Left Ideology and Post-Civilizational World

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, but you're here to listen to the star and namesake.

That's Victor Davis-Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We are recording on Saturday, the 20th

of January, a few days out from the New Hampshire primary.

This show will come out that very day.

We'll have no discussion, Victor, on the outcome since we will not know it.

But we can talk about some other important matters, including a really interesting and telling a poll conducted by Scott Rasmussen for

the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, and it was about the elites of America, them versus us.

And

Kim Strossel at the Wall Street Journal had a really, really groovy breakdown of that poll.

And we'll start off this program today getting your thoughts about that poll and Kim's piece.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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So, Victor, as I mentioned, Scott Rasmussen conducted this poll.

I was on a briefing about it last week, and it was

embargoed.

And the embargo broke on Friday through an article in the Wall Street Journal written by Kim Strossel, the them versus us election.

And if you'll indulge me a second,

Victor,

some of the findings here.

What's the us versus them?

And the them,

or the us, depending on which side you're on, is the elites, the elite elites, the

postgraduate degrees, $150,000 plus salary, living in a major city or metropolitan area.

What are their views compared to the views of the rest of America?

And here's what Kim wrote, analyzing this survey.

Talk about out of touch.

Among the elites, 74%

say their finances are getting better compared with 20% of the rest of voters.

The share is 88% among elites who are Ivy League graduates.

The elite give President Biden an 84% approval rating, oh my God, compared with 40% from non-elites.

And their complete faith in fellow elites extends beyond Mr.

Biden.

Large majorities of them have a favorable view of university professors, 89%, journalists, 79%, lawyers and union leaders, 78%,

and even members of congress 67 percent two-thirds say they prefer a candidate who said teachers and educational professionals not parents should decide what children are taught victor there's a lot more here i won't torture our listeners anymore i recommend they go to the journal and find this piece Victor, I am confident you are not surprised.

No, you know,

I'm kind of guilty of using this word.

I think she had a really good point, Kim did, who's a very bright person.

And the poll suggests that it's not just income.

You can say that Donald Trump in some ways is not an elite, at least not culturally.

At least he's not seen as so by his enemies.

What I mean by that, Jack, is if you're, say, you're a Ford

car dealer in Lansing, Michigan, and you make $400,000 a year, but you're pretty conservative and you live among normal people versus you're a single techie who makes 200 in San Francisco and lives in a studio.

That is, and you have certain ideas.

So it's more your zip code, your worldview, the type of labor you do.

And yes, there is a minimum income that shields you from the consequences of your own ideology.

But what she's talking about is a culture that we've created.

And I think globalization had a lot to do with it.

That wasn't mentioned prominently in her article, but I think it does because

somewhere around 2000,

anybody who did something

by the nature of their labor, muscular labor, for example, or the nature of what they did, assembly, manufacturing, farming,

that was outsourced to Mexico, to Southeast Asia, but specifically, and particularly to China.

And real wages crashed.

And I saw it happen in the San Joaquin Valley when over a period of 10 years, family farms were just liquidated.

Suddenly, you get $23 a box for plums, and then it was four.

And then the land was consolidated, and people made up the difference in transportation, and shipping, and distribution, and brokerage.

They were vertically integrated and huge acreages, and they did fine under globalization.

And we kind of and then the people who had skills, mostly on the coast,

law, media, universities,

you could say international finance, insurance, anything that had a global market, suddenly

their consumer base went from 330 million, or at that time, probably 290, all the way up to 6 billion customers.

And then you had these huge mega, the Michael Bloomberg fortune, the Zuckerberg fortune, the

Warren Buffett fortune, etc., the Googles and the Apples and all that.

And they,

we've never seen that amount of money in the history of civilization and the people who surrounded them, the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in those types of industries, and they created a world view that they were not subject to market realities or taxes.

So in their view, They had all of their material wants satisfied.

They had beautiful homes.

They had perfect health care.

They had beautiful cars.

They went on vacation, but they felt they couldn't live forever.

So then they started

worrying about cosmic issues, global warming and DEI and ESG and radical abortion on demand.

And they felt that there were people who were obstacles to their vision of utopia, heaven on earth.

And those were variously named.

They came to be known as the Klingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, the chumps, the gregs, the crazies, the hobbits.

to quote John McCain and Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.

But essentially, it was a new group of people who had visions for the rest of us, electric trucks and Ford.

We're going to make electric trucks.

Joe Biden's going to drive one.

You're all going to buy one.

And then people said, well, no, I like my 36-gallon

fuel tank and I like to go 700 miles.

I don't want to have to look around to be charged up every 250 miles.

Sorry.

And they're not buying it.

I like my natural gas stove.

I was told that's the way to cook food.

It's a much more efficient way to do it.

It's more precise.

I like it.

And I was told by the power company 10 years ago to use natural gas for your hot water heater rather than electricity.

So they're just rebelling about against these people.

And we know who they are.

They're the people who put their kids in very tony prep schools and then rant and rave about charter schools and homeschools and how great the teachers unions are and how great diversity is, but they don't put their kids into those situations.

And they rave and rave and rave about climate change and da-da-da-da-da-da-da,

evils of air conditioning.

But in California, they live on the coast where it's 75 to 85 all year round.

And so

they're John Kariites.

They rail about carbon footprints.

They fly on private jets.

And so that's what they're talking about.

And that's what this election is really shaping up to be, as we saw on Davos.

That was one of the most, you know, just to veer off a little bit, that was one of the most crazy things.

I've been watching these clips from various presentations at Davos.

Right.

And you, Jack, when you hear these people

start issuing these warnings that what might happen to the United States under Trump, they're just surreal.

This one guy, I think he was German or French or I don't don't know what he was, but he said,

the world is under attack.

There's wars everywhere right now.

There's wars everywhere.

It's very uncanny what will happen if Donald Trump comes in with those wars?

You think, hey, wait a minute, there were no wars when Donald Trump was here.

There was no Ukrainian war.

There was no Afghan humiliation.

There was no Hamas invasion.

The Red Sea was open.

Iran was corralled.

Do you ever get the picture that all of these wars you're talking about were caused by your ideology as manifested by Joe Biden?

It's just, it's just a complete disconnect.

It's so funny.

And I was watching Rachel Mattel, Jack.

You probably saw when she cut Trump's acceptance speech, which actually was really strange because

of all the speeches Donald Trump has given,

They can be crude, they can be mean, but that speech was conciliatory.

He said he wanted to work with Democrats.

He wanted it, and they cut it.

And they said, we can't have this disinformation.

We can't.

And I thought, you sat there every night at your desk, Rachel Maudow, and you told us chapter and verse about

Trump as the Putin asset, Russian collusion.

Then you went into full gear with Russian disinformation and the laptop was cooked up in Russia.

And then you went into the alpha bank ping.

You went into the Ukrainian phone call.

And you're shameless to say that this man is disinforming us when that was your trademark.

For years, you misled the American people.

So that is what that poll is about.

That's what Kim is talking about.

A group of people in the United States, a minority, who,

because of globalization and the types of things that they produce,

basically cerebral things or abstract things or financial things or insurance or law, they have done made out like bandits.

And the people who weld and fabricate and farm and mine

haven't done so well.

And these people are deemed roadblocks to their vision of utopia because they worry about things like I can't afford my power bill.

I need to have affordable gasoline.

I need to be able to turn up the thermostat to 68 in the winter.

Please, my kids are not learning in school.

And so they have different values and different concerns.

And that's why we're starting to also hear this weird attack on democracy from the elite left.

You know, you have to destroy democracy to save it.

You can't allow these people to vote.

They may vote for Donald Trump.

You got to get him off the ballot in Colorado.

You got to get him off the ballot in Maine.

You've got to get him, you've got to put him behind bars.

These stupid people may vote for him.

So I think that it was a very good article and a good poll.

Yeah, one of the

survey numbers was that nearly 50% of the elites believe the U.S.

provides, quote, too much individual freedom.

Isn't that nice of them?

Hey, Victor, you mentioned Tavos and right.

It's a great count, this poll, which by the way, folks want to see the poll.

I know that the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, that's the group founded by Steve Moore

and

Art Laffer, Laffer, Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow.

Larry used to be part of it before he went into the administration.

They underwrote it, paid for it, and it's up on their website.

So, if you're interested in it, but it's a great counterpoint with Davos happening at the same time.

And

I just, amongst the many, you mentioned some weirdnesses there.

And here's a headline: World Economic Forum, that's what Davos's

official name is, introduces international criminal category of ecocide to criminalize farming, fishing, and energy production.

I guess we really are supposed to eat bugs

at the beginning of the year.

Why don't they criminalize private jets?

There's a thousand of them parked there.

And why don't they criminalize prostitution?

We're told that high-priced escorts are in short supply.

The demand is

so great at Davos, they can't meet it.

So

why don't they just ban, I have

a polite suggestion.

Why don't they just say that if you have over 8,000 square feet, you're leaving too big of a carbon footprint and therefore you'll have to pay taxes or cut off part of your house.

They never do that.

They never apply these standards that they want to enforce on all the middle class to themselves.

And they're really like the French aristocracy of the 18th century, the Bourbons.

They really are.

You know, like Tally Rand said that often, quote, they learn nothing, they forgot nothing, they learn nothing, and they've forgotten nothing.

They just keep at it no matter, you know, all of the lies that they've, you know, all the George Floyd lies, the January 6th lies, the COVID lies,

the insurrection, quote-unquote, armed insurrection.

All of these lies, they don't care.

They just keep going.

And the Davos thing, everything they've said at Davos the last 20 years has been false.

Remember the guy, Joe, Jack, in 2000, he said that we should just kiss snow goodbye, that nobody would ever see it again?

That was, you know,

I went up to my little cabin in Huntington Lake and last year, and I looked like an igloo, a two-story,

and you had to dig a tunnel to get into it.

And there was an accumulated over the winter 90 feet.

And so

what they tell us and what you see in real life have nothing to do with each other, nothing to do, nothing to do at all.

Right.

And then they do things that are so crazy.

They tell us now all of a sudden that being morbidly obese.

I was looking at the sports illustrated bikini person who was very, very heavy.

The psychological damage of saying that someone is overweight far outweighs the actual cholesterol damage or diabetes damage that

overweightness entails.

So they just make stuff as they go.

And,

you know.

Right.

Like, like it was okay to

rally and riot in the streets.

I mean,

I'll be candid.

I looked at,

if you look at the FBI crime statistics or what comes out of the DOJ, or you do it anecdotally and look at TikTok and TikTok and you see smash and grab or carjacking, it's mostly African-American males.

It is.

And yet, we're told by the elite, they don't discuss it.

They will not discuss it.

And yet, they feel that if 12% of the population is 55% in commercials, they've solved the problem of high crime inordinately committed by one demographic.

And that's how they deal with things.

They really do.

And

did you see it?

There was a story that came out today, Victor, about a high school fight in Minnesota,

the town of St.

Louis, where it was blacks versus Somalian kids.

They got in the summer.

And I don't know now if Somalians

are racist, even though they're black.

It's so weird how race is, it's not weird.

Race is the shield and the sword and everything

of the left.

It's why Black Lives Matter, right?

Joe Biden Biden bragged that he said in 20 years that so-called white people would not be the majority.

This is great.

Okay, we get all that.

It doesn't really matter what color we are, but if it does matter, if you're reverting to tribalism and that your superficial appearance is essential to who you are rather than incidental, that's what they're doing.

And so why wouldn't you have a Hobbesian war of everybody against everybody once you start to re-tribalize?

And, you know, when I was watching Jory Reed's clips the other day, I cannot believe that woman.

She has a major platform and she is a 19th century racist.

She just goes out and says that people in Iowa are just racist because they're evangelical and they're white.

She says that moms for liberty are the daughters of American Revolution or Confederate people.

They're racist.

If you just took the word white and substitute black and any other person said that, they would be off the air in two seconds.

It's just incredible.

And

it's like Fannie Willis.

I mean, here she is on a tape, I guess, four years ago saying she will not tolerate sexual relations between members of her office.

And if she finds it, they're going to be dismissed.

And the taxpayers are not going to pay for sexual harassment suits under her.

They're going to fire people.

And here she is, who hires someone who is not not qualified, never tried once a criminal case,

put him in charge at a greater pay than the other person who was much more qualified, used the money to junk it around the United States, kept it quiet, helped him suppress the divorce records.

And there's so many things that are wrong.

And then what does she do?

She says it's all about going after a powerful black woman.

And that mentality has been created.

It accelerated during George Floyd, but I don't think these people realize they're creating a racist society.

They really are when people identify by their race and we just say, well, it's because it's a past race.

No, it's not.

Fannie Willis and Letita James or Alvin Bragg can't point to places where the situations where they're victims of racism.

Kamala Harris can't.

Michelle Obama can't.

Well, maybe,

you know, in the way that we all get snubbed, it would be like, Victor, can you cite personal races?

Yeah, if I had to say how many times from K through 12, I was called a gringo in a community that was 60, 70%,

I could never do it.

Was that racism?

I guess.

Did it matter?

No,

not at all.

But

I heard it all the time when I grew up.

And, you know, it was.

But you'd go drinking with those people too, right?

No.

It was sort of like the people in high school that I hung out and I hung out with again.

There were two types of

people who were so-called marginalized, Mexican-American people.

There were the majority who didn't care anything about how you looked.

And then there were the people who were the Larazaites or Chicanos or Chucos.

They were called pachucos or batos.

That's what they were.

We were calling them either Chuccos or Vatos.

And they were in gangs and they were racist.

And maybe it was because they were poor, they came from Mexico, or to be candid, they came from southern Mexico.

And when I was growing up, most of the people came from northern Mexico and they came legally and they were sort of completely integrated, intermarried, assimilated, and nobody cared.

And the Vatos or the Chucos would call them white Mexicans.

and they'd make fun of them.

And then the other one would call them wetbacks.

And

that was the extent of it.

It was bad.

But I mean,

if you were in a minority and I my entire life, and I'm in a minority now in my community,

I don't go around and say, wow,

everybody in my community doesn't look like me.

The police chief doesn't look like me.

The mayors, the city council, the school teachers, the superintendents.

I go into the drugstore, I go into the health center.

I don't see anybody who looks like me.

I'm a victim.

No, I'm not.

I don't care how people look.

It's just the way it is.

But when you start to do that and re-tribalize, when you're a Joy Reed or you're Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin or you're the bicosto elite, and you think you're going to start to re-tribalize the country and destroy meritocracy and just start looking at the way people look, regardless of class or their individual circumstances, then you are lighting, you're putting a match to to gasoline because what you will do is you will go into full bore Yugoslavia and everybody will start to re-tribalize and start.

And I've mentioned that before on podcasts.

Sometimes I get up really early and I go to various stores before people come in.

And usually they're rural people who get up very early and they're the only people there.

And

they're probably 20% of the population in these towns that are still white,

so-called white.

Well, everybody's intermarried, so it doesn't really matter matter that much as far as classifications, but they will talk to you.

Hey, how are you doing?

Good to see you.

Do I know you?

No.

But it's some kind of unspoken solidarity that I've never seen in my lifetime before.

But it's a reaction to this tribalism.

And I can see it even in sophisticated places at Stanford, because when you when you have 60, 70% of the population is so-called white and you restrict it to 21%

of the incoming classes, then you're, and you tell them every single day that the I-D-E-I and that you people are culpable, you people, this is a generation that grew up 30 years after the civil rights movement.

And you keep telling them that, they're going to start to get freaked out.

I can see it already on campus.

And

it doesn't stop.

The more that you start to judge people by the color of their skin and destroy merit, the more that empowers them.

And then the more problems you have with people continuing to do that.

We saw that with Claudine Gay.

Harvard thought, wow, she came from Stanford.

She got tenure with four articles.

We're not going to read them or examine them.

We're going to give her tenure as a professor.

We're going to make her an administrator.

We're going to make her a dean.

We're going to make her president.

And at each state,

they made that decision on the base of her race and gender and ideology.

Had she been a brilliant woman in the fashion of Tom Sowell or Shelby Steele or Glenn Lowry or someone like that, she would have never gotten there.

So don't fool ourselves.

It's more than just race.

It's ideology.

But my point is, they thought they were at the end of history then, that Claudine Gay was president and she'll be here for 30 years.

They didn't realize that once you start to give exemptions,

it's like an addict.

You have to keep giving a fix.

So then when she plagiarized, well, it was duplicative language.

Oh, it was just a misstep.

It was kind of copying.

It wasn't really intellectual theft.

Or she got confused during that hearing.

Oh, that people were after her.

Or race was the whole thing.

You just have to keep doing that.

And finally, the weight of the lies becomes so overwhelming, they crush you.

And that's what happened to Harvard.

And I think you can make the argument, to get off topic a bit, that Claudine Gay has done more, maybe inadvertently, but the events swirling around her has done more damage to Harvard than anything in the last 50 years.

And it has single-handedly really tarnished the name of Harvard.

And I think

the same thing about Stanford University.

You can say the Judge Duncan law school incident, the euphemism language, you can't use certain words like patriot or American,

or the whole controversy about the president, or certain people in the faculty senate, all of these scandals, the Sam Bankman, have done, they've kind of destroyed

the reputation of the university I'm in.

Yeah.

You've talked about this with Stanford graduates, but I could see quiet conservative business owners saying

regarding Harvard,

I am not hiring anyone.

I hear it all the time.

I hear it.

I think what's going to happen is people are going to say, God, you're going to spend a quarter million dollars and your child's going to come home at Thanksgiving

of her first year and she's not going to recognize you.

She's going to start, after you're paying and borrowing $100,000 for her education, she's going to start lecturing you about all of your

liberalities.

You'd want to go through that.

And then when she graduates and you ask her, okay, can you name the 10 amendments that form the Bill of Rights?

Can you tell me what, I don't know, the checks and balances between legislative, executive, and judicial branches?

Maybe give me a little excursus on what caused World War II.

Can you tell me anything about

Benito Mussolini and what he did in Italy and the damage?

They don't know anything.

And yet, so who wants, and then when you add that know-nothingism to the arrogance,

one person said to me, I don't want to get one of these guys because they do two things.

They haven't been taught in the fundamentals of the craft that we're hiring them for because the curriculum has been watered down.

And then they're HR junkies.

They go to human relations and they complain.

And that's this generation.

So we'd much rather have a guy from Texas A ⁇ M or University of Florida or Georgia Tech.

And I think that's going to happen.

I think these other universities, University of Florida is a good example under Ben Sasa.

I know a lot of the listeners think he's, you know, he was an Ever Trumper, but he's doing a wonderful job at the University of Florida.

There's a great piece

about him

in Toronto and

today's January 23rd.

It's a very good piece.

It's a very good piece.

And he's

if he gets his way and Ron DeSantis is still governor for another three and doesn't take an appointment.

If Donald Trump should win the nomination, but if they can continue that in three years, that will be the harbor of the South and the trajectory it's going.

Because once you create, you create real freedom and real exchange of thoughts and you go back to meritocracy, did you see the SAT score, I mean scores they're getting at Florida, 1450 and 1430?

I mean, pretty damn good.

Yeah.

Do you really think right now when you've thrown out the SAT

at Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and you've thrown out comparative evaluations of GPAs based on the rigor of their high schools, and you put emphasis on the DEI statement that you're going to get a superior student to the people who are applying to Florida that have to have a particular SAT score or GPA from a rigorous high school.

I don't think so.

It's going to happen very quickly, the change.

And it's happening right now.

You can see it.

You really can see it.

Well,

I again recommend folks read that.

Ben, who is a friend, and he is really a smart guy and a visionary on the education front.

So that's a very welcome piece.

Hey, Victor, though, we have to talk about some more academic lunacy mixed with race at Rice University.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

And before I get to that subject about a professor, Brooke Johnson, who teaches chemistry at Rice, I do want to take a very brief moment here to welcome our new sponsor, Tax Network.

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So, Victor,

I follow Eli Steele religiously on, I'll still call it Twitter, just to torque some of our listeners who can't stand it.

Sorry, X.

And he has this post about Brooke Johnson, who's, it says a preceptor in chemistry.

I must admit my ignorance.

I'm not, you know, I assume preceptor is not even an assistant professor, but whatever.

And this is the course she is teaching.

It's Afrochemistry, the study of Black Life Matter.

It's a three-credit course, and it says that students, here's the course description, students will apply chemical tools and analysis to understand Black life in the U.S.

and students will implement African-American sensibilities to analyze chemistry.

Diverse historical and contemporary scientists, intellectuals, and chemical discoveries will inform personal reflections and proposals for addressing inequities in chemistry and chemical education.

This course will be accessible to students from a variety of backgrounds, including STEM and non-STEM disciplines.

No prior knowledge of chemistry or African-American studies is required for engagement in this course.

And there is no final exam.

This is Rice University.

Chemistry Department Afrochemistry course.

You know, it really reminds me of Stalinism when

there was a Stalinist science.

You know, you're going to drain the Ural Sea, it's brilliant because Stalin said so.

And Comissars and the Red Army in 1941 and 42 had certain,

it's counter-revolutionary to have a strategic retreat.

We don't do that.

700,000 people captured and killed because of that.

Or Hitler's

crazy ideas of making an America four-engine bomber to fly all the way to the United States and divert

very

scarce resources against something

from something that would be very valuable, like an 88-millimeter platform artillery gun.

And that's what it was.

It was ideology that was governing science and productivity and allotment of resources.

So there is no such thing as white chemistry or African-American.

It's just chemistry.

And there's a general rule that when you look at all of these courses, if they have the word intersectional or intersectionality or my truth, anything that suggests that in lieu of real knowledge, they should be given a pass because they're intersectional.

They have different so-called oppressed groups that are interested in it, or that you have a relativist my truth versus the universal truth, they're completely bogus.

So what are they going to, if you say if you're a young person that is African-American and you have aptitude for chemistry, what you want to do is take as many rigorous

empirical, intuitive courses in chemistry as you can.

And you want to be the best chemist you can be.

You know,

you mentioned that once.

The thing I remember most, Jack, when I was in 1962, I think it was eight or nine, and my mom pushed me through the door of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco when Martin Luther King was there.

We were I was the only, I was kind of a,

I don't know, wandering kid, and I wandered ahead of my parents right when they shut the doors because it was sold out.

And then he walked around

the edge of the church before he spoke and said hello to everybody.

And then he went to the pulpit and he had that famous speech.

I don't care what you are.

If you're the janitor, I want you to be the best janitor.

If you are a landscaper, you be the best.

And the point he was saying is that only through excellence, excellence in these fields are African Americans going to be to progress.

And that's what he meant against all of the endemic hindrances and blockages, if you could still overcome it and be the best.

And that message has been completely lost.

There is no such thing as African-American chemistry.

It doesn't exist.

It's just chemistry.

And

why wouldn't Rice, that's a great university, why wouldn't they emphasize that?

Why would they allow that to happen and give these false narratives that's just going to confuse people?

Or it's going to ask for one, that class will give you exemptions or it'll give you grievances.

And then when you take a real chemistry class and you don't do well because you didn't study hard enough, then you will be given rationales why the course did not, I don't know, address your needs or your

the biases of the professor.

It's Stalinist.

It's Hitlerian.

It's this idea that ideology starts to destroy empirical knowledge and the quest for truth.

And any society, and there's a lot of them, whether it's Cuba or Venezuela or Mao's China

or Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, whenever you take ideology and you start to massage

disciplines like science, biology, math, calculus, or you start to say things like Jewish physics, the best thing that ever happened to the Allies was the Nazi Party had something called Jewish physics.

And that was particle matter and the types of pure physics that was necessary in an applied sense to create the bomb.

And

all during the 1930s and mid

late 30s, they dubbed Einsteinian physics Jewish physics.

And the result was the West got all of these refugees that helped, you know, in New Mexico create our bomb before they got it.

And so there's a terrible history there.

And I don't know why we allow this to happen.

I really don't.

Where is the president of that university?

Where's the dean?

Where can he say we're not going to have

Asian chemistry?

We're not going to have white physics.

We're not going to have Chicano math.

It's just not going to happen.

I'm sorry.

And if everybody would still,

I don't know, you could stop it in a second.

But Victor, if there was someone, you know, Chris Ruffo's duplicate would take half an hour a day.

They could every day populate a Twitter feed with a daily nutball, nutcase professor like this one.

That's not even nutty.

Nutty is weird.

This is, you know, evil.

It's anti-civilizational.

It really is.

It's tribal.

It's anti-civilizational.

You keep doing stuff like this.

You're United Airlines, and you keep saying that if you're the CEO, your goal is to be DEI and not to be the safest airline and the most efficient, then you're going to have real problems.

It's starting to filter down to the basics of society.

I'm living in a community where

right, I think, 12 miles away where I bought my infamous Echo Diesel,

there was a policeman shot the other day, who shot in broad daylight.

And who was he shot by?

A felon who had been let out four times for violent offenses.

And they won't reveal his immigration status.

But when you start to tinker with all these theories and ideologies rather than just practical stay to the truth,

follow the law,

reinforce the system, then

it starts to break down.

It's very important people understand that because Some of the great questions in history are what what?

Why did the Byzantine Empire that lasted a thousand years in hostile neighborhood why in the 15th century did it just implode and why was it destroyed and why did Rome that lasted

well it lasted for 1500 years republican empire why in the fifth century AD did it unwind and and you can you can find the answers very easily that people in a particular generation stopped believing the received wisdom customs traditions that had been successful from prior generations because, usually, because they were pretty affluent, or they were leisured, or they were pampered, or whatever the particular reason was, they started to believe in ideologies or thought patterns or narratives that were contrary to the values that had created them.

And so, when you look at the society and you see a war on the past, oh, our ancestors were racist, oh, they put up racist statues,

You want a war in the past?

Then you're going to be war because people are going to look at this generation.

I've said this before.

What did they do?

What did they do?

They inherited San Francisco and they created a desert.

They inherited New York, the Giuliani Bloomberg, New York.

It's uninhabitable.

That's what they did.

And yet that generation that gave us the homeless epidemic, the 8 million coming in from the border, the worst racial tensions in history since the, I don't know, the periods of the 1950s, or they gave us

lockdowns, or they gave us rioting, insurrection, that real insurrection in May, June, July, August of 2020, or they started taking,

what did they do?

They didn't do anything.

And yet they're the most critical of prior generations.

And every time,

you know, when I've had a conversation with one of these people, you just say, if it was so bad, why are so many people coming across the border?

Why isn't there a big sign by President Obador?

Warning, do not step foot across that border.

There is white rage, white privilege, white supremacy.

It is an unfair society.

It is not sensitive to marginalized people like we are in Mexico.

Do not go there.

It doesn't work.

I don't know why they don't say that.

So when Joy Reed goes on her harangue, does she ever take a deep breath and say, why did my parents immigrate here?

Why didn't we just stay in an indigenous country?

Why didn't Claudine Gay, who's so critical, why didn't her parents say, We don't want to come to the United States.

We have a monopoly, very rich in Haiti.

They've got the biggest cement plant.

It's a monopolistic government, private enterprise scam, probably.

And we're very wealthy.

We're aristocratic.

Why would we want to go to that racist society?

But nobody ever does that.

So they,

just to finish this rant,

what they're saying is, privately, I'm so glad I'm in the United States.

I'm so glad that the founders created this wonderful thing called the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the Declaration.

I'm so happy of the history and traditions of pre-market capitalism, private property, individual liberty, security, prosperity.

That's why I'm here, but I can't say that.

So I want to, it doesn't do anything for me.

It doesn't help my career.

So what I'm going to do is just blast this awful place that under no circumstances will I leave.

You can really see it with the crazy lunatic on hinge pro-Hamas demonstrations, whether they're going outside Sloan Kettering Hospital to yell at some many Jewish kids that are dying of cancer or shutting down the bridges in San Francisco or New York, or you name the atrocious thing they're doing.

And then they're cheering on

Hamas, but you say to them, you know, Genocide Joe.

Okay, he's Genocide Joe.

We agree.

He's bad.

The country's bad.

And Hamas is noble.

So go over there.

Just go over there, please.

We promise we will never go to Gaza ever again.

Anybody who's in America, make a deal.

Nobody will ever go to Gaza.

But everybody from Gaza who is not a citizen and here on a green card or student visit, would you please go home and enjoy that wonderful society?

And they don't do that.

You've written about

pretty powerfully about Hamas and the riots in the streets.

looking at another angle of October 7th and the reaction to it.

Is there an insurrection going on here?

And let's get your fuller thoughts on that, Victor, right after

these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

And before Victor

raised that again about your

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So, Victor, this past week you wrote a significant post on Twitter, X, by the way, you're over 500,000 followers now, half a million.

So

onward to a million.

And it raises to me and others and yourself about what is insurrection?

We focus on, there was an insurrection on January 6th.

And it's a pretty elastic term, I think.

It's a pretty politicized term.

And is it applicable to what we're seeing in the streets of our major cities and in the the really nasty and troubling harassment and sometimes murder of Jewish Americans.

If I may just say, there's a piece in a commentary magazine that just came out by John Pedaritz.

It's titled, They're Coming After.

I read it.

I read it.

It's a very good essay.

John wrote a very good essay.

Yeah.

So this is, you know, what is insurrection?

If what happened on January 6th is insurrection, isn't what the Hamasophiles doing?

No,

insurrection means one thing.

Let's be clear about it.

Insurrection, if you have a new American dictionary, it says a term of libel used against protest of conservatives or people on the right that on occasion get out of control and become temporarily riotous.

That's what insurrection is.

It does not mean people on the left going into the Capitol Rotunda and shutting it down.

It does not mean people in June of 2020 swarming the fence separating the White House grounds from Lafayette Park and trying to get in there to kill or...

swarm Donald Trump.

It does not mean burning a federal courthouse or a police precinct with police in it or historic St.

John's Episcopal Church.

It does not mean Hamas, pro-Hamas people going in the California legislature and stopping it.

It does not mean trying to shut down entry into Sloan Kettering Hospital.

It does not mean taking over the Manhattan Bridge or San Francisco at commute time.

It doesn't mean hitting a pinata in front of everybody at UCLA as you say, beat the effing Jew.

And that's what is not insurrection, according to these people.

And at some point,

you know, I think a lot of people are getting very, very angry at these

protests.

I've said it before on this show,

Jack, but I'd just like to reiterate or maybe elaborate.

What we're seeing

in the pro-Israel marches, and there's not very many of them anymore,

and the pro-Hamas

marches are simply mirror imaging the dichotomy that's going on now in the Middle East.

Because we have to remember there was no war between Hamas.

There was no Jews, no Israelis.

They had left Gaza.

Gaza had its first luxury hotel that Hamas had got from foreign money.

They were the recipients over the last 20 years of autonomy of billions of dollars, billions.

They created without money the most sophisticated and largest labyrinth of military tunnels in the world.

That's what they did with their money.

And on October 7th, at a time of peace, they went in and slaughtered somewhere between 11 and 1,300 people.

And they beheaded them, and they committed necrophilia, and they tortured women, as they raped them, and they dismembered people, and they torched them.

Okay.

And what are we learning now?

We're learning the most macabre things from these stories.

As they were raping women, they were stabbing them with a knife.

We're now, I don't know if you saw the story this week of a father trying to bury his son and they said, we do not want you to look at the casket.

The Israeli authorities did.

And he said, I have to.

It was headless and he found out that the Hamas civilians who came in

on word that if you follow the militants, the gunmen, the terrorists, the killers,

and you follow and you got Israeli civilians and you drag them back, then you could get up to $10,000 bounty.

So they got, killed a young man in the IDF and beheaded him and took the head back to sell it.

And they found it in a refrigerator in Gaza.

So I could go on, but, and they're sending, you know, of course, 7,000 rockets.

Now it's probably up to 8,000 without any warning, deliberately at civilians.

And we are taking all of that and we're...

we're conflating it with the IDF that's trying to stop these people who are hiding under hospitals and mosques and schools and using human shields and enlisting Gazan civilians to hold hostages and trying not to kill people and wanting them to get out.

And we're saying that the response is amoral and the people who started it and committed this pre-civilizational barbarity is moral.

And here at the United States, we see Jewish students who are accused of being Zionist, who are following the rules and following the law when they do occasionally demonstrate.

And the people who chase them in, chase them into libraries and surround them, or in the case near Us in Los Angeles, hit somebody

with a megaphone and kill them, or chant from the river to the sea, which is a genocidal.

We're saying that's okay.

But my point is that there's a reason why the people demonstrating for Hamas

are so asymmetrical with the people demonstrating against it.

And the same differences take place in Gaza between how the IDF conducts war and how Hamas conducts war.

And I think that's,

and I'd like to see somebody deny it.

Just tell me, you're wrong.

No, beheading is perfectly legitimate in war.

And selling heads is what we do.

And if you rape, you've got to stab a woman at the same time.

And there's nothing wrong with mutilating corpses.

That's just, they drove us to do that.

And if you put a baby in a microwave, that is legitimate too.

Just like here in the United States, you can shut down the Golden Gate when there's people trying to get home.

In some cases, emergency vehicles can be stopped.

There's nothing wrong with going

out in front of a cancer ward, looking at kids in the window and yelling, screaming threats to their existence.

That's fine too.

And I just don't think people are going to accept that.

I really don't.

I think one of the things that some polls have been showing, Jack, is that the support for Israel has gone up in direct proportion to these pro-Hamas demonstrations.

Because

if you go down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and you deface the National Military Cemetery, nobody's going to be for that.

Nobody's going to be for that at all.

If you throw paint as if it's blood on the Lincoln Memorial, nobody's going to be for that.

You know, or these guys that get out of their cars and actually drag these douchebags off the road while they're blocking traffic.

They're applauded.

They're lauded by

the rest of us.

You know, like, I wish I was in that situation and had the courage to do the same thing.

Yeah, no, they are.

And I think people are,

I think what we're trying to sum up, everyone, is that

I don't want to be an alarmist, but there's a growing anger and there's a growing worry that civilization as we know it is accelerating into

not just into decline, but into nothingness.

It's being destroyed.

And we know the remedy, but we feel the remedy is impossible because it's,

I don't know, it's politically incorrect or what.

We could shut the border down tomorrow.

We could tell Mexico, instead of taking a bribe from Joe Biden, and I think that's what they did, because they're starting to do what they could have done

three years ago, we could shut it down tomorrow.

We could finish the wall and just say, you know what?

You've got 30 days to make sure nobody comes near the wall.

And if you don't, it's 5% on the 60 billion remittances.

And then if you don't do it in 30 days, it's 10.

And we could just go in up to its 50% and cut off $60 billion.

And they would really react.

And we could stop all of the madness with Iran.

We don't want a war with Iran.

Nobody wants a war.

But we could put sanctions on them that would cripple them.

tomorrow.

And we could do the same thing with the Houthis and all of these people.

But we, I don't know, we just, you know, we can't do it.

And we could stop the smash and grab tomorrow.

All you'd have to do is have one mayor who say we're going to enforce the law as it's written.

And the police are going to arrest people.

And if they're found guilty, they're going to be incarcerated.

And that would stop it.

But we can't do it.

Yeah, I'd like to.

This isn't a commercial, but it is a plug for your website, the blade of perseusvictorhansen.com.

And I do want to encourage our listeners to visit it.

If you care about

Victor's various appearances, you'll find links to them there.

The archives of this podcast, you'll find them there.

His pieces for American Greatness, his weekly syndicated column, links there.

You'll also find ultra articles, which

you won't be able to read unless you're a subscriber.

It's $5 a month, discounted at $50

for for a year.

Victor writes about three ultra pieces a week, exclusive pieces for the Blade of Perseus.

So please go there and you will regret not having done so sooner.

But you'll also find, Victor, and this gets into something we've just been talking about, you've been talking about a link to your forthcoming book, The End of Everything, how

wars descend into annihilation.

And I'm just curious, Victor, about the book.

You know, the subtitle is what it is, but

I can imagine a robust society

being

annihilated because of war, but I would imagine a society that's going to be annihilated is already on that path.

In the epilogue, I have a typology of why the Carthaginians or the Byzantines or classical Thebes

got into that situation of vulnerability.

Part of it is there's an arrogance that this can't happen here.

here.

Nobody has ever bridged the walls of Constantinople, the land wall, never once.

Even in our decline, they can't do it.

Nobody has ever, even Scipio Africanus at the end of the Second Punic War, didn't dare try to go over the walls of Carthage.

Classical Thebes is seven-gated Thebes.

This Tenochitlan, we control 4 million people.

We control the whole lake.

around Tenochitlan.

So there was a disbelief and there is an inability to realize that the imperial power is waning because we're just like right now, we're Americans.

It can't happen.

And then there's this idea that

the people that you're dealing with are not

existentially

going to destroy you or they don't hate you or there.

You can reason with them.

Yes, we've dealt with the Romans on two Punic Wars, and each time they did not destroy Carthage.

They won the first Punic War, they won the second, and we were still here.

So if we lose, no, this time they're going to destroy you, and every single person in this city is going to be dead or enslaved.

And your city is going to be leveled, and it's going to be uninhabited, the land that was on top.

And there's going to be no more Punic dialect, and you're going to be history.

You understand that?

And they didn't.

They didn't quite get that until

it was too late.

And the same thing with Constantinople.

Well, we can deal.

We've always dealt with the Ottomans.

They don't want to, why would they want to destroy us?

We have the Genovese.

We have the Florentines.

We have the Venetians here.

We bring in gunpowder, sophisticated weapons.

This is their window on the West.

They use our technology.

We've gotten along with them.

It's not worth the effort to try to storm Constantinople.

It's a bastion.

You can't take it.

No, no, no.

They wanted to, Mehmet II once.

wanted to destroy you and his son really wants to destroy you.

He really wants to destroy you.

And they couldn't get that message across.

And then the people who destroy don't come in, they don't come in with a forked tongue and horns like a Hitler.

They're usually philosophers, Jack.

Alexander the Great.

Aristotle was his tutor.

He wouldn't really want to level Thebes.

He's not a cutthroat.

He's a humane man.

He's learned.

No, he's a thug.

And, you know, Scipio Africa, Scipio Aemilianus, the Scipianic

Circle, he has playwrights around him.

And when he destroyed Carthage, he felt so bad he cried.

He said, I didn't want to do it.

So did the Sultan.

I didn't want to destroy Constantinople.

I'm the next Caesar.

Cortez, he writes to Charles V, I didn't really want to destroy Tenochtitlan.

They made me do it.

So there's a pattern there.

And when you can see that people,

I don't think that people quite realize that we have some existential enemies right now, and they have capabilities that that we're not talking about.

If you start to read, and what I try to do now, Jack, is I look at certain articles

and I try to correlate them.

One of them is that Joe Biden has not been updating our nuclear deterrent into Sentinel new missiles, and we're way behind on that.

And the Chinese know that.

They've added 300

additional nuclear missiles, and you know who they're pointed at, us.

My point is, if you don't do that, you're not going to have a deterrent to make them see that that would be stupid to attack us.

We have no missile defense.

We're $34 trillion in debt.

Even Donald Trump said the other day he can't look at Social Security.

I don't know.

I think you should look at Social Security.

You have to look at everything.

We're $34 trillion in debt.

We just borrowed $2 trillion.

$800 billion is the interest tap.

It's going to be a trillion in about three years.

You're going to be financially insolvent.

And,

you know, when you go to San Francisco, I think people don't realize it.

It's, as Hemingway said, it's gradually that it's suddenly.

They should read what the letters of Jerome are what Augustine was talking about at Hippo

when the Vandals came in and at Carthage.

And it's sudden, but it's gradual.

And they were living in a society what they understood was falling apart.

And when you go to San Francisco and you see that beautiful city just 10 years ago with all that tech money and nightlife and clean, and you know, Jack, I think I met you there a couple of times for National Review

regional lectures where they had three or four of us give lectures.

And I can remember walking back.

I think they put us at the Hyatt.

I could walk back by myself at 10.30.

It was perfectly safe.

I parked my car in the street overnight.

You'd be crazy to do that today.

And if you go into a drug, there's nothing in the, even in my local pharmacy, there's not stuff.

It's all locked up.

So my point is, I don't think that we realize, because it's so insidious, how close we are to implosion.

We just keep saying, well,

okay, you just kind of step over the crap on the, on the, you know, there's a clover leaf right near my house and people camp out in it.

down in the uh where the trees are.

And I just ride by and think, oh, there's another guy out there, big deal, defecating out there, no problem.

Oh, I went to the,

you know, I went to Walgreens.

There's another thing locked up.

Didn't know that.

Just locked up.

Oh, I went to Costco the other day.

You know, instead of just handing them your little tag and they kind of look real quickly and they sign it off, they're looking, looking, looking because they are confronted with mass theft.

And so every single thing.

is starting to then you look you start to look at certain you know cosmic forces you start to see your friends, your family, and you start looking at young males, and you start to notice something.

Wow, they're not married.

Wow, they're in their 30s.

Wow, they have bachelor's degrees or master's degrees.

Or wow, they don't have homes.

Wow, they don't have children.

We have a whole, and then you think, well, Victor, in 2000, it was 2.1 fertility rate.

Now it's 1.78.

So that's what you're talking about.

There's a whole, and then when you look at these kids, you know, well, I owe $140,000.

I haven't made a payment in six years.

That kind of stuff.

So

it's all around us, and we keep thinking it's not existential, and we're just going to press on.

And it is existential.

I can see California, to be honest, we have $65 billion

deficit.

And Gavin Newsom just allowed $500 million for health care for illegal aliens and they're pouring in given the open border.

And at some point,

this attitude that we're just going to come to California and they're going to give us free health care and we get free legal care and subsidized housing and free food and

that they're going to pay for it.

Well, they're not here anymore.

They're leaving.

Toronto.

Fast, quickly,

as they say in Greek.

We had the advantage, Victor, of having Detroit happen.

And

that's what's happening.

That's a very powerful lesson to the entire country.

And

I would say

if this continues in California at the rate it is

the next 30 years, it's going to be very problematic that you could drive, say, on a major

state freeway, say from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and be able to afford the fuel or feel safe.

And then when you pull into San Francisco or Los Angeles, it would be very dangerous.

And I think it'll be very hard for any young person to buy a home.

And I think if you go to the ER, and that's, you're not going to get, you're not going to get health care.

And I think even if you think you have a doctor, a family physician, and specialist, and I've noticed this in California, when you go to a specialist for a checkup, whether it's urology or whether it's cardiology.

It's not like it was just five years.

It takes months.

And when you go into that waiting room, it's just packed with people.

And suddenly when you show your insurance card, it's like cross-examination.

We got to see this.

Do you have this?

And what they're really saying is, we need people to pay for this.

And just down the road in Madera, the hospital just went broke.

And, you know, the Denver, Denver, city of Denver was bragging about they were an open sanctuary city.

All these left-wing people, remember, kept trying to performance art or virtue signal their moral superiority as long as Donald Trump had the border closed.

Cages on the border of Trump.

And then when Joe Biden gave them their wish, they turn out to be paranoid.

They're saying,

the hospitals in Denver are going broke.

What are we going to do?

New York, people out in the street, they're coming to people, knocking on the door and wanting money.

What are you going to do?

Well, you, it's what you wanted, that's what you got, that's what you're getting.

Civilization has imploded.

So, I think it's, and I can see it in the universities too.

I get a

daily rundown of crime on the Stanford campus, and it used to be very rare.

And I was just looking at this morning for the month of December, it's every single day.

It's bike theft, assailant,

suspect unknown, it is a rape, suspect unknown, car theft, catalytic converter theft, assault.

Every day, that used to be an oasis.

It was one of the safest places in the world.

And

apparently every thief in the area goes there and they steal bikes every single day and they break into cars.

And I never saw any of that.

I will say that the Cleary Act is completely non-operable.

Cleary Act by law says that if you know the suspect's description, you're supposed to apprise the university community so they can make the necessary adjustments.

But I think I read today maybe 30 crimes,

40 crimes in December, more than that probably, and there wasn't one suspect notice, no description of a single suspect.

Really?

Jeez.

And I don't believe that in every single case they didn't see somebody that might have been the suspect.

So we're post-civilizational and we're pre-civilizational.

And I think it's going to start to

break down.

And that's why people are fleeing to these kind of like areas of the Roman Empire where they felt they were still safe in the 5th century AD or the classical Greek city-state in the 4th century or 3rd century.

People went to particular places and in our parlance, they're Wyoming, they're Utah, they're Florida, Tennessee, Texas, where they enforce the law.

They have balanced budgets.

They have good civic services.

Where you can own a gun.

You can own a gun and protect yourself.

And they're going to flee California, New York, Illinois, Maryland.

They were going to keep away from Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit,

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis.

Some of the most beautiful and best cities

in the country.

And it's really sad to be in a generation when you're watching this happen, particularly if you belong to the generation who inaugurated it, the boomers.

And that's what's...

So you try to say to yourself, well,

what was intrinsic in your generation that made you so different from your parents or your grandparents?

And then that gets very dangerous because you can do it on a personal level and you have to ask yourself, and I do this all the time.

Victor, you're 70.

What was your dad doing at 70?

What was your grandfather?

What do you think your great-grandfather was doing?

How do they comport themselves?

Did they pay their taxes on time?

Did they follow the law?

Was any of it.

And then you'd have to model yourself like them to continue a civilization.

Yeah.

It would probably mean you'd have to be religious.

Comparing, you'd have to have a sense of honor.

and a sense of shame, which we don't have in society.

When my grandfather died in his sleep at 86, he literally went to go to the DMV and he didn't pass his test.

He was upset, came back and he died in the bedroom that I'm living in now.

Okay.

So my mother was very busy with the funeral, everything, and she said,

he was so worried about bills.

Could you at least in the next two or three days find out what he owed on the ranch or farm and go to them?

And so I went to maybe nine stores, the the electric motor shop,

the

farm supply shop, the insurance.

You know what I found out?

They all said the same thing.

He wasn't feeling very well two or three weeks earlier.

So he came in and wrote us a check.

And we had to tell Mr.

Davis that he'd already paid.

And he did this not because he was old, but he always did it.

He always came in to make sure that

the check and the mail had gotten there and he double checked.

And if we hadn't gotten it in time, he thought, three days,

then he wanted to write us another check.

And I thought to myself, think of that, that attitude.

And what a whole nation of people were like that.

And they had a responsibility to pay.

They didn't cheat on their income taxes.

They trusted people.

They followed the rules.

They didn't get arrested.

They treated people with courtesy.

Yeah, and they also had a sense, Victor, of what's normal and what's not normal.

And you mentioned before United Airlines.

And, you know, did I misread this?

Or is the president of United Airlines?

I read.

No, you're right.

I read it.

I read it too.

Like, what the?

He's mad, isn't he?

He's putting every, he's mentioned everything United was going to do except one thing, ensure the passengers' absolute safety of their aircraft.

He couldn't do that.

But a guy like that, I'm sorry.

It's not normal.

It's not normal.

but he's put on a freaking pedestal in our society today i asked my grandfather once is it true that you had 28 people in 1931 living on this small farm he said no i had 32 i said well what did you do he said every second cousin every uncle would write me a letter because i had a farm so i'd go into the salma depot about once every two weeks and somebody would be hitchhiking on a on a rail car and i'd put them in the back of the truck, and we'd brought them home.

We had them in the barn.

We had them in the pump house.

We had them in the shed.

And we had beds, and we had a big pot.

We made stew every day.

Your grandmother did.

And everybody had a communal table.

And I remember the wood tables, they were very long.

They were in the shed when I was a kid.

And we had, and I never understood there were all these beds, these wire beds.

And he said,

they all worked.

Everybody had to work on the farm, and then they ate communally, and we kept everybody going alive.

And then every once in a while, there was two or three of them had a car, and I filled them up with gas, and they would go away.

And that's what they did.

And my point is, they were very, very poor, and yet they were more law-abiding and more, as you say, normal than today.

I know there was, I'm not saying that, I'm not in rosy-colored glasses.

I'm not saying there were not real pathologies in every society, but

on on the whole, when you look at their moral lives compared to ours, I would say that if I lost my wallet in 1931 in the middle of depression in Selma at a hardware store, I would have a much better chance of getting it then than now.

Because I've lost two wallets and both of them turned up.

The credit cards were being used in about two hours.

And so I just think I look at things like that, the nuts and bolts of a civilization and how people treat each other and whether there was shoplifting on an epidemic level or whether there was trash thrown everywhere.

I go to a local parking lot and I tell you,

this is very funny.

I was going in.

I won't mention the name of the store yesterday.

And as I was going in, I was so busy.

And

the woman at the door said, stop.

And I said, why?

What did I do wrong?

She goes, you have a half-eaten hot dog in your shopping cart.

I said, what?

And I looked down and there was a hot dog that I had just taken the cart, you know, from the cart rail.

And somebody,

and that's, that happens all the time now when I go to this one place.

It's a modern shopping center, but I have to look at the carts because people just throw trash in it.

Yeah.

Well,

all right, Mike.

Anyway, that's enough of that rant.

That's, well, it was a pretty, pretty darn good rant.

I'm trying to say that trying to,

I'll just finish today because we're going over, but I think everybody shares these concerns that what used to bother them in abstraction, do we have a strong military?

Do we have a secure border?

Are we financially solvent?

Is fuel and food affordable?

Can my kids buy a house?

Those are concerns, but we're beyond that now.

We're beyond that.

We're into.

These people are crazy.

They're going to put certain types of literature in the school that are pretty pornographic.

Or you're going to look at

when you look at Sam, what was his name, Britton?

When you have the head of a major nuclear waste division in the Department of Energy and he's dressing up as a woman and stealing women's clothes, these are the things that are starting to really come right out of Suetonius or you know, Petronius the Satyricon.

And actually

they're worried that the whole fabric of society is unwinding, but just not just unwinding, but unwinding at a geometric pace.

And

they're troubled.

I think Jamie Dimon,

Sammy and I talked about him when he said that thing at Davos the other day, it was almost like a Socratic, as I said to Sammy dialogue.

Well, border, wasn't that pretty good, what Trump did?

Oh, economy was not too bad.

He was kind of right on China, wasn't he?

Did you see that interview with him?

Yeah, I did.

It was pretty good.

I'm prejudiced because I said to Sammy, I have great admiration for people who of Greek ancestry who lived in Asia Minor.

And his family came from Izmir, which was Greek Smyrna in the 90s.

Okay.

Wouldn't have been even better if his family had come from Sweden, but double tick we can get.

I have a new, I'll finish today with I have a new appraisal.

I went in three cycles in my life.

I got so tired driving this ladybug used Volvo my dad got for the three of us that was 350,000 miles.

It looked like a ladybug, you know, a Volvo 540.

And we fixed it every week, but that was our transportation.

And we had to eat those rye crackers and we had to have an electrolux that we would all get shocked on when he would try to rebuild it.

And we had all this Swedish stuff.

And then I reacted, and then there was, remember all the Swedish people who were lecturing us during the Vietnam War from Sweden, and there was all left-wing, and they hated the United States, and they were neutral in World War II.

They sent iron ore to Bremen and Germany, and they paid for the transportation to help the Third Reich, da, da, da, da.

And now I'm starting to be pro-philio-Swedish again, because they had the right attitude on COVID.

And

they have some of the most sophisticated military weaponry, and they have a deterrent.

They have a very good military, and

they have no

illusions about what Putin's about.

And they're starting to address this 22% radical Islamicist that are part of their population now for the first time.

So I think they're a model now.

Yeah, they'll be a real model if they start kicking them out and bringing them back from whatever hellhull they came from.

How dare you say that?

Well, I'm sure that's.

You can't do that.

You can't deport somebody who

hates your guts and is committing felonies.

Why would you want to be in a, do him a favor, get him out of the lands of

white privilege?

Yeah, it would be, I don't understand that.

Why do these people who hate Western civilization and are racist and hate so-called white majority populations, why are they so attracted to go there?

I don't understand that.

It's a weird thing.

Why is Joy Reed go on a rant every single night about evil white people in Iowa and then she dyes her hair blonde?

I don't understand that.

I heard you with Sammy.

Cultural appropriation.

All right, anyway, we are.

Cultural appropriated, I guess.

No, well, she certainly is.

So, Victor, one last, two last things.

One, I'd like to thank the folks.

A lot of folks have written me lately.

They're getting civil thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil.

I'm glad you enjoy it.

For those who don't know what it is, it's a free weekly email newsletter that comes out every Friday where I give 14 recommended readings of great articles I've come across the previous week.

For example, the aforementioned John Pedoritz piece.

That's the kind of thing.

Oh, here's the link.

Here's an excerpt.

I do think you will enjoy it.

Go to civilthoughts.com and do sign up.

And then

the thanks folks who rate this show, which you can do on if you listen on iTunes and Apple.

And Victor,

the ratings are zero to five stars, and Victor's 4.9, whatever, you know,

approval ratings.

There's a couple, there's a crank or two out there, Victor

doesn't like you.

They're the kind of people that write those angry readers,

there's more than a couple, believe me, I have a lot of personal email that are sometimes

well, but you have, you did a piece, and the

I mentioned before, Victor writes these ultra articles

for

The Blade of Perseus.

And one of when he responds to a quote-unquote angry reader, it is an ultra piece.

And there was one angry reader who just went off on

Victor about

the Harvard, Clodien Gay's

departure from Harvard, et cetera.

But your response is your article, and somebody wrote a comment on that.

And I just like to read that as we end our shows with comments.

And this is from Robert O'Brien.

And he's, this is in response to your angry reader piece from a Michael Jordan, not the basketball player.

And Michael spelt kind of weird.

But anyway,

Robert O'Brien writes, I enjoy

watching an arrogant, smack-talking fighter walk into the match ending left hook from Mike Tyson.

This seems to be what happened here.

Thank you, BDH.

And he ends with Mike Tyson's famous quote: Everyone got a plan till they get punched in the mouth.

So, thank you, Robert O'Brien.

Thanks to everyone else who leaves comments on iTunes, Apple, and on Victor's website.

We read them all.

At least I do.

I know Victor does.

I know Sammy does too.

Victor will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone.