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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to listen to the star and namesake, the wisdom he dispenses four times a week.

That's Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshall Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

We'll talk more about that towards the end of the show.

A couple of topics to talk about on this

first post-Thanksgiving, all the stuffing digested episode, Victor.

Wall Street Journal

the other day put out a quite interesting poll about the American dream and its disappearing in the eyes of Americans.

And the questions I'd like to ask of you, and I think our listeners would like to know from you, is, are,

is the American dream a good dream?

What is And

who's to blame for its disappearing?

And we'll get your thoughts on that, Victor, and other topics right after these important messages.

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

Victor, the poll that came out,

I think the day before Thanksgiving, or maybe even Thanksgiving Day.

Voters see American Dreams Slipping Out of Reach.

This is a new Wall Street Journal poll.

Only 36% of voters in the new Wall Street Journal, NORC, I'm not sure what NORC is, survey,

said the American Dream still holds true, substantially fewer than 53% who said so in 2012.

The survey goes on to make note of the youth of America, whatever you want to call youth, 18 to 35, I think, particularly see no dream ahead of them in their life.

Work hard and you'll get ahead.

That's baloney.

What are your thoughts, Victor?

Is there an American dream?

What is it?

Was it good?

No, the American dream was that you could say what you wanted.

You had freedom of expression and lifestyle.

If you worked hard and played by the so-called rules, then you prospered and you were secure.

Tell that to somebody who's living in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington, Memphis, Minneapolis.

If you go into those cities, there's carjackings, there's mass looting, there's theft,

there's human excretement on the sidewalk.

You fill up your tank in California, it's $5.50 a gallon.

You go in to buy something to wire your house, it's $120 for a roll of wire that used to cost $30.

So

Bidenomics really did a lot because suddenly we went from a 30-year mortgage of $1.9 to $7 plus.

And on

the basket of essentials for life, food, gas, energy, housing, we're up to about 25% more than when Biden took office.

So what he does is he just pathologically lies.

He just says, well, inflation's 2% from last month or from, no, no, it's from when you started.

And then he says, well, I brought more jobs.

No, you started when there was the COVID lockdown and people had been laid off in the millions.

And it just was a natural rebound.

And you made it worse by

engineering the economy when you had pent up demand and we had the supply chain, and you poured money onto that and gave more purchasing power to people who already had it, and you ruined the currency.

So, when you look at energy,

check bad.

You look at housing, interest rates, check, bad.

You look at inflation, check bad.

You look at crime, check bad.

You look at the border, check bad.

And that causes a a general feeling of malaise and depression.

And people, the most common thing that I hear, if I'm going somewhere and somebody wants to talk, they say, what happened to the country?

What the hell happened to the country?

When did Americans say that

you could go into an Apple store and just steal and you would be exempt?

Or

when did Americans say that people could come from the Middle East and disrupt Thanksgiving or tear down flags on Veterans Day or

try to disrupt Black Friday shopping or take over bridges or scout out and harass and try to harm Jewish students at our universities?

Weren't they guest?

Aren't we their host?

Is that how they reciprocate our magnanimity?

So there's a lot of things that bother them.

And they look at

overseas and they're tired of wars and they don't want optional engagements.

But on the other hand, if you have the largest concentration of military force in recent memory off the coast of Lebanon or the eastern Mediterranean in general, and every single day

an appendage of Iran is attacking and trying to kill Americans and your president either does not react or does small reactions that are proportionate and they're only encouraging it.

So they get depressed and they say to themselves, what did the leftists do with the power we gave them?

And they flooded us with immigrants who don't like us and they allowed crime to escalate to out of control proportions and they hurt us economically and they humiliated us abroad, whether in Afghanistan or other places, Chinese balloon, China, et cetera.

And

they're angry about it.

So they're starting to say, These people did this to us and they're shielded from the consequences of their ideology because they're all wealthy.

In the United States, they're a bicoastal elite.

They count on their influence and their money and their networking to shield them from the crime they created, from the

costly inflation they created, from the housing crisis they created.

So people are getting really angry at them and they lash out.

And that doesn't help when the academic world and the media world calls them drags and clingers and deplorables and irredeemables, chomps, semi-fascist.

When you have Joe Biden saying, let's, it's Thanksgiving.

We're the greatest nation in the world.

We've got to unite, man.

While he sends out a little manifesto to how to talk to your ultra-maga people at Thanksgiving, which is just a litany of lies and disparagements.

Yeah, Victor, also on the cultural front, especially, I would assume, if you're a woman,

a lot of women, girls participate in sports.

And to know that in high high school, you're going to, the odds, there's a possibility that no matter how hard you

train and you become a senior, that

you're not going to make the states this year because some dude has become a menu.

Be honest, Jack, the trans movement is really anti-women.

It's not anti-men.

It's giving men a great advantage.

You have men taking over their beauty pageants.

Miss Universe, you have them take over their sports.

They dress in their locker rooms.

And you don't see any trans men that were women that transitioned to men dominating sports, but you should because they say that biological determination is irrelevant.

It doesn't exist.

You are what you are.

You're a full-fledged male when you say you are.

Okay, win the discus,

you know, win the sprint.

They don't.

And then go into a laptop or, you know, laptop dancing or something, you know, lap dancing.

Do some sexually provocative thing like the Miss Universe

pageant if you're a trans man.

And they don't.

And so it's asymmetrical.

Men become feminine, but women don't become hyper masculine is what I'm trying to say.

And so it is directed at women.

Right.

But if the American dream in part is work hard, get ahead, which can be business, could be, you know, studying, right?

Same thing with school.

I'm going to kill myself.

I'm going to work hard because I want to get to Yale, even though

I, the hypothetical person here, may have the view that Yale is still Yale, right?

As opposed to some elitist crap.

But there's no way if I'm Jack Fowler's son and I'm the valedictorian and I'm the cash.

Everybody's interested in that.

Yeah.

So this is like work hard and get ahead.

No wonder the American.

No, you can't.

If you're a white male of the middle class,

you're not going to get into a quote-unquote prestigious school no matter how perfect your SAT score, which is now optional, and no matter how perfect your GPA and how brilliant your SA, you're not going to get in.

When you take 20 to 30% white students and they're inordinately women, and you get down to 10 to 15% white males, that is about

that handles that small number, the children of the elite,

the children of the alumni, the children of the donors, the children of the administrators and faculty, and there's no athletes, and there's no room for you.

And they do that deliberately, but they all take care of their own.

So the biggest proponents of proportional or demographic proportional admissions, which are now gone to repertory admissions, The biggest advocates have no problem getting on the phone and say, what the hell?

My kid didn't get in?

I've given you 10 million bucks.

I'm the seventh person in my family to go to Harvard.

Come on.

And he gets in.

But not the middle-class kid from, you know, Toledo.

Who cares about him?

Yeah.

Well, the American dream is kind of dependent on meritocracy.

And

the enemy of it, I think, is equity.

But that'd be fair to say.

I think immigration is really starting to alarm people, that they're starting to understand that when you

and

for me, it's bewildering because I wrote Mexifornia 22 years ago.

But when you allow millions of people to come from one geographical area without diversity, without meritocracy, without skills,

and come without English and come illegally,

then you have a recipe for disaster.

And the only way to remedy that, if you're still going to do that, would be to have a confident host that insists on assimilation and integration.

But when you have the left, the European and American, or indeed Western left,

and their whole rationale for this is

nobody wants our agenda.

Nobody polls 51% for what we're doing on the border or crime or the economy or foreign policy or energy.

So we need new constituents.

And when they come in, we give them entitlements and we make them swear fealty to the left.

And if you think that's just, oh, he victories an advocate of Tucker Carlson's great replacement, no, I'm just quoting what they wrote themselves,

the new democratic majority, demography is destined.

These are titles of books by the left in triumphalist fashion.

And this October 7th has really shocked them because a lot of architects of these policies are seeing that these people they let in from the Middle East hate them, despise them.

And

it'll be curious to see how it works out in the next election because I don't know whether the 250,000 Muslim voters of Michigan, to take one example, are serious when they say they're not going to vote for I doubt that they will do that because the alternative will be a conservative that gets elected.

But that's their threat.

If I don't get my way on Hamas,

if I don't get to support October 7th, then I'm not going to vote for Joe Biden.

And we'll see.

Well, Michigan is

plus five for Trump

as we're recording.

I don't think it's going to make a difference in the next election in Michigan.

I really don't.

And I think.

I have a lot of friends in the Middle East.

I like a lot of people from the Middle East.

And you want to go up to them and say, are you blank, blank crazy?

Do do you really think

that going into brentwood and going to a home of a prominent jewish person and throwing blood on his driveway fake blood and screaming at him at thanksgiving and harassing him or shutting down the golden gate or hassling shoppers the day after thanksgiving or for the first time in history rerouting the thanksgiving day parade or tearing down an american flag you think that's going to make we all of us say you know what?

I watched all that in TV and I think these guys are right.

I think that mutilation and decapitation and necrophilia, all that was a good thing on October 7th.

Is that what they think?

Or to have somebody with a mat, you look at a crowd and they're defacing American property and they have these masks on and they're screaming and yelling.

And then when they're interviewed, they're just crazy.

with their lust for death.

And then when you juxtapose all of that bragadaccio on October 7th and all of what the crowds are saying, and then the supposed we love death and the Israelis are decadent, they love life.

And then these so-called nerds go into Gaza and they say, here we are.

And they go scamper down the tunnels.

If you like death so much, come out and kill Israelis and let them fight it out.

But they don't.

So everybody looks at all this disconnect.

You know, wait a minute, you came over here on your own volition.

You wanted to join us.

Why are you attacking us?

We have

a former Iranian ambassador to the UN who flew over to Iran periodically at a professor at Oberlin.

We have a professor at Princeton who is one of Iran's top diplomats.

And they're both in connection and in contact with the Iranian government.

One of them flew to Soleimani's funeral, and they despise us.

They're pro-Hamas, they're pro-Iran, and they're American universities.

And if you ask either one of them, hey, you know, this is a good idea, this cultural exchange, I think I'm going to go over to the University of Tehran, and over there, I'm going to cheer on, I don't know, the Israeli retaliation in October 7th.

Not only would you be hung, hanged, but these people who are over here would be the first to hang you.

And that's what's so strange about it.

This arrogance, this narcissist

self-absorption.

Also, Victor, I've convetched about this on prior episodes, but I guess the one institution in the U.S.

that should be conscious and on the lookout is the FBI.

Very conscious about parents protesting at school board meetings and maybe the guy that goes to Latin Mass.

But these enemies of the U.S., like China has a freaking freaking police station in downtown New York City to harass

Chinese nationals.

We have

these, this

radical Palestinian operation has been alive and well in America for decades.

And I just wonder, have any of these things been infiltrated?

Shouldn't the FBI, not the FBI, the New York police have known ahead of time that these clowns are going to disrupt the Vasy's parade just to pick up?

No, you know why they don't?

Because they're looking at Latin masses and they're going after school boards and they're going to Roger Stone's house and their performance art swarming the homes of abortion protesters.

That's their enemy.

This is fused with the DEI industry.

It's one of the weirdest things in the world, this far-left DEI has merged with one of the most far-right fascistic movements, which is Hamas.

And they've merged.

And so, no, the FBI it keeps away from, but that's not new.

Remember the Sarnov brothers, the Russians of all people, warned the FBI.

Right.

This family are terrorists, and they're going into your country.

And we're no friend of yours, but you should watch out.

And they didn't do anything.

There's a whole San Bernardino terrorist, the same thing.

They interviewed them.

They know about this.

And they don't do anything because it's politically incorrect, I guess.

Or they're busy doing something else, which, you know, it's a whole nother question, whether they're worth the amount of investment and expenditure we put to the FBI, today's FBI.

But I guess what I'm saying is that

this new phenomenon that we're bringing in millions of people because the left wants a constituency

because its message is no longer resonant, it doesn't work.

And everybody on the left knows it doesn't work.

I mean, they had a, what, a child molester that was found at Martha's Vineyard, or is it Nantucket?

And we saw what happened at Martha's Vineyard in Chicago.

And then we have Eric Adams.

And then the weird thing is, when people protest on the left,

all of a sudden, if you protest, if you're a leftist and you protest and you are kind of a crook, which is okay with the left,

look what happens to Eric Adams.

All of a sudden, we learned that.

He's getting illegal campaign donation.

They knew that for years.

From Turkey, then we found out that years ago he may have had a sexual assault.

Menendez, we find out, oh, he's a crook, you think?

But they had no problem with that.

But you crossed them, like Elon Musk is another example.

You just crossed them.

They had no problem with Elon Musk.

He was their hero because of Tesla.

And you crossed them one time, and

they're vindictive people.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, you mentioned Gavin Newsom before, and we'll get back to

a little bit about him and Thanksgiving.

and then we'll talk about a piece you've written for American greatness on Western civilization in Europe and we'll do all that right after

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

So, Victor, maybe you didn't mention Newsome, maybe I did, but you mentioned Biden inflation.

Just to get one last Thanksgiving thing done, and Newsom is

a couple of days from now,

well, from when this broadcast is, this episode is being aired,

he will be debating Iran DeSantis.

That's on November 30th.

But Newsom put out this tweet.

Here's the headline.

It's from the Daily Wire.

Gavin Newsom implies inflation pains are a conservative lie.

And then he has a tweet.

Things you won't see on Fox News today, prices for Thanksgiving are down from turkey to air travel.

And he even has things like the cost of peas and pie crusts, et cetera, you know, down 1%.

Well, down 1%, peas are less than 1% than.

Think of the logic, though, Jack.

My party and me, we rose prices 25% in just two years until they got to the point where nobody could afford them and the economy is starting to slow down.

So now they're not rising.

as much or they're 1% less than they were last year after they've increased 25% food.

And so, wow,

they're not 25% higher than January 2021.

Now they're 24% higher.

That's great.

No, we want it to go down to 22%

and have a 3% inflation rate over two and a half years, three years.

You can't do that, Gavin.

Nobody's that stupid.

Yeah, I don't know how else you try to spin

because people aren't that stupid.

What is the average household?

$5,000, $6,000 a year more in cost than a year.

You should see this

wooed by cranberry prices drops over a year yeah you should see this state

i drove up to see my daughter in newcastle near auburn

and you go down the 99

the main north south central lateral in california which is the most dangerous freeway in the united states per miles driven and you are there are passages now where on the construction i swear to god that you will go in a lane and you will be directed into one lane and there are barriers on each side with three or four inches clearance and this and you've got a whole bunch of cars that can't navigate it and it's a death trap.

If any private company did that in their parking lot, they would be sued.

And it's construction everywhere in California.

And it's not because we're moving ahead.

It's because our ossified system is so decrepit.

because we've diverted so much money to stupid wind and solar and tearing down dams and and building high-speed rail.

And half the births in the state are on Medi-Cal, we're not investing.

And that's his state.

That's what he's done.

He was mayor of San Francisco.

He was lieutenant governor.

He's governor.

He's got, you know, over 20 years that he was in control of things.

And the record is there to see.

I really hope when he debates DeSantis, he has the guts to stand up and say, I promise I'll do for America what I did for California.

And we'll see what happens.

But anybody who lives in this state, and now they're, you know, 16% income tax, that's what they're talking about.

It's insane.

And what do you get for that?

If you're living in San Francisco and you make $350,000 a year and you're a techie or a lawyer and you pay 16% on it

and you get what?

Homeless?

Crime?

Roll down your window and put a placard, please don't rob my car.

And so

it's what's weird about all this, just to sum up this, I don't want to rant, but what is strange about this is this is different.

This is fundamentally, psychologically, socially, economically,

culturally different than our past crisis.

When you had the Great Depression, when you had the 60s, when you had the 2008 meltdown, when you had 9-11, everybody understood there had been a lapse, a breakdown,

and it had to be corrected.

This time,

it's different because this is a self-inflicted suicidal impulse in which when crime goes up, the old remedy of arresting people for crime

is not there.

And when gas prices go up, that's good, not bad.

When

we get humiliated abroad, we'll keep getting humiliated abroad.

So it's a whole fundamental effort to redefine what the United States is by destroying it.

It really is.

It's different.

It's different.

I never thought in my life that I would go into a pharmacy and see everything, almost everything locked up.

I was in, I won't mention the big home supply, but it's either Lowe's or Home Depot, so you guys can guess.

And

I bought a trash can,

right, Jack?

A rubber trash can, plastic.

$72

for trash can yes

yes had two little wheels on it there's no it's not about 30 gallon or whatever I bought it I come out there's a sticker on the side and she says wait a minute open that up I said what because it had a lid so she opened the lid and she put her head in said I'm sorry but you do not You wouldn't believe how many trash cans we sell.

They put merchandise inside this.

I said, are you serious?

And she goes, they do it all the time.

And she said, I said, well, I came in here the other night and you had the automatic checkout.

You're all closed down.

She said, we have to because they go run right through it.

And then there's a car in the curb that picks up and takes them off.

There's no consequences.

You know, it's all written into the budget, you know, 2% or 3% loss.

My son bought a house, my youngest son.

John, and I've done this for my two other sons who own houses.

I go buy them everything you need for tools, you know, power saws, drills, and screwdrivers, and all kinds of ladders, etc.

You own a house, you're going to need these basic things.

And John, I bought about three months ago.

What cost me 500 bucks three years ago is now over $1,000.

This is at Lowe's.

It's shocking.

And I'm thankful I haven't needed to buy wood of any kind because I'd probably pass out at the cost of a two by four, you know, nowadays.

So staggering.

By the way, Victor, one other thought of California, and then we move on to

Western Europe, but the California Policy Center, Ed Ring, has a story: like, what's it costing you for your 16%

potential income tax?

It's going to be water rationing, and there's

percolating through the

administrative state out there, Senate, it's going to, the California State Water Board held a hearing to implement how it will,

how it's going to implement Senate Bill 1157, which was passed by the legislature, to cut

water use from 47 gallons per person to 42 gallons per person by the end of 2030, just to torture people, pay more, get less.

42 gallons may sound like a lot, but on a daily basis for washing,

cooking, et cetera, it's not.

It's just

you're getting squawked for your money.

You're getting driven out of the state.

Anyway, Victor.

Last year, the

Sierra Nevada watershed,

along with the Klamath and Cascades, had one of the greatest runoffs in history, probably the greatest.

90% of that water, by intent, went out of the San Joaquin and its tributaries and the Sacramento and its tributaries out to the Delta by intent.

And why this was happening, they voted and they now have finished destroying four dams on the Klamath River.

Four dams.

Hydroelectric, yes, 80,000 customers gone.

Recreation gone.

Water storage gone.

Flood control gone.

And so we don't have a water storage.

We have a water policy problem.

It's not the water storage problem.

We could build plenty of water storage.

We have the natural wherewithal to give us water, but we don't do it because the people on the coast who are very wealthy have an alliance with the very poor representatives, and they're both on the left.

And the one side says, you guys vote for all of our environmental green projects that hurt your own constituents, and we'll give you free stuff that we don't get.

We pay taxes on, but we get the environmental stuff and you get the entitlements.

And that's how they work.

And the result is that all this water and snow goes out to the ocean.

So we could have had 10 million acre-feet of storage at Los Banos Grandes,

at Temperance Flat, at the Sites Reservoir.

They were all on the drawing boards.

They've all been budgeted, and they didn't build them.

And it's just their next big thing is they cannot stand the idea

that

Californians have a constitutional right to have a water right.

In other words, you own a piece of property.

Underneath it, you own the oil, but you also own the water, even though it's fungible like oil underneath.

And that's what they don't like.

So what's coming down the

agenda is they're going to have everybody out in the rural area that pumps their own water have it metered.

You pay for the well, the $50,000, $80,000, $150,000.

You pay for the maintenance.

You pay for the electricity to pump it, but the water right under your feet is not yours.

It's the state's, the collective, the socialist commune owns it.

And then we're going to regulate it.

But you can be sure that Gavin Newsome and Nancy Pelosi's Napa estate, all of those people are going to have plenty of water for their gardens.

And gas stoves.

You saw that.

Thanks.

I saw Camilla Harris's.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I ride my bike around the Stanford campus, and I see some very beautiful homes, and they're lush and they require a lot of water.

They really do.

And there's a big Crystal Springs Reservoir right up the road on 280 that's full and that coming all the way from Northern California.

And they don't, nobody touches that one.

They don't say, we got to drain this to go out and save the Delta smell.

So it's a problem.

let's say socioeconomic, cultural problem in California, where you have the richest people in the world by zip code or whatever you want to rubric you use,

number of billionaires, number of half billionaires, and then you have the poorest people in the United States, and they're juxtaposed, and they have an alliance.

Subsidize us and open the borders.

You will be protected by your money and influence.

But in turn, we will have our guys be in politics and we will vote vote for banning gas stoves, do this.

But there is one caveat.

You will not enforce the law on us.

What do I mean by that?

I think I've said in this podcast before, Jack, I could go buy

in the next

24 hours, I could go to a swap meet or a corner I know, and I could buy a bicycle, a hoe, a shovel.

food, you name it.

And I will pay no income tax.

Flowers, absolutely I can buy anything I want I can buy lawnmowers blowers anything I'll pay no sales tax no sales tax and the people who are selling it will pay no income tax we have the largest underground economy in the entire United States and it's by design

because the powers that be will not go into so-called marginalized communities or areas and enforce sales tax laws or income tax laws as they do to everybody else.

And so it's the most regulated and the least regulated state in the Union.

It's wild out here.

I mean, you can see

it.

You just bought a garbage can, Victor.

I dream sometimes that I won't mention the direction from my home, that I could just take it, this neighbor plot, and put it on one of those Chinese balloons and float it over to the Stanford campus and plop it down in faculty area right there.

Right.

So you know what?

This is what you created.

So here's seven Winnebagos.

Here's 20 chickens.

Here's 30 dogs with no vaccinations, no license.

Here's a couple of horses.

Here's maybe 40 people living on a single zoned house.

Here's Rome's.

Here's Porta Potties.

That's it.

And you're going to be your neighbors.

How's that?

Well, we know the answer from Martha's Vineyard, don't we?

Right.

Right.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

What a stunt.

Great stunt that was.

Too bad it was a stunt don't get people very angry.

It's really, there's certain things that

when the right finally wakes up and does it, it gets people angry.

Another thing that got, I mentioned it, they made them a rate

when Trump came in and he applied that travel ban and they wanted to say it's Islamophobic.

And then he applied it to Venezuela, you know, Cuba, I think.

But the people got so angry were the left and especially the Middle Eastern left.

And it was like,

I have a fellowship at Harvard.

You can't stop me from going to the United States and damning the country when I get there.

Come on.

Or, hey, I'm a consultant.

I got to leave, you know, Nablus.

I come to the United States.

What's wrong?

I hate your country.

Let me in.

They were so angry.

that somebody finally said, I'm going to give you your wish.

You don't like us and you don't have to come here.

We don't want to make you suffer.

Stay there.

Yeah,

too much.

Hey, Victor, we're going to pick up on your

thoughts on Western Europe and Western civilization.

And

what's Europe's role, if anything, anymore, in defending it and advocating it and articulating its history.

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

Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, before we pick up on

your Western Europe or your Europe piece about Western civilization, I do want to just let our listeners know that on

I think our last podcast, maybe it came out on Thanksgiving Day, we had talked about a study.

I raised this a COVID vaccine study.

And of course, we're talking, we can't give out, you know, 900-character web addresses.

But if anyone's interested in finding that study, I want to recommend that they go to your

Twitter page, at VD Hanson,

where you link to the podcast.

And I have replied to that tweet of yours.

I don't know if we can still call them tweets

with the web address.

And also, for folks who are on Facebook who are interested at the very friendly Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, which is not an official part of your life, Victor, but they're just great folks, about 60,000 people in this group on Facebook.

I've posted the link to this COVID vaccination study also.

So please check that out.

Victor,

for American Greatness, and this can also be read on

the Blade Blade of Perseus, your webpage, you have an essay, Can Europe Become Western Again?

And it begins for the first time in a millennium, Europe no longer plays a critical role in promoting Western civilization, nor in world history at large.

That's quite...

I'll call it an accusation for the sake of discussion.

Victor,

tell us about what's happening.

I mean,

since 1945, Europe has surrendered its influence.

And it's really

quite striking because if you think about it, its population, the greater Eurozone,

is much bigger than ours.

It's about 800 million people.

And if you think about it, the EU

and the Eurozone, I should say, has a second largest GDP in the world.

It's larger than than China's.

And when you look at science and technology and industry, it's still among the leaders.

So you would think that it would exercise a prominent role in world affairs.

But I don't know whether it was the trauma of the two world wars or it was its

long-held infatuation with socialism.

But it is now, its economy is stagnant.

Its energy policy is suicidal.

It's foregone using clean coal or natural gas or oil.

France is the only country that really does nuclear power to any large extent, at least in Western Europe.

It doesn't spend 2%, I think six countries do, that's it, of its budget on its self-defense.

If the United States didn't help it, I think Putin could go all the way through to the Thames.

So

all of its deeply held beliefs, consensus, whether it's open borders, unlimited immigration, redistribution,

disarmament, they fail.

And it's too bad because

if Europe would get back to a free society and a free market capitalist economy,

and

a very muscular defense,

collective defense industry and preparedness and deterrent, along with the United States, the two of them

would operate in a way that would be very good for the world.

And they can't, we don't have a partner there.

And now that we're hemorrhaging,

they're going to lose their partner because we are no longer in a position financially, culturally, politically,

socially to be the big beacon of Western civilization.

You can see that in our streets and what our reaction in our universities to October 7th.

And so, as I keep saying, there's something going on in Europe, in France, in Germany, in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in Britain.

But I don't know if it's going to be enough or it's too late.

There's some people who say we have to spend more in defense.

We've got to

import natural gas or frack ourselves.

We've got to watch our immigration.

It's just killing us.

20 to 25% percent of European countries, if people are not born in that country, and they can look to California, where it's the highest of any state, 27 percent.

And that's an enormous challenge when you have 27 percent of your population that are mostly coming as impoverished

immigrants under illegal auspices without capital skills or English.

And then, when you have a host that's lost confidence and the ability to integrate them in the body politic,

you've got what we have in California on a continental dimension in Europe.

And so

this article got a lot of heat, Jack, because a lot of people wrote me and said,

what's wrong with you?

Europe is over.

They deserve it.

They're gone, Victor.

They're just wimps.

They're socialists.

All they want to do is eat and screw.

They're worthless.

They hate us.

And so my article was, yeah, I know that.

And I don't like that.

I like to bring them back in as a partner.

I mean,

they caused two world wars, but they also helped us end them.

And there was something majestic about the French army at one time and the British intelligence agencies.

And,

my God, the Norwegian, brave Norwegians and the Greeks who died in droves to try to fight the Nazis.

So there were, it's a great place, and you need it as a partner.

And it would exercise a lot of authority in the world rather than be anti-American all the time and join with people who hate the West.

Right.

We can't see the 1619 project and sit back and just let it happen and not fight back against it.

No, you can't.

You can't.

And I know a lot of the thing about Europeans are this.

When you meet a conservative European,

They are some of the most articulate, bright, inductive people in the world.

They really are.

They have to be because they've they've been so beleaguered.

But I do interviews with a lot of them from Italy and from Switzerland, and they're better informed than our conservatives.

And

they're very brave people, and they're starting to be in the ascendance.

People are starting to listen to them because it doesn't work what the left did to Europe.

It does not work.

So we look at these horrible riots, these right-wing people that are rioting all over Ireland.

Okay,

and that's a terrible thing what they're doing.

But when you have the leaders of the government of Ireland saying there's too many white people, you know, it's 98% white originally.

There's too many of them.

And we're going to let in 20% of the population is not going to be born in Ireland.

And then you demonized your own people.

And then an immigrant, supposedly from Algeria, tries to cut the throat of children.

People get angry because they know nothing's going to happen.

So yes, they are barbaric, they're savage, they're breaking the law, but they represent something.

And that is the anger at an elite who is adopting policies that are suicidal to the

body, the body of the citizenry.

And that's why people are angry.

They have no voice.

These unelected people and elected, but also a lot of them are unelected in bureaucracies.

I mean, if Ireland becomes 20% whatever else, Polish,

Swahili, I don't know what.

You've talked about this numerous times.

I mean, we are the melting pot, right?

You have to have a meritocracy in order to make that succeed.

And if you don't have a meritocracy,

a multiracial society is not going to succeed.

Is that basically correct?

Yeah, it is.

And when you tell

You see, what's happening in Europe, but also here is it's a paradox and everybody's afraid to articulate it.

So you say that the majority white population or Western population, whatever group, whether you want to define them racially, I don't, but their critics do.

But the people who follow the Western paradigm created the conditions under which people who are not in the Western paradigm want to join.

Okay.

So

somebody in Gaza or Saudi Arabia's customs, traditions, and values do not lead to Paris or New York or the United States or Cormel.

It doesn't do that.

But that person wants to then join the Western paradigm and they come over in droves.

And when they get here, then they lodge conditions or

they create conditions in which they're hostile.

And they say, I'm a victim.

I just set foot in your country, but because I'm not white, I'm a victim and I want this and this and this.

And I'm going to glue myself to the sidewalk during your annual Thanksgiving stupid pilgrim parade.

What are you going to do about it?

And that's not a sustainable proposition unless you're intent on committing collective suicide.

Just a fact.

It's not sustainable.

And people are saying it's not sustainable.

And

it's coming, this anger at these elites, what they're doing.

So far, their control of the media, of academia, the corporate boardroom, entertainment, popular culture, foundations is able to give the left power and to have open borders.

Open borders and institutional control are the duality that allow the left to stay in power without popular support.

And

I don't think that's going to be sustainable either.

I think finally, the sheer numbers of people is going to overwhelm them that are getting angry.

And they're getting getting angry for a lot of different reasons.

But if the conservative movement is smart and they can unite around a candidate,

then they can win the House, they can win the Senate, they can win the White House, and they can have an agenda within three months that can stop it.

They can build a wall in three minutes.

They can deport people.

They can have travel bans.

They can crack down on crime.

They can start charging with federal racketeering charges, people who are committing these crimes across state lines.

They can go after prosecutors who are deliberately not enforcing the law or trying to undermine it.

They can do a lot of things.

And

you take that person in Brentwood, that

Jewish American who was active in Jewish politics, and you have people come to his house and scream and yell and throw body bags supposedly on his garage.

The pictures show it, and then pouring blood and defacing his

and damaging his property and terrorizing his family.

You can, in a normal world, somebody would charge those people with, I don't know, conspiracy to commit, you know, da-da-da,

but not George Goston in Los Angeles.

So

what we are in is an aberrant period in our history.

And I don't think it's going to,

I know it's not going to last because if it lasts, it'll destroy the country.

So it's a question of not whether it will last, it's whether you want to destroy the country or not.

And I think half of the people don't want to do it.

And the other half may think they want to do it, but when it starts happening to them, they don't want to do it.

And so just final little note.

I think everybody should take a deep breath

and remember that Some of the things that we said,

we being Americans, have been proven true.

And the left lied about.

There was no Russian collusion.

That was cooked up by Hillary Clinton and Christopher Steele and the media.

There was no Russian disinformation.

That was cooked up by the Joe Biden campaign.

And Anthony Blinken concocted the 51 signees and the media.

That laptop was authentic.

And it was damning proof of the corruption of the Biden.

The lockdowns did not work.

They caused more more damage, economic, personal health than the virus did.

And you and I talked last time, Jack, about a study that you brought to my attention that in the southern hemisphere, over I think 17 countries in four continents,

that there was no difference or there was not only no difference in overall mortality rates.

overall mortality rates or all mortality rates, I guess it's AMR,

vis-a-vis the people who got the shots and didn't get the shots, meaning that COVID

didn't,

apparently getting the shot did not lessen the mortality rate in the general population

when COVID was around.

And some of the studies in some of the countries suggested that those countries that had

vaccination mandates that covered a large number of the population, especially elderly, they had higher mortality rates.

And I got a lot of mail about that one.

I said, Oh, you don't have any source for that, and da da da da da.

So

well, I yeah, we've I mentioned that earlier.

Yeah, so the sources are

up on your Twitter page and on the friendly, friendly sites.

But yeah, it was quite a damning study,

I thought.

And

not only was it were the vaccinations not

saving you, really?

Are there

the post-vaccination problems that we have may even have made matters worse?

It has.

And I said something, a person wrote me a note and said, that's dangerous for you to say that.

All I said was, when I got my Moderna, which I guess...

Research has said compared to the Pfizer, it was the safest and most effective.

I don't know.

I have no reason to know whether that's true or not.

That's what I have discovered that so-called literature.

But I was told it had 90% efficacy.

And Anthony Fauci said it probably would

maintain that for a long time.

And I found that

I was infected three times after I had those two.

So I was not, I was probably infectious and I got infected and I had a bad reaction to it.

And I got long COVID.

So in my view, I don't know.

I think it might have provided some safety against the most pernicious or virulent original form of the virus.

And I thank Moderna for that.

But at some point, it became counterproductive or irrelevant whether you were getting these boosters or not, because you were going to get it anyway.

And we don't still know, and we won't know for years

what the total effects were of using an untried new mechanism of vaccination, kind of genetic engineering to make these cells produce spike proteins.

But anyway,

what I'm getting at is all the things that we were told were canonical or biblical, almost biblical truth, were all lies.

They were all lies.

And everybody kind of knew it.

We all knew that January 6th was a bunch of buffoons that went crazy and some couple hundred people got violent.

They should be prosecuted, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to 2020, where the 14,000 people who were arrested were mostly let go.

And this 40,000 hours are starting to creep out.

I don't know if you saw some of them, Jack.

There was an older, elderly lady who allegedly was a grandmother, was pushed down a bunch of stairs.

If she had been,

if she had been a person of color in the May riots and a policeman had done that, there would have been a riot.

But they just knocked her down and she did a kind of a somersault and rolled down the steps.

Well, Well, that's your problem.

You shouldn't be here.

Okay, yeah,

let's enforce the law, but let's do it equitably.

That's what all people want.

And

the thing is that anytime someone takes and calibrates a person's color or personal appearance and makes that essential,

essentialism, then they're racist, no matter what the motive is.

They're racist.

And so you turn on the view and they say, wait, wait, wait, wait, you're racist.

You're racist.

It doesn't matter what you're saying.

Or you're going to, you're a university admissions officer and you're ignoring criteria and you think as God that you're going to play God and pick people on the basis of their race.

That's racist.

You're in a theme house and you want to go into a theme where everybody looks like yourself and you don't want anybody else in your theme house.

You have a separate graduation that's based on race.

You don't want anybody from a different race in your particular graduate.

That's racist.

Sorry, it is.

And anybody who doesn't call it out is a coward.

Well, Victor, racism is

the final topic we'll keep on in today's podcast.

We'll also add in transgenderism, and we're going to stick to Europe.

And one of the reasons why there are

a growing backlash to the elites in Europe has to do with the elites and their application of 2023

ideology onto European history and actually onto Roman history too.

And we'll get to all this

final topic right after this final message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Want to remind our listeners to visit the Blade of Perseus.

That's Victor's website, VictorHanson.com.

Go there.

You will find links to Victor's various writings, his syndicated columns,

links to the archives of these podcasts, to his books.

By the way, the next book, forthcoming book, is titled The End of Everything,

How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

Click on the link, learn about it.

It comes out in May of 2024, and you should order a copy.

Hey, if you're interested in,

it's almost Christmas, Victor.

It's about a month away.

So,

especially if you're a military history buff, Victor's got a lot of books on military history.

Check them out.

Grandpa, Uncle Bill, Cousin Joe.

I shouldn't leave the women out of this.

Sister Sue

may be interested.

So make great, great Christmas gifts.

So anyway,

victorhanson.com and subscribe because you will not be able to read Victor's ultra articles that he writes exclusively for the website.

Some of them are

some of them are doozies.

This week's on the angry readers are

a lot of really nutty angry readers.

But don't despair.

I have a nice one I've got coming out tomorrow.

Oh, okay.

There we go.

Yeah.

All right.

Be a good cheer.

Okay.

I get one, but I did get one.

No, that's that's that's good.

It's not all not all Eeyore.

So, So,

gosh, Victor, I sent you a link to this Twitter, the Daily Mail article about these.

There's an attempt to cast the black plague as racist because some excavation found some bodies, and they're extrapolating that these were blacks, and blacks were more in Britain in the 14th century, were more likely to be victims of the plague than not.

It's just ethnic

craziness.

It has.

It's been completely

rejected on almost every ground.

The criteria by which you judge a skull and a particular race depends as much on diet and health as it does on innate racial characteristics.

Are not sure that these people were black.

The number of people who died of natural causes is not, that was what they used to say that the people who died of plague it was an ordinary a different number but we don't really know the exact criteria by which they died of natural causes

we don't have very much information about demography in

the last three centuries or before that in England but to the degree we do it doesn't suggest that people who were black from Africa constituted the proportion of the population by which these forensic anthropologists anthropologists said they did.

So then we're left with, why would you try to get,

why would you say something that doesn't have scientific support?

Because it's in the paper.

That's why you know that if you say something that's politically correct and it will enhance your career, then you apply for a fellowship.

And I'm the person who

found an unrecognized racist tradition in the West.

Therefore, I need to get this grant or I should be eligible.

I'm just saying that because I am reading applications for my institution for application, and I can tell you that,

and I don't want to mention the institution because I'm affiliated with some, but

I can tell you that this affects people and they will say things in their application that suggest that they're woke.

And that's why we have this type of research.

And it's everywhere.

And so

the sense is that if you can go back, if you're a historian and you can go back and find some esoteric theory of racism that has contemporary ramifications, then it's going to enhance your application for a fellowship, for admissions, for tenure, retention, promotion, whatever.

So it's politicized.

It's kind of like in the 1930s, you know, when

You were a hydraulic engineer in the Soviet Union and you said, Chairman Stalin said that you can drain the Caspian Sea or something.

And he was right.

And I showed you could do it.

And then you got promoted.

And that's how it works in a Coma Sar system.

And that's what we have.

So it's, I don't know, that type of research is, it would, it's not scientifically viable.

Everybody's attacked it.

It was just something a person put out to gain notoriety and therefore career enhancement.

Well, Victor, it's not always about race.

Sometimes it's about

appendages.

I was reading a piece that my former colleague at National Review, Madeline Kearns, wrote.

She wrote it not for NR, but for The Telegraph.

And it's titled,

A Transgender Emperor and a Racist Plague,

whatever is next.

So for the Telegraph, she wrote, this is the beginning of her piece.

Who knew that Elagabalus, I'm sure I've mispronounced that, the third century Roman emperor, was transgender?

This remarkable detail was somehow missed by generations of historians over thousands of years.

Yet this week, the North Hertfordshire Museum in North London has brought it to the attention of many.

So, Victor, once again, we take our modern progressive.

uh proclivities and ideologies and have to apply them now to 1700 years ago to show i think this you know these things you're a you're you're an ancient ancient historian.

This guy sounds like he was a crackpot and a weirdo.

But no, it's very important that we cast him today.

At least it's important for the North Hertfordshire Museum to cast him as transgender.

And getting into what we talked about earlier, this is part of

an ingredient in the stew that may be leading to

the

rise of conservative or non-liberal reaction in Europe?

Yeah.

Well,

if you look at contemporary sources about El Agabalis,

the criticism, first of all, he was only 14, and it was kind of an accent that he became emperor for just four years until they did away with him because he was so on hinge.

And he was different because he was an Arab.

He was from Syria.

And

at that time, there had been North Africans.

I don't think there had been Syrian emperors before that.

But in the ancient world, they didn't have rigid heterosexual, homosexual divides.

In other words,

for the elite,

not the common or the agrarian classes, which was 90% of the population, but for the elite, it wasn't held against a man

if he had sexual relations in the active, the male role, with a younger boy or teenager.

Odium occurred when people who you would say in modern terms were biologically homosexual, that is, they were exclusively homosexual, and there are anywhere from 2% to 3% of the population probably,

that they continued that activity with men their own age.

or older than they were, and they assumed a passive role.

And there were people all through

history like that, and they in Greek and Roman history, and they then earned an odium.

Okay, so

the problem with Elagabalus wasn't that he engaged in homosexual relations per se, because the Emperor Hadrian, who was one of the most popular and successful

emperors, had a partner, Antinous, who he did all the time with, but he was the active older man, and it was a pederastic relationship where the younger person was used as a female.

Okay.

But Elagabalis belonged to that small percentage of the population who was exclusively homosexual.

And therefore, according to the Times, it was assumed that he would marry, had to marry, even though he was 14 to 18, and that he, if he had homosexual

activities, they would be with a younger person and he would be the active member.

But he didn't fit that.

And the ancient sources then said he was woman-ish.

And there were some suggestions that he wanted to be as a woman, but that's common in

the

effeminate part of male homosexuality.

There are male homosexuals who prefer the submissive role, if I could use that archaic ossified language.

Okay, so he was that.

And no one ever said he was transgendered, although, you know, in Petronius'

satiricon and other novels,

transvestism is very common where men are dressing up as women or they wear, and it was called effeminate.

But no one said they actually were members of the opposite race.

Transgenderism is a biological reality for a very small subset.

So this transgender craze comes, and just like the blacks and the plague in London, then it opens a whole whole avenue of opportunistic research.

So people go back and they say, ah,

he really, really, really wasn't a effeminate homosexual as we all thought he was, and as

the sources said he was, and therefore he was condemned for it.

He was actually transgendered and he thought that he was a real woman.

And they went back and looked at certain passages when he said he liked being female, but that didn't mean he was transgendered necessarily.

So

I think that's what has happened, that contemporaries want to turn someone who was reviled in the ancient world as being a passive homosexual when he became an age where he was assumed to favor mostly women and to the degree that he engaged in male-on-male relations, it would be in a pederastic dominant role, so to speak.

And he didn't fit that stereotype and therefore he was condemned and that was one of of the reasons he was killed.

He was also violent.

So,

modern researchers go back and they say, Oh, wow, I've got a new take on him.

He was actually transgender, and he was trying, poor guy was trying to become a woman, and he was damned by the oppressive mores of his society.

But that's what we have once more.

Wow,

well, my friend, we've come back to the

end of our

podcast here.

As we do whenever we come to the end and to the home stretch, we thank our listeners and thank you, listeners, for listening.

And thank you, those who rate the show at iTunes/slash Apple.

And some leave comments, and we do read them.

And here's one that's

really short and sweet, Victor.

It's titled Informative,

and it's very simple.

I love VDH.

He is so intelligent.

I've turned my husband on to him, too.

And that's from Orange Chewy.

Orange Chewy.

So, Victor, you are affecting positively marital relationships.

I hope I can be of some help.

You know, I got a letter, and you mentioned you got a letter, but about the Roman emperors.

We were talking about Elagabalus, and someone said your favorite Roman emperor.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, I was going to, I thought I'd say that, but let's stretch the show

little bit.

Wanted to know, like, if Victor could go back in time,

what Roman emperor

would he want to live under?

And by the way, Victor, I have nuances here.

If you lived in a certain time,

would you, Victor the Roman citizen, want to live in Rome itself or somewhere else within the empire?

I would not want to live in Rome.

A million people, no.

No.

But I think northern Italy would be nice.

Okay.

Well, under whose...

Well,

half of me wants to say that that reign of Augustus from 31 at the Battle of Actium and his ascendants and then to 14 AD when he died, that was a long time, you know, 45 years, where

although he ended the violence of the Republic and he institutionalized the Senate not as a deliberative legislative body, but as a consulting body,

there was something to be said for it because that was a period when you had Propertius and Virgil and Livy writing, and there was an end to the civil war, and the Augustan policy was to accept the borders of the empire and not to go on to costly Crassus-like invasions of Parthia or etc.

So it was a

quiet time, but he's blasted because to get where he is, he was pretty bloodthirsty during the civil wars.

Edward Gibbon became famous because he resurrected Machiavelli's discourses, where he said that there was a brief period in the Roman Empire of some 500 years in the West, starting with the Emperor Nerva, 96, I think, all the way to the death of Marcus Aurelius, which was about 90 years of Nerva

and then

the Emperor Trajan and then the Emperor Hadrian and then the Emperor Antonius Pius and then Marcus Aurelius the Philosopher.

And in that period of nine plus decades, there was not a major foreign war.

There were wars on the boundary, but not the kind that threatened the integrity of the empire.

There was not a lot of civil wars.

There was not a lot of Neronian or

collegiate type executions and gibbon then took that and said this was the finest period not just in rome but the finest period in western history to be alive as far as being secure and prosperous and there's something to that when you go archaeologically when you look at

uh strata of

you know

it it sort of goes Classical Greek, Hellenistic.

It starts with Mycenaean, then Archaic, and then Classical Greek, then Hellenistic, then Roman Republic, then Roman Imperial, then Byzantine.

When you get to Roman Imperial at that age, roughly from 96 maybe to 180, 190, you don't see a lot of trauma, let's say, but you do see evidence of prosperity, a lot of glass, a lot of fine pottery, etc.

Metal, coinage, it's not debased.

So that's the general appearance.

That would have been nice to live in 100 years.

It's sort of like saying,

what was a period in the United States when you had access to medical research that allowed you to live, say, to 75

and you could defeat diseases like typhus or smallpox or polio, and yet there was prosperity for the first time,

and there was still a traditional society that was crime-free.

And I think most people would say somewhere between 1952 three until 1965 or something, that that period was a very confident period, the JFK, Eisenhower period.

Government was pretty stable.

We weren't in great debt.

The Korean War, we'd got through, it was before really the Vietnam War, the hippie movement.

And people were GI Bill.

They were getting educated.

Universities were popping up.

Freeways were being built.

It was a very confident, can-do

society.

And the movies show show that.

There's some great movies from the late 50s

into the early 60s.

And then it became

what we see now.

So if you were to say, what period would you like to be in Rome?

I'd say probably during the reign of Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Bias, Marcus Aurelius, maybe the last few years of Augustus.

Or

Vespasian would have been a good time to be alive.

He was a good emperor.

Titus was a good emperor.

And then maybe in the United States, something in the middle 50s to the early 60s.

I have really good memories of the early 60s that transcend just being, you know, nine or 10 when everybody's happy.

It just, and we didn't have a lot of material wealth.

We lived in a very small little house and our cars always broke down.

We were always buying these, but everybody was happy and there was all this aspirational

agendas that everybody had.

You know, a guy would come by and he'd be a third cousin.

He'd say, hey, you know, you got to come down to LA.

I've opened a boat sales

company.

We're selling a lot of boats now.

Or somebody would come by and say, you know,

I got this thing called a Winnebago.

It's wonderful.

You know, there was an up whether you liked it or not, it was upbeat.

It was confident.

Yeah.

And

there still was some.

The universities were liberal, very liberal, but they were not anti-American.

And you could come home from from school and watch Luca Libre.

So

great times.

You had said that.

It's funny, you said that.

When I went to college in 1971,

he just said,

when you come home for Thanksgiving, just do me a favor.

Don't have your hair below your ears.

Don't smoke marijuana.

Don't tell me how awful I was in World War II.

Simple, simple request.

So he'd do that.

Well, Victor, Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

I want to thank the folks who subscribe to Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Antville, where we do indeed try to strengthen civil society.

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Victor, thanks for your wisdom.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening.