeVos fined them in the first term.

I think it's pretty clear that they were charging up to 50% surcharges on federal grounds.

That's going to cost them $183 million that they were counting on.

They ran Judge Duncan out of the law school.

They shouted him down.

They hijacked his lecture.

The DEI person did at the law school.

And then the trans students said they hope they yelled at him, we want your daughter to be raped.

There were no consequences to any of them.

I mentioned the Hamas.

They had a lot of liberal faculty

did an anti-Semitic study, David, at Stanford, 900 pages.

And everybody thought they would whitewash it, but it was so egregious that even they had to say that Stanford was institutionalized, anti-Semitism had institutionalized anti-Semitism.

They posted in kind of a

braggadocious fashion that they were letting in 9 to 10% of the incoming class

post-George Floyd as white males.

And even though that's a 33 to 35% demographic.

So they've got so much exposure that, and they have a new president, but that's typical of all these campuses, and the public doesn't know any of that.

And they're kind of like illegal immigration.

People say, okay, Trump is trying to do it, but almost every day it's been so egregious, you get a murder, or you get this guy in Colorado, or you, and the same thing with the universities.

So, you know, you learn that these two Harvard students that roughed up a Jewish student, the divinity school made one the grand marshal of the graduation, and the other guy in the law school, they gave him $65,000.

It's almost, it would have been a lot more honest if Harvard said, we have a Beat the Jew award, and we're going to give it this year to two guys who got 90 days,

cut a deal with the DA.

They were found culpable, but they were so brave because they roughed up a Jewish guy that we gave one guy, he won the Beat the Jew award in the law school, and this guy won the Beat the Jew.

That's what they're doing, basically.

And well, it's not you say you say as if, but it's not as if.

It's true.

No, it's true.

It's true.

So I think we were talking years ago about

Thorsten Veblen, right?

Who's a great

populist economist of the University of Chicago.

And he's famous, of course, for writing a theory of the leisure class.

He wrote a lot of great books.

One of them is called The Higher Learning.

Thorsten Veblen, yeah.

He was a great writer.

Yeah, but he was looking at what was happening in higher education.

In 1914, he said it's a scam.

He said it's an absolute scam.

The universities, he was in the University of Chicago, which has just been

founded 20 years previously.

He said it's a scam.

He said, it's basically, it's all a diploma mill.

But what they're doing is saying, come to our,

so what they're doing is competing against each other in giving out treats to attract students.

One of the treats was this professor who won a Nobel Prize.

Well, you're never going to see him.

right you're going to see his teaching assistants teaching assistants as this goes on through the years we get we're going to give you credit for life experience, right?

Which is selling diplomas, or we're going to give you credit for an essay that everybody knows you didn't write, or

we're going to give you a football team.

And so, as you see, over the last 100 years, the school keeps giving out these greater and greater inducements exactly as if they're a resort, which in effect they are.

So,

the latest inducement of these schools is, guess what?

You get to beat up Jews.

That's what they're doing.

No, it is.

It is.

It's the little submarine, the plastic submarine

in the Kellogg's cornflakes.

You know what?

It's funny.

Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Princeton,

they always advertised that.

Up until George Floyd, that our median SAT score is 780, that we evaluate your GPA by the caliber of your high school.

We're very, very rigorous.

We take 6-5%.

Then we have these curricula that are so hard that no one else can do it.

A guy at Fresno State would flunk out, da-da-da-da-da, and that's why we get our prestige.

We have no...

But once they went down this road, they had been going down it, of course, but when they got rid of the SAT for five years and they stopped ranking comparative GPAs and they went into what they would call privately reparations admissions.

So these groups that were not, say, 200 points down the SAT or they were, either their GPA was not competitive or it was from a high school that was not competitive.

And they put them all in.

It's been a great experiment.

So you talk to faculty and I try to always talk when I visit and they say something like the following, David.

They said, I'm not going to die on the altar of standards.

I only have three choices.

I either water down the content or I water down the grade and Stanford and Yale gave 80% A's or I got to bring in new

ridiculous courses.

And if I don't, the DEI auditors find that I have a systemic prejudice against certain groups.

So I was telling everybody, I was talking to four or five Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, pretty well-off guys, and I said very naively,

if they sold these cattle brands that you could go to Harvard or Yale or Chicago or Duke, whatever,

because of their rigor, and then for a while, at least people, maybe they didn't learn anything, but they had to do well in these tests or something, so they had the semblance of education.

So when you hired them at Google or Facebook, they spoke well or they were good in analytics.

Now they can't guarantee that.

So what will happen to the prestige?

And this guy, he said, where in the hell have you been, Victor?

You are so far behind.

If I have a choice between a Georgia Tech, a Virginia Tech, a Texas AM graduate, and a Stanford, you think I'm crazy?

I know those guys are well-trained.

They had to earn their grades and they don't go to HR on the first day and complain about me.

And we're hiring those people.

And I think they don't realize that Trump is the kind of the

He's the end of the beginning.

They don't understand that he's just a symptom of what they caused, and he's accelerated.

He's a catalyst.

But I think their whole prestige and how they settle as an entree into the wealthy elite class is over with.

I really think that a lot of people are going to say, you know what?

I hope so.

It's a joke.

It's a joke.

Your degree is a joke.

But see, I've been doing that.

I'm glad to hear you say that because I've been doing that for years because when I'm making a movie,

a lot of people, young people would come up and say, oh, give me a job.

Give me a job.

If I look at one of the elite universities, I'm going to say, you know what?

No, somebody went to the Santa Monica Community College.

I'm going to say, okay, sit down and let's talk.

But, you know, Tom Soule, of course, wrote this book about black education 30 years ago.

He said, the tragedy is when you lower the standards, the kids

who have the lower standards can't do the work and then they can't get a job.

And it's going to mean that other black people who are going to be tied with the same brush of saying, oh, I guess guess that you're an affirmative action graduate of Harvard.

It's terrible.

But

part of the problem, what's going to happen is the parents got to stop saying, I'm not going to give a million bucks

after taxes to send you to go protest and come out with a degree that's not fungible.

So that's what's got to happen.

And it's happening.

I think it's happening when these employers see that the graduates that are turned out are not competitive with places south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Yeah, indeed.

Yeah, and they're not competitive, and they're not hiring as much.

And I know I was on a hiring committee, and we had 900 applicants to the Hoover Institution, and I was just stunned that when we interviewed people

some from German universities, some from British universities, and some from state universities versus the regular Stanford, Harvard,

The other ones were just much more realistic, well-spoken,

not crazy, not esoteric, not arrogant as a general stereotype.

But

the public,

60% now have no confidence in higher education.

They're way ahead of the universities.

The university people still think they have this allure or this power, this prestige, but I think the general public is done with them.

And Trump has kind of lit the fuse of an explosive that was already there.

Excellent.

Yeah, I think that's hopeful.

David, what are you working on right now for your next project?

Well, I just finished the movie.

I did a play with Shia LaBeouf

in a little theater, 100-seat theater over here.

And

it was good plays, really.

And at the end of the run, Shia said and Evan Evan Jonikite who was his co-star said

we can't we don't have the theater anymore let's do it as a movie so we did a movie based on this play it's called Henry Johnson just came out people can watch on

henryjohnsonmovie.com henryjohnsonmovie.com and I'm really happy with it it's it's about this

this guy who is so good willed that A, everybody takes advantage of him and B, he ruins everything he touches, which is to me an example of the liberals, you know, because I think

it was Arnold Bennett said, there are old fools and young fools, sad fools and happy fools, but there never was a fool who was not cruel.

Remember

Robert Gates, you remember who said that about Joe Biden?

Joe Biden's been on the wrong side of every major foreign policy decision for the last 30 years, and he's been rewarded for it.

Well, yeah.

Oh, speaking of that, just between two guys, right, in a private conversation, what's our president doing about Iran?

I mean, how can there possibly be a deal that they'll keep, or is he just playing poker with them?

I'm hoping he's playing poker.

I think his strategy is

I've got this MAGA, Candace Owen, these people.

And they are non-interventionist neo-isolationists.

And we all know that Iran, you can't talk to Iran.

They're proverbial liars.

They want to destroy Israel.

But if I do a preemptive raid before it's clear that they're going to reject everything, so I think what he's doing, and I don't know if

it has a self, unfortunately, it might have a self like a drone that's gone on its own mission, but I think he thinks he's going to tell the American people that he's exhausted trying to talk to them.

And that, you know, it's kind of like Obama, to tell you the truth.

I'm going to talk, talk, talk, and then at some critical point, somebody's going to come to him in the summer or fall and say, Mr.

President, they've got 12 bombs that they can, they're at enrichment.

You either have to act now or you can't act because they don't have any air defenses.

Hezbollah is inert.

Hamas is inert.

The Houthis are inert.

This is the only chance you're going to have.

There's a lot of dissension.

So this is the time to do it.

And I think that would be some, I've talked to people and they they seem to think that he wants to go.

It's sort of like the Ukraine thing, that he was playing art of the deal, that, hey, everybody, nobody's heard Putin's side of the story.

And people came to Trump and they said, why don't you insult him?

Why don't you call?

And he said, no, no, no, you don't insult your people.

But we're going to go through this.

And then he learned that.

Putin is not going to settle a deal.

And now he's got credibility if he wants to, you know, help Ukraine.

And I'm not going to get into whether he should or not.

I I think he should, but the point I'm making is I think he feels that he's got to exhaust.

He did that with Baghdadi and ISIS.

He said, I'm going to bomb the crap out of ISIS, and I'm going to solve the ISIS.

And then he started negotiating, and then all of a sudden,

and he said the same thing about Iran.

And then all of a sudden,

Soleimani was vaporized, Baghdadi was vaporized, ISIS was vaporized, and then they came to him and they said, the Wagner group is running amok in Syria.

They're killing everybody.

And now they've attacked, an hour ago, they attacked the

American installation, this base

in Iraq.

And people said, in Syria, excuse me.

And they said,

we can't do anything.

And he said, kill them all.

And they said, you'd kill more people than we lost than we did in the entire, you'll kill more Russians than we did during the whole Cold War.

He said, kill them.

And they killed anywhere from 200 to 400 of them.

So I think that's what he's doing.

And that's, and to the degree that I'm being objective or optimistic, I don't know.

I'm hoping he's doing that because it will be a blank-blank disaster if you try to negotiate with them, especially in this weekend.

They have no cards to play right now.

They have no Hezbollah to commit terrorism.

They can't launch 20,000 rockets like they have against Israeli civilian centers.

The Houthis are kind of emasculated for a while.

And Israel's ready to go, but Israel doesn't have the wherewithal for a one-week strategic campaign with 20,000-pound, 30,000-pound bombs.

They don't have the delivery system, at least in terms of aircraft.

It would be better if we did it, but I think

he's run on the idea we don't do optional wars in the Middle East anymore.

I don't know if he defined that as aerial or ground.

So I think he's looking not for a pretext, but trying to tell the Western world:

I exhausted every avenue and I have no choice.

So we'll see.

But I'm worried.

I'm worried.

Yeah, we will see, won't we?

And same thing about Ukraine, it is even more interesting because today they hit the Kirsch Bridge that's the lifeline from Russia to Crimea.

And then

these drones that were delivered all the way to these Arctic bases are brilliant.

They've destroyed 35% of the

nuclear delivery bombers, and everybody is ecstatic.

But until this happened, they were being ground down.

They've lost 12 million people to refugees.

So the country's 28 million out of 40 million people are still there.

And they don't have the wherewithal to keep fighting.

They were being ground down.

So now they've done this, and everybody's...

euphoric, but you don't know what the reaction is going to be and what our counter reaction to their action should be.

Because we had kind of a rule in the Cold War when we faced the Soviets that we didn't allow the proxy of either side to attack or threaten the homeland of the rival.

So when they armed Cuba to hit us,

Kennedy, Curtis LeMay, and that whole bunch

said to

Khrushchev, you broke the rules, you're using a proxy to threaten the homeland.

When we were in Vietnam, we had just started to have troops,

we didn't threaten you.

We were in a proxy third.

So it's kind of a rule you don't do that.

So, and I don't know if those rules still apply, but everybody thinks that there's never going to be an escalation on the part of the Russians and all these threats are empty.

But when you lose 30% of your strategic bombing fleet by a proxy, and I know that they said that we had no help, but I doubt that

the Ukrainians had the intelligence or the satellite capability to know without us or the European.

So that's pretty scary.

And I mentioned it in this recent book, The End of Everything, that it was getting the

unimaginable becomes imaginable and then likely very quickly without warning.

Well, that's for certain.

Yeah.

So are you...

Where are your emphases right now in, is it movies, plays, writing, or all together, David?

Well, as I say, I finished this movie.

I'm planning a new movie that I hope to shoot in the fall with Shia and with John Malkovich.

John Malkovich, is he still active?

He's such a great actor.

I didn't know.

Oh, yeah, you know, I did a play.

I guess it's already like three years ago.

We did a play in the West End, John started in a comedy I wrote about a fellow very much like Harvey Weinstein.

It was pretty freaking funny.

And he's working all the time.

He's directing a lot of opera and he's doing a lot of acting.

And Al Pacino is going to be in that and Patty Lupone, too.

Did he direct that movie

in Latin America about the ballerina upstairs?

It was a great that

she was a communist or she was a terrorist and this guy, the police guy falls in love with her.

And it was a great movie.

I think he directed it.

I don't know, but it's quite possible.

He works all the time.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know.

I don't see him as much on the screen as I used to.

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Let me ask you another question.

Maybe it's a little bit personal.

The more that you are overt in your disgust of this progressive project or whatever you want, is it

are there seams within Hollywood or the film industry that don't care?

They just want to look at talent?

Or is the majority, is it, have you seen roadblocks to you personally, professionally, career-wise?

Well, it's hard to say.

You know,

I've been hooring around this business for for 40, 50 years, and the business very much changed.

And the

I came into movies at the end of the studio system where there were still people, there were guys in power, and you had a cup of coffee with them.

And they said, oh, yeah, Dave, I know your work.

What are you making?

I say, blah, blah, blah.

What's it going to cost?

Okay.

Who's in it?

Okay, good.

Go make it.

The contract will catch up with you later.

There are guys who actually had the capacity to make a decision.

And those were the people I talked to.

XTX years later, it's nothing but committees who are terrified of making a wrong decision.

So they don't make a decision.

So everything becomes mush.

It becomes

compromised.

And it's always in the, when there's nobody in charge, it's Gresham's law, right?

And the bad decisions turn out, throw out the good decision.

So I aged out A, and

the business changed B, and

people don't want to touch me because I'm a conservative.

It's okay.

So this movie I just made, we just found the money independently and as we're going to with the next movie and because the movie industry is as we see is is dead.

They're making a lot of decisions.

They make a lot of movies nobody wants to see them.

Nobody wants to see them psychologically.

Then they make a couple of they make a couple of

tentpole films.

And God, yeah, I love

Tom Cruise.

God bless him.

They're betting he's going to live forever.

But that business is gone.

And part of the reason it's gone is the theaters are gone, right?

The brick and mortar theaters are gone.

So if people aren't going to the theater, they're going to download the movie.

So if you're going to download the movie, you don't need the studios,

right?

You got to catch their attention.

You got to figure that out.

But other than that, there's no difference.

There's no reason to, listen, the studios that used to have parking lots full of working people, craftspeople that were the lower middle class, the white,

the kind of light blue collar of

Los Angeles, they're all taken up by bureaucrats now.

If you go to Paramount and Warners, blah, blah, blah,

there's nothing there but bureaucrats who make nothing, right?

Yeah.

The whole thing is fragmented, isn't it, with streaming and online and pod and everything?

Is that encouraging that there seems that you can or is it just so discombobulated when you don't have

people spend their whole lives in Hollywood saying, I had one more meeting, I think I'm getting there.

I think I'm blah, blah, blah.

They'll spend 20 years literally saying,

I had a really good meeting today, or I had a really good audition today.

Well, so I was saying to some people the other day, go ahead and make the movie yourself.

You can make a movie on his iPhone.

It's not going to be worse than the technology of

Top Gun.

Well, I don't know how to do that, they'll say.

That's true.

But you're better off to spend 10 years figuring out how to do it than to spend 10 years going to meetings and smiling at people who don't have the capacity to say yes.

Let me ask you another question before we end.

You live in Santa Monica.

What is your...

Every time I go down into Los Angeles, maybe I go to the wrong places downtown.

It seems like I'm going in the ninth ring of the Inferno.

Yeah, it's just the homelessness.

Are you optimistic?

Is there changes?

When I see Venice Beach and Santa Monica and the downtown, I teach at Pepperdine sometimes.

And I go into, I had a daughter that lived in Santa Monica, and she was there.

And I couldn't believe

pre-COVID and post-COVID.

Has it recovered the L.A.

area, Santa Monica?

Is there any hope that it'll be renewed or what?

Well, I mean, they just burnt down the palisades.

That was cute.

I actually went to see a movie at the 3rd Street Mall in the brick and mortar theater, what we used to call it movie theater, because I wanted to see this guy.

There was nobody there at the theater.

And the 3rd Street Mall, which is like five blocks of the most expensive, pretty real estate in the country.

three blocks from the beach.

Tens of millions of tourists come there.

The 3rd Street Mall is empty.

There's like, it looks like about maybe 30% occupancy.

Everything else in these shops is for lease

because

of COVID, because of the riots that

came with COVID, and because of homelessness.

So the city of Santa Monica,

they aren't making very, very smart decisions.

So there's that.

I wonder if it's going to change because when you look at the palisades, the mayor was in Ghana.

The vice mayor was arrested for throwing in, phoning in an anti-Israel bomb threat.

He was under house arrest.

I think they've just indicted him.

Yeah, the head of water and power was getting $700,000 after failing at PG ⁇ E, and they hired her.

And the hide vents were not working.

The reservoir was empty under her direction.

Then the fire chief was bragging about her DEI hiring.

The assistant woman was the one that said, if I see a man I can't lift in an emergency, he's in the wrong place.

They didn't let people clean the hillsides because of endangered vetch or whatever.

It was a complete breakdown of every aspect of radical environmentalism and DEI.

And the people, not that all of them were culpable, but I have a feeling, even though

the times I've been to Pacific Palisades, they seem to be a little bit more conservative than other places, but they voted for all this.

Is there a change in the attitude that

I don't know?

I mean, will they keep doing this again and again and again?

Or is there

how many times we've talked about you have to keep beating them back, but when you lose these beautiful homes and they're not being quickly rebuilt and you add this to all the other stuff that I live five miles from high-speed rail.

$30 billion, not one track laid, graffiti on all the overpasses.

They had a sign on my street that was shut down.

We hire their

disabled DEI.

They were bragging about the state.

And it's just, it's like Stonehenge when you look at it.

There's just nothing there but overpasses and no track after 15 years.

And the whole state, it seems to be dysfunctional.

And you're wondering after the Palisades fire and high-speed rail, if finally people are going to...

I mean, LA got rid of Mr.

Gascon.

That was a good sign.

And the mayor.

So I don't know

how much more the state can take before it either

becomes dysfunctional.

Half of all the accidents in Fresno County, the person that commits them runs away, illegal aliens.

And I live out in an area here that I grew up in.

I'm speaking in the house where I grew up.

My great-great-grandmother built it in 1870.

And nobody had a key when we were growing up.

Nobody even knew where the key to the house was.

And all these farms are gone.

An agua business concern, about 10,000 acres, rents all the land.

The old farmhouses are rented out, mostly to people here illegally.

I just got back on my morning walk.

I saw three refrigerators, two dryers thrown in the orchard,

a bag of garbage, car seats.

and a stripped-down car that somebody stole and had dismantled.

And it's almost apocalyptic.

And maybe I'm being too dramatic, but

I really think that California is sort of the first example of a dystopia or decivilization that's happening across.

And I don't know how you can arrest it.

It just seems the more we get worried about it and say we're going to do something, it doesn't change.

And it's dysfunctional.

I drive to Stanford once a week or once every two weeks.

And when I was a graduate student, I could do it when we had a population of 18 million in about two and a half hours, and the roads are on change, and we have 40 million people.

And it's crazy.

It's like Road Warrior,

you know, the roads, the people, it's 40 million people for

everything you look, I don't see any encouragement anywhere.

And that's why I'm pretty pessimistic.

And then all the people that I meet that are talented and could have offered constructive, they've all left.

They've all gone to Nevada, Tennessee, Florida.

I never see people.

I went to Boise not long ago to speak, and I was walking by, about five people said, Hi, Victor.

I said, I know you.

And they said, yes, I'm from Fresno.

And the next guy, I said, well,

what happened?

He goes, well, there's a bunch of us from Fresno.

We love Boise.

We all left.

We never told anybody.

And I said,

so I don't want to end on a pessimistic moment, but I need some optimism from you, David, on Los Angeles or the state, anything?

That's a very interesting question.

You know, Dennis Prager always used to say that,

first off, he said 30 years ago we're in a civil war.

And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.

I get it.

I understand we're in the prodromo of a civil war, but not even that yet, but we certainly are now.

He also said he divided the left into liberals and leftists.

And he said he said he had no

fight.

with the liberals, but he did have a fight with the leftist.

And I always thought he was absolutely wrong.

I thought he had it absolutely upside down, that the leftists couldn't exist without the liberals.

And that's what I think now.

I think you're right.

I think they're the ones that empower them.

Sure.

So what we're looking at in California is some brain dead liberals who say

that they can afford

to

stay along the border because it doesn't affect them.

And then when it does affect them, the question is, do they change?

And I don't think they do.

I think they leave California.

I think that's it.

Their ideology, I think we're all lab rats or guinea pigs and they experiment on us.

And they assume that they're always exempt from the consequences of their ideology because of their zip code or their money or their titles.

But they do things like gas.

When I go to Palo Alto, it's $6.50.

I was in Michigan not too long ago.

It was $2.50.

And I see all these poor Mexican-American people and and illegals here paying $5.50 a gallon when California has the fourth largest oil reserves

and

they can't afford it.

So I go to the gas station.

It's a big line because it's a discount gas station.

They pay $20.

They fill up and they think, I got another $10.

I'll go back in and give them $10.

And I talked to all these people and said, I can't afford $140 for my truck.

But the people who did that policy of not drilling or driving out refineries or special blends, they don't care because they either have enough money or they don't drive 50 miles a day or something.

And that's true of the school system.

It's true of natural resources.

It's all a coastal elite from San Diego to Berkeley, about 15 million people that are some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world.

And they dictate for everybody else in the state.

And they never have to experience what they do to the schools or the infrastructure or race relations.

And they reminds me of a passage in Tacitus' history when this tribal chieftain goes to the Romans.

You know that passage, I think.

He says,

I can't negotiate with you people because you make a desert and call it peace.

Sorry.

Anyway.

Elon got it right.

He said it's the most expensive weather in the world.

I hadn't heard that.

Yeah, it's good.

It's true.

Let me just ask you your final thoughts because I so respect.

What do you think about Elon?

I think he's a Renaissance guy, and I really appreciate it.

I'm crazy about him.

And

here's the thing, that the perfect example of these idiots who say we have to have

electric vehicles, we have to have, in effect, it's praying to the sun god.

Oh, God of wind, power my house.

Oh, God of the sun, power my house.

Elon comes along with an electric car, and they say, thank you, thank you, because we're going to ban the internal combustion engine.

He goes to work for Trump and they say, kill him.

Yeah.

I mean, do we need to know anything more about the left?

I was thinking, to try to be dispassionate, I was thinking, I went back and looked at Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers.

He's not even like those people because

he's revolutionized.

I'm speaking to you on Starlink, and I'm out in the middle of nowhere.

He's brought internet to the world at an affordable price to inaccessible locations.

He revolutionized the EV.

My wife has a Tesla, and she swears by it.

And then we've got Neuralink, but he opened up social media and these rockets are incredible.

He's got more

I was listening to a talk by Larry Ellison, another guy that I had never heard, and I have so much respect for him.

He was absolutely brilliant.

He went through the entire...

one of the questions was, what do you think of Elon?

And he said something I never thought of.

He said, to the audience, how many satellites does the EU have and China have in the United States government?

He said, whatever they are, times two, that's Elon.

So he's done things that nobody, Henry Ford didn't.

He's in so many different fields, and

he's changed the life of so many million people that it's almost sacrilegious to do what they say about what they say about him and what they do to his branding

well it's it's it's savagery it is it is it's it reminds me

you know being on a campus what they say about israel too you know when you look at israel what it did it it really

it really empowered the united states by getting rid of Hamas and dealing with the Houthis and Hezbollah and taking out the air defenses of this

pernicious Iran and then their tech

system.

And every time I go to Israel, I cannot believe it.

I mean, Haifa looks like San Francisco did in Vertigo, that Hitchcock movie.

It looks clean, it's functional, everybody's happy.

And it's almost like Elon.

They hate it because it's so talented and successful.

And

I don't know what it is about.

It's a hatred of modernity, which is why a lot of the left embraced

Islam.

because it's pre-civilizational, I suppose.

But they seem to like, they like

every time I see somebody who doesn't like Israel, I always ask them, where did you stay?

Have you ever been to Israel?

And once in a while, they say yes, and they always say the same thing, the four seasons, King David.

Of course.

Why don't you stay in Ramallah?

Why don't you go to Gaza City?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's the same thing with

Elon.

I think that's why all these people are shocked.

There's always a story in the news that some guy is very left-wing, and he's shocked that somebody attacked his Tesla.

So

anyway,

we covered a lot of ground.

David, where can we get your book on the disenlightenment?

Amazon?

Oh, hold on.

You can get it on Amazon.

Absolutely so.

And you can look at my movie, Henry JohnsonMovie.com.

And

I think you'll enjoy it.

It's kind of an homage to maybe Ivanov by Chegov.

It's a guy who

thinks so well that he ends up

on a descent into hell.

When did it get online?

When did it...

I think just now as we...

Just now.

So we can get it now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hey, did you know that the president endorsed my book?

Did you know that?

All I knew was that he called you after, was that in June or when when you were on Bill Maher?

Oh, no, this was a couple of years ago.

He called me when he he was out of office when I was on Bill Maher.

Yeah.

And he said, I saw you on Bill Maher.

I thought you were great.

But P.S.,

he maneuvered you into saying you don't know whether the election was stolen or not.

David, the election was stolen.

Don't talk to me in 20 minutes.

It was great.

No, but this new book that just came out, The Disenlightenment, he tweeted, you got to, this is a great book.

You got to buy it.

That's great.

It's amazing.

That's great.

I was just thinking the other day about something.

There were two things about him that

I hadn't seen remarked about.

And when he ran before, I wrote about it, but it had nobody paid any attention.

He was the only candidate when he went to the Rust Belt or farming.

He used the first person.

personal pronoun our.

He said, I love our farmers.

I love our workers.

Our R.

And I never heard a politician say our.

And the other thing is, I was curious about what he says about Ukraine.

So I went back and I looked, I googled slaughter, bloodbath, catastrophe, tragedy, plus Obama, where they, you know, they invaded during 2014 on his watch.

Then I looked at Biden, nothing.

And then you look at Trump.

He always talks about

the human tragedy.

He always says, this is horrible.

These young people are being destroyed.

It's horrible.

This killing.

We've got to stop it.

But nobody else has ever said that.

It's always we can emasculate Putin or we've got to put Ukraine.

It's always geostrategic gobbledygook, but he's the only one that talks as if it's a Verdun or Somme or

Stalingrad.

1.6 million dead, wounded, and missing.

And it's going on and on.

But it really, I don't know if it's because he's a builder and he likes to build things and it doesn't make logic to destroy it.

Or I think it's more, he is, he actually, for all of the attacks on him as being crude and he's actually much more sensitive to the loss of human life than any other president that we've had.

It's on the record.

And I don't think people appreciate that about him.

Yeah, I love him.

I'm crazy about him.

He speaks English.

He sounds like a character in a lot of your plays, David.

Now, do you,

S.I.

Hayakawa?

Yes, I loved him.

I loved him.

Me too.

He wrote a book called Language and Thought and Action.

He's a great San Francisco State linguist.

That's right, San Francisco State.

That was about semantics and the early introduction to semantics.

And I get time for a quick story.

He says, here's an example.

He says, a guy talking about talking to the people.

He says, a guy from Oxford is campaigning for electoral reform

in Yorkshire, right?

And the guy in Yorkshire says to the Oxford guy, he says, what does all this mean, one man,

one vote?

What does that mean, one man, one vote?

And the guy from Oxford says, well, quite simply, it means one bloody man, one bloody vote.

And the Yorkshire man says, well, why the hell can't they say so?

He had that little, what was they called it, that little Tammersham or something?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then he ran for Senate, and they called him Sleeping Sam.

He would take a nap.

And they criticized him.

He's a one-term senator.

And he said, listen, I'm not going to go so easily.

My mom lived to be 97.

I think he he almost did too but he he was from he was on San Francisco State I think he was the provost or something and he walked by that free speech that said no loud music and they were yelling kill I don't know all that and he got up and he he pulled out all the chords on the and that made him famous everybody was waiting waiting for that moment and he gave it to them yeah good for him yeah anyway David it's been fascinating and I hope everybody goes out and buys David's book.

And

David is sort of like Elon Musk.

He really is.

Playwright, author, director, screenwriter.

He does it all.

And he does it with grace and humble.

He's humble, and he's an American, I don't know, an American fixture, American treasure.

And we really appreciate it, David.

Great talking to you, Victor.

Thank you.

Take care.