From Europe to the Far, Far West

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is the Friday news roundup, and we have a lot of news on the agenda today.

We're going to look at many international things, certain things going on in Europe.

And the first will be what's happening to the alliance between the United States and Europe.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, and we're starting right now.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back, And Victor, we have a lot on the agenda today.

And

Europe is always Europe doing as many strange things as the United States.

But we recently have an article by a MSN, Phillips Payson O'Brien is his name.

And he writes titled, U.S.

and Europe Are Splitting Over Ukraine.

And he says that there's currently occurring a decoupling of NATO, which has always been the core of the alliance, the things that brought the United States and especially Europe together through the Cold War.

And he says the cause is, and I'm going to quote here, profound differences in outlook between the Republican Party's populist wing and the existential security concerns of much of Europe.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were on that.

ridiculous i mean if you look at all the aid that we've given them and is committed it's somewhere between a hundred billion and a hundred and thirty five billion that's more than europe has given

and suddenly with donald trump in the news and some of the republican party saying

at some point given the quagmire and the stagnation there, what is the end game?

And so the Europeans, being Europeans to the left of our left, have now just gone paranoid and Donald Trump might come into power.

They might cut it off, cut off the aid.

And

never did they say anything rationally.

They don't say, okay, let's take a deep breath.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden allowed Vladimir Putin to go in to the Donbas.

and Crimea with no ramifications whatsoever.

We know that because earlier he had said on a hot mic to give

to Medebed, he said, tell Vladimir to give me some space.

This is my last election.

And then I'll be flexible on missile defense.

And he

looked weak with his red lines in Syria and invited the Russians in.

So Vladimir Putin invaded.

Obama did nothing.

Biden did nothing.

And so Trump comes along and he's pretty tough on the Russians, but he's sick sick and tired of the Europeans yelling at us when they won't defend themselves with a GDP of all of Europe that's about comparable to the United States.

And they won't meet their 2%.

They've only had about six of the 30 nations will meet their 2%

of GDP expenditure on military fare.

So he jawbones them and they get angry and he gets angry and then they spend $100 billion on munitions.

Then he leaves office and Joe Biden comes in and Joe Biden says that there is a mine, if it's a minor offensive, he won't do anything.

If the Russians hack, please put hospitals off the list.

He is humiliated in Afghanistan and guess what?

He invades.

Okay, so now we're in Verdun

and there are Republicans saying 500,000 people, low-ball estimate, have been killed.

and wounded.

What is the end game after a year and a half?

And suddenly the Europeans say, well,

you're just Donald Trump.

We're going to have to look at the NATO.

Well, look at it again.

That would be really good.

Look at it again and say, you know what?

We are tired of the Americans telling us what to do.

So we're going to spend 6% of GDP on our own NATO, okay?

We'll partner with Americans.

But don't just,

you know, not make a measly 2% and then yell at the Americans because they said after

giving them over $100 billion, they might want to re-examine where they're going with that.

And it's all about domestic American politics.

They cannot stand Trump.

And yet the person that they should be angry about is Joe Biden, because he was the weak one that allowed the Russians to go in.

And they never say, hmm, Ossatia, Georgia, 2008.

Crimea, Donbos, 2014, the attack on Kiev, 2022.

Well, what happened between 2017 and 2021?

Oh, that was when Donald Trump was president.

But we hate him because he's not helping us.

Well, maybe he was helping them by killing Russian mercenaries and getting out of asymmetrical missile deals and sanctioning oligarchs and sending them offensive javelins.

But they'd never say that.

So

it's all rhetoric, showtime.

They really worried about Vladimir Putin, then don't sell in natural gas, which they have been making a lot of money off of in the case of Germany.

And

matches nuclear.

I mean, France is nuclear, Britain is nuclear, build 6,000 nuclear weapons, and then deter him with conventional forces,

then rather than yell and scream at the United States, who's doing more than they are in Ukraine.

Yes, I have to hand it to O'Brien of

MSN, because he does say that if the GOP wins and they win a president that wants to and does get out of the war in Ukraine, that

France and Britain won't be able to supply Ukraine at the levels that it is being supplied currently.

And

that they would have to negotiate a withdrawal.

And I thought, wow, is there something bad about that?

Yeah, why don't they just say, okay, Germany, you help us.

Spain, Greece, Italy, you got a big economy.

All of us help.

Yeah,

they don't do that.

They don't do that.

Okay, let's go ahead.

I don't know.

Trump is just somebody for a variety of reasons that makes him go crazy.

So whatever he does, they're against.

Yeah, I know.

It's so unusual.

Well, let's turn to another international

story that I read from the Gulf Times,

where it was talking about, while the entire article was not very cohesive at the end they said something interesting that China is beginning betting on political fragmentation in the new Cold War so it was talking about a Cold War II whereas the United States had always in Cold War one

bet on alliances and is hoping for a consensus of allies and the article

at the end says but the US lacks the clout to make middle powers pick a side like south korea like japan and i was wondering is that do you think an apt assessment of the future of our new if it is a cold war cold war with china all these countries have a choice they have three choices if you're india if you're japan if you're taiwan if you're south korea if you're australia right

you can be pro-China and they understand what that is, that that you're under the

even if you're a hawk, you're under the talon of an eagle, and you're going to be stamped down and told what to do from a corrupt

one-party dictatorship.

Or

you can spend 5%, 6% of GDP,

and you can have a really robust military you can join with like kind.

Or you can...

count on the United States to help you.

And the latter part is a little bit tricky right now because Joe Biden is non-compost mintev.

And

we

have had a series of reversals in Afghanistan and then Ukraine installed.

And a lot of people don't think the United States has the wherewithal to put these countries under our nuclear umbrella.

But if I was one of those countries, I would take choices two and three.

I would build my military very

robustly, and then I would try to have a deep relationship with the United States, and then I think you'd be in pretty good shape.

But

every ally wants an ally that's strong, and Israel was the only ally that really understood that.

When Israel wins and when Israel is tough, then everybody wants to be allied with it.

But after the Yom Kippur War, when it looked weak, people started to abandon it.

And so That's just the rule of the world.

The strong dictate to the weak.

And so all these allies would do themselves really a lot of good, like Australia and Japan are now by rearming.

And that will deter China and they won't be able to be picked off.

Yeah.

Since World War II, the United States gives back land.

It gave back the conquered Philippines.

It gave back the conquered Okinawa.

It gave back the conquered Yuji.

These are places where millions

of people have visited

Americans during the war.

These are places where thousands have been killed and we gave it back.

China doesn't do that.

They take stuff.

So they're disputing with Japan over land.

They're disputing with Australia.

They're disputing with the Philippines.

And they know that.

So the United States is an ally that doesn't just rob you of some land.

You know, doesn't say, well, we took Okinawa in World War II and we lost 12,000 soldiers.

We ain't getting it back.

We want it.

No, they don't do that.

But China not only does that, they create artificial islands like the Spratly Islands and

they terrorize people because they're the communist autocratic party.

And so

I think everybody in that area doesn't want to ally with them.

But what China does is they say,

you may not like us, but we are the rising sun.

And look at America, transgender this, George Floyd riots, that.

Half the country is at war with the other half.

Do you really want to ally with that bunch of losers?

Look at us.

We're united.

We're ascended.

And that's the message that they give.

So far, even with Biden, most of the countries have decided to stick with us.

Yeah.

Well, they should look at China, don't you think, and say, look at what they did with COVID.

They could destroy any country.

And they seem unflinching about it.

They don't apologize.

They don't, nothing about their millions that they killed.

Well, they look at the United States, but they're worried these countries because they say, wow, the United States let that balloon go right over.

Wow, they dressed down Blinken and Sullivan and Anchorage, and they didn't say anything.

Wow, they've been hacking, and they let them hack.

Wow,

they steal their patents and copyrights.

They don't do anything.

So that's what they're worried about.

They're thinking, well, if they don't even protect their own soil, why would they protect us?

And then China goes, hey, we sent a balloon over, and guess what?

They didn't do anything to it.

That's what's going to happen to you when we send a bomb over your country.

And so, why don't you join us?

Just exactly the same strategy that Hitler had.

He went into Eastern Europe and he said to Hungary and Romania,

would you like to be end up like Poland or would you like to be an ally?

Take your pick.

And it was very effective.

Yeah, sure.

I guess so.

Even if they have apparently no moral compass from what we do.

No, they don't.

Of them international.

No communist does.

It's by definition an amoral philosophy.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about free speech in Europe and the border in the United States.

So we'll return to domestic politics in just a few minutes.

Please stay with us.

We're back.

So, Victor, last thing about Europe is that maybe two things.

Actually, it's two things I want to just put before you, and then you can decide how you want to talk about them.

We have a recent article on Finland, which is the newest of the NATO alliances, says that

a top prosecutor said quoting the Bible and publishing a booklet.

about Christian sexual ethics constitutes hate speech in Finland's law.

And what he's referring to in a Christian sexual ethics is that it criminally insults homosexuals because it defines marriages between a man and a woman.

And he has actually brought a bishop and a member of parliament up to trial for these crimes.

That's the first one.

And the second one is

Mark Stein recently wrote an article that

recounts the 2005 cartoon in a newspaper in Denmark, Jiland and Posten newspaper, where they had a series that depicted

Muhammad, and that's against Islamic law to have him physically depicted.

And

so the rerun of the newspaper, they wided out.

And the gist of Mark Stein's article was that all the people that defended free speech in 2005 have either been

had an assassination attempt, they've disappeared into probably

a, what do you call that,

a

witness protection program, or died off, and that there's nobody here anymore, or at least in Denmark.

And he also talks about the Netherlands to defend free speech like they did.

And they're copying to the

circumscribing of free speech.

So I was wondering.

Yeah, go ahead.

The root of all this is immigration.

So

when these countries allowed millions of people to come from the Middle East Muslim, and they asked nothing of them, and

many of them came illegally and then played on their guilt and maybe thought that they wanted cheap labor, although I'm not sure all these people work,

then

They had to assimilate them and integrate them, but they didn't want that.

They just didn't want them around.

They just wanted to do menial work and then disappear.

And

the immigrants knew that.

And so there was no effort to bring them into the body politic.

Instead, they appeased them.

They started giving concessions when their clerics broke the laws, when imams engaged in hate speech, and then they doubled down on the reaction.

So

what I mean by that is if you let these crazy imams say very

provocative things and do provocative things, and then you get a pushback, and then you only address the pushback, then that only empowers radical Islamicists to do even more.

And so, now people feel that the government nor the police will protect them.

And so, they're not going to put their neck out there and give a big soapbox speech on the dangers of radical Islam to free speech.

They're just not going to do it anymore because the authorities are on the side of the Muslim immigrant.

And as part of the leftist project, that's not surprising.

So, what Mark Stein's saying is that

nobody wants to talk because they're going to get killed, because there's no consequences for the people who did get killed.

The police aren't going to investigate.

And I don't know if that's because they're just naive and stupid, or there's such a large Islamic population with no-go zones in these cities that they're afraid to go in there.

But ultimately, it's the paradox of immigration from third world countries that these people

are just desperate to get to the west

and when they get to the west

they have this weird double take in other words it's well we're not we like the consumer capitalism we like the housing we like the good life

but we feel the good life has made us decadent so the muslim comes there and he feels he's decadent because he's sold out for the consumer lifestyle and he's lost his Islamic fides and so how does he react to that he doubles down and doubles down and tells his host you're not going to make fun of the the prophet or we're going to go after you and when he goes after them they either can't do anything or they won't do anything so then he goes after them even more and so now after killing these people, no one wants to even show the original cartoons that prompted the original attack.

No one in Denmark or Finland or any of these countries says, you know what?

Victor Orban Orban and the Eastern Europeans have an answer to this.

You do not bring people in illegally from the Middle East, millions of them.

And if you do bring them in legally, they have to be in small numbers that we can assimilate.

And we do not allow them to bring their own laws in that supersede our laws.

So you can say whatever you want in a Western country.

And the sad thing about all these European censors is they give all these lectures about hate speech and free speech and tolerance, and then they just don't do anything.

And people mock Christ or

they do art like piss cries or they write novels about Jesus and sex.

They don't care at all.

It's but if you do that with a Muslim person, a Muslim

iconic figure, I should say, then they go ballistic, not because there's a principle involved, but because they're terrified.

They are absolutely terrified.

And I don't get this idea of immigration where you invite people into your country

and then you don't make any effort to make them obey their laws, nor do you remind them that they chose to come to your country because they apparently felt their country was a failed system.

Therefore, you wouldn't want them to do to your country,

you know, what they did to theirs.

It's kind of like this internal immigration, the United States.

Why would people leave California to Tennessee or Texas or Florida and then try to turn those states into what they left, right?

And that would be insane.

And so that's what is insane about it.

I think we're getting a point right now in Europe, the United States, that people are starting to see that if you want to save your culture and civilization, you're going to have to change your mindset.

Yes.

Yeah, you're going to have to restrict immigration.

You're going to have to say, you can come legally.

We're going to vet you.

And you're going to assimilate and follow our laws but we don't really care if you don't want to do that just don't come yeah we're going to have to tell people on our own border look

we make people wear masks we make people get vaccinations if you want to come to the united states you're going to be subject to the same laws what we apply to our own people.

If you don't like it, stay there.

We don't care either one.

But if you come to the United States, you have to come legally.

You have to come in a diverse fashion.

You should have some skills.

And if you break our laws, you're going to be deported.

And that would solve the problem.

But that takes confidence on the part of the host.

We have no confidence anymore.

Yeah.

Well, you just cut into another article.

I just want people to at least hear the news about the border.

There's not a whole lot new, but recently in Insights and Issues, there was a column that organized

retail crime by cartels is eating into retail profits and costing the retailer over $100 billion in 2021.

And I thought that that was interesting that, you know, that part of the new thing is that it's really costing the retailer and local and state organizations to try to fight this are pouring millions into it.

And so it's just completely destructive of our communities.

Within a 20-mile radius of my home, I can go to a Sunday or Saturday, quote-unquote, swap meet.

Believe me, they're not swap meets.

They're not poor people going in there with an old lawnmower that doesn't work, trading it for an edger that does.

No,

there are semi-trucks there.

They open it up.

They have brand new stuff in it.

And where did that brand new stuff, I won't say, but you can imagine where it comes from.

That's just a fact.

And do you really believe that these people going into Nordstrom, or there was a new story that just came out about a Home Depot?

in Los Angeles.

They just came in and they just swarmed it and they stole all the power tools.

You really think that all of a sudden these black teenagers and those who were depicted in the video all of a sudden think, hmm, I want to apprentice and I can't afford a drill and a power saw.

And so I want to get to know how to use them so I can go get a productive job.

No.

They're going to go out and what are they going to do?

They're going to go fence it.

Who are they going to fence it?

Probably to some organized crime people.

And then they're going to resell it to the people we see at Swablies.

And so that eats, and they don't have to pay any sales tax.

I don't understand this whole thing, especially in California, where you get a guy, there's a road nearby, and there's a Mexican-American guy who played by all the rules.

And he has a little restaurant, and he refurbished it.

It was a kind of an old hamburger stand.

And it's very clean.

He has benches and it's a permanent fixed structure.

And therefore, there are parking, there's paved parking lots, there's access, and he doesn't

interrupt the flow of traffic on a very busy road.

But there's four other people that just pull over a taco truck,

and people just pull off the road or pull out in front of you in the dirt.

And there's no facilities.

I mean, they have a port-a-potty, but there's no permanent running water, a toilet, flush toilet.

There's flies all over.

And there's, where do they, what do they do with their cooking waste?

Well, I can tell you what they do because I used to ride a bike around my house for 20 miles, and these trucks go out in the country and they pull the plug, and you see this cooking oil go right down the street.

But my point is, why do we allow that to happen when this other person is playing by all the rules and he's being undercut in prices by the people who have none of his overhead?

And the answer is that

we have a vast black market,

unreported cash,

no taxation.

And because they're quote unquote marginalized people, we don't, we in California, the most regulated and the most underregulated, we give them a complete exemption.

And so

cartels,

I don't know, gangs, but all I know is there's a huge economy in California, to take one example, that competes with retailers.

and it can be food, it can be stuff you buy on the internet.

Or, I not too long ago, I drove down an intersection.

Here was a guy with like 19 bikes all lined up, bicycle, and it said bikes for sale.

Well, would you go whether to pay a hundred dollars for one of those, or would you rather go to a bike shop and get a very skilled person to give you instructions about whether to you know get a giant bike or

a schwin or something

and then pay three times the price because it's legal and these are probably hot.

So that nobody ever talks about that.

And it's because we feel that all the people are poor, they're people of color, they're immigrants,

swap meats, we shouldn't go there, but they eat, they take a big bite out of the economy and they make it much harder for the people who play by the rules.

Yeah, and then destroy, I think the left doesn't understand or see, or

the ones that are running the left don't experience the breakdown of capitalism and the rules by which it operates is going to really destroy the material wealth and experience of especially the lower and middle classes.

And I just

everything they don't understand anything.

They're starting to with immigration now that these mayors,

people like Massachusetts,

they're going crazy now, just like New York.

But

if I drive down a quarter mile from my house and I see every single pipeline has gang insignia written over

Norteños, Serenos, M13, then somebody has to go out and repaint it, or they have to pick up sofas and appliances almost every day.

And then

there's no money to fix the road.

The road's full of potholes.

And then, if somebody doesn't really know how to drive, they came from a different country, they have drinking, and they knock down a power pole.

It happens about every weekend, then the power company has to come out and fix it.

Well, there's a whole nother overhead to illegal immigration that no one talks about.

And Gavin Newsom sees all of that as a future constituency, so he's not going to do anything about it, nor is the California legislature.

But if you really wanted to improve the lives of the United States citizenry, then you would just put a

task force effort to clamp down on the black market economy and just say, you know what?

We're going to go after all of you people who don't turn in tax returns and we want to know how you live.

Or we want to see what your tax return says, $6,000 and you've got a brand new RAM pickup.

How'd you afford it?

And it's all cash, cash and carry.

Yeah.

And I think if you gave me one day, I could buy everything I needed with cash in 10 mile radius of my home.

Yeah,

absolutely.

Shovels, lawnmowers, bicycles, clothes, food, you name it.

Yeah.

But if they can't even provide the analysis of Joe Biden's income like that, how would they do it of every,

of all these individuals, right?

Or why, what's the, what's the lawfulness of doing that kind of analysis, right?

Where did Joe Biden get all his million-dollar mansions?

Joe Biden, I think all of our listeners are coming to the conclusion, is one of the most evil, corrupt presidents we've ever had.

The question is, what will he not do?

Insult parents who just lost a child by checking his watch or lying about his son?

Yes, he will do that.

He will do that.

Go around the country and say the rich have to pay their fair share after he and his brother, Jim, and Joe, tried to rip off the United States for thousands of dollars in income tax?

Yes, Hunter included.

Does he ever say,

oh,

Jim and I and Hunter are going to pay our fair share?

We're going to go pay all that tax money back that we never did because we never reported these millions of dollars that Hunter shook down from foreign countries.

No.

So every aspect of Joe Biden, you name it, Is he a pervert?

Does he blow into the hair of young girls?

Yes.

Does he try to nibble the necks of little three-year-olds and frighten them?

Yes.

Does he take older women and grab them and hold them too long when he's told not to?

Yes.

He does all of that.

Is he a mean SOB that he calls half the country semi-fascist, ultra-mega, chumps, dregs?

Yes, he will do that.

He will do that.

Yeah, he will do that.

Does he yell and then whisper?

And then when he gets angry and make accusation, does he plagiarize?

Yes.

Does he lie?

He can't tell the truth.

Everything he says is a lie.

It's pathological with him.

Yeah.

Almost everything he says is a lie.

Yeah.

And will he preside over a country where squatters take over Casper, Wyoming, and nearly destroy the city?

Or in Nevada where Bernie Man celebration is flooded out.

There's one road in and one road rode out.

They apparently are hidden.

Those are really two and plagued by mysterious virus.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

Those are really two diametrically opposite examples of life in the far, far west, as my grandmother used to say.

She used to call me up.

There was a radio show.

Take a look at the sunset in the far, far west.

I think, yeah, there's really a lot of things going in the far, far west.

So in Casper, Wyoming, in one of the most conservative states in the country, in an abandoned hotel that was being renovated after flood damage, squatters came in, took over the hotel, and they destroyed the entire hotel, and they left 500 pounds of human feces.

And

why would they do that?

And why would anybody allow them to do that of all places in Wyoming?

Because some judge says you can't evict.

squatters.

Why isn't there a national law?

Why doesn't Joe Biden or why don't governors say, we're going to pass a law and it's going to be aimed at stopping these unconstitutional rulings by these politicized judges.

And it's going to say that a property owner has the right to evict people who trespass and take

ownership illegally of his property.

A city can do the same with its own property.

And then you would have it solved.

But that's a pre-civilizational.

The Bernie Man was post-civilizational.

But here's all these sophisticated people, and they want to go out in the desert all by themselves, all away from civilization, because they're beyond civilization.

And they're going to take all their clothes off.

They're going to have sex with various partners.

They're going to dance.

They're going to listen to music.

They're going to be new age, and they're going to go on one road,

and they're only going to have one road out.

I don't know about you, Sammy, but I would never go with anybody

when when I thought there was going to be 70,000 people with one road in and one road out.

And all sorts of sex acts, you probably can't imagine.

I don't think I could imagine.

There was this article the first day that

I have to be careful, a male had to go seek treatment because he broke his penis.

And it was bleeding, it was hemorrhaging heavily.

And they asked him, and he said he tried to have sex with seven different men.

And

he injured his organ.

And then now,

so the dry lake bed that plagued them with dust, they had a historic rain that hadn't happened in 30 years, but it's a lake bed, isn't it?

It's a lake bed.

So lake bed means that it is a drainage area for high ground in every direction.

So the rain came and the rain didn't stop and it drained into the lake bed where that's where they were all squatting.

And now they're up to their ankles ankles or knees in mud, and it's filthy, dirty.

And guess what happens when you're beyond civilization?

And your porter potties you need for 70,000 people?

Well, the squatters in Wyoming had they just crapped on the floor and ruined it.

But these people were post-civilizational, they were beyond civilizational.

So they did have their porter potties, but nobody could come in and get them because there's one road to a lake bed, as we said, and it's flooded.

So they had no running water.

They had nowhere to defecate, urinate, and they're in a lake bed that's full of mud.

And then they're fornicating with anybody who walks by in the orgy tent, and they're doing all of these other things.

And now there's a rumor that they're supposed to shelter in place because there's a, I don't know what it is, monkey virus.

I don't know, some kind of weird virus.

They're claiming out that they get boils and vomiting.

And it's probably not anything other than they've got dirty food and dirty water, and

they're having sex with dirty people.

Yeah.

Dirty.

And the conditions are like World War I

trenches.

And that's supposed to be fun.

It's almost like, hey,

I'm going to go get in the car, honey.

You and I are going to go to a one-lane road to a lake bed.

And it's a natural place.

When it it rains, it'll flood.

And if it doesn't flood, it'll be 110 because lake beds are hot in the desert.

And we won't even know where the water or food will just kind of hang.

And of course, we're post-civilizational, so they'll have our food and they'll have sewage.

And

you want to,

that would be like me going to UC Santa Cruz and taking one look around at that bunch in 1971 and think, I can depend on these people.

I don't think so.

My dorm was po,

that was so funny.

After three months, I looked, I went into the dorm and all the walls had been kicked in by these drunken party goers.

And they would put posters of Shay, you know, or Jane Fondo over the holes in the sheetrock.

And then you go to the bathroom on Sunday morning after their

parties, there was vomit everywhere.

And then it was, they just lived like animals.

They really did.

Yeah, they thought that was better than living as a capitalist.

Oh, yes, they had petulial oil because they didn't believe in bathing and they didn't believe that you should sit, you should, I guess, what's the, I hate the word fart.

I like the word passing wind, but when they would pass wind, they do it openly.

That was a big thing.

We'd be in a class and

some

guy would just pass wind and he goes, what do you want me to do?

And he didn't even make it.

And that was the idea.

No shaving of your legs or shaving of your arm.

That was the whole thing.

It was the whole, it was the advanced view of burning man in fact i shouldn't say that the people at burning man were probably there in 1971 they looked like a lot of older people wasn't all of this just an extension of the rebellion even in the 1920s against the victorian moral code etc yeah too repressed and those are just different stages of that goes way back to antiquity probably that

there's this rousseauian view that we came in as natural gods and then all these humans put chains on us and made us into monsters.

And if we could liberate us and get back to our essential human nature, nobody would club the other person over the head.

And that's exactly what happens.

Yeah.

And

all the while, capitalists are trying to build more civilization and it's getting increasingly harder for them to do that.

As I said with Jack the other day, just go on a plane.

Just go on a plane on a long flight and you will see

uh as i said yesterday you will see mr so-and-so with his cell phone and he'll stand right in the middle of the aisle while he takes his briefcase and re-examines every single thing before he puts it in the carry-on and then he's holding up so miss x with her oversized bag that they told her not to bring in and she'll go to the back and then she'll say there's no room for this and then there'll be mr with the cheese and the cheetos and the beans and all the food.

And they will be sitting there.

And it's

that is pre-civilizational and a post-civilizational plane.

Yeah.

You got the most sophisticated technology in the history of civilization to take people from San Francisco to New York in a mere five and a half hours.

But the way people dress, the way people eat, the way people treat each other is pre-civilizational.

It's not a good mix.

No, it's.

Nobody, I thought, when I was young, I thought that morality would progress at the same rate as technology.

But in fact, it was the opposite with

technological or material progress comes moral regress.

Yeah.

Well, you talked with Jack about

airline flight.

I recently had a trip

to one of our major cities.

It was quite a long trip and I filled up with gas.

And since I drive an EV, I just haven't really paid that much attention to gas prices.

And oh my gosh, what a,

my car took over $102 in gas.

I don't even see how any of these people that are without jobs or part of the lower classes or even lower middle classes, I mean, how do you

can't?

How do you, yeah, that bill is huge.

I have an Echo Diesel.

It's a very good car.

It has 31 pickup RAM, 32 gallon, 30 miles the gallon, but it has 31 gallon.

So I put in 30 dollars of diesel not long ago 30 and diesel's higher and it is california diesel was almost six dollars so the bill was 172 dollars

and that's to fill up that pickup now it has a long range but that's why as i said earlier people they don't In California, they just don't flip, oh, I'll just flip out the credit card and I'll be here for about three minutes and then you can pull in my my place.

No, they look at the price, and it says, What five or six cents cheaper for gas?

And they can't have enough money to fill it up, so they go in and they hand them a 20 or a 30.

Then they come back to their pump, they fill up, and then they think, Well, maybe I can put 10 more dollars.

So they go back in

and the lines go way out into the road.

Yeah, and it's anybody could see what's going on.

And then you have these very wealthy bicostal elites like Gavin News.

We're going to outlaw all diesel pickups in California will be outlawed in 15 years.

And you will not be able to buy one.

Five years later, you will not be able to possess one.

And we know that that's going to be, that's the California Air Resources Board.

But we don't really know anybody who owns one of those things, those icky people that drive diesel semis or diesel pickups.

We're just going to make a lot of thin air and they're going to have to adjust.

Meanwhile, we're going to go back to our house in Montecito or,

you know, Ross, or maybe we'll go to San Rafael and we'll just putter around in our Tesla.

That's how they will, that's how they view the world, and they don't really care about people.

That's why we're having this major revolt right now.

It's starting to,

I think we're starting to reassert class instead of race.

It's, it's kind of,

I don't know, it's encouraging that a lot of black people recently have expressed sheer disgust with Joe Biden.

A lot of Hispanic people are.

And what they're saying is that they have class interests that transcend their race.

In other words, if you're a Mexican-American painter in Fresno and you've got a

three-quarter ton truck and you're full of paint

and somebody tells you that

you have a Cummings diesel 1995

pickup and they're going to tell you you're going to have to get rid of it or it's bad, who's telling you that?

And it's your Mexican-American legislature,

legislator who went to UC Santa Cruz and then got a master's from San Jose State and then went to work as a political aide to Pelosi or Feinstein, then ran for office and was a second or third generation middle class person and just swallowed hook, line, and seeker, what they told him or her to believe in.

Man-made climate change requires us to shut down diesel, and we have to have transgendered explicit materials in kindergarten.

And

there's going to be, in theory,

some cases where a baby will have to be terminated in the birth canal.

And then this contractor is going to listen to all that just because they both happen to be Mexican-American?

I don't think so.

And I think that's starting to reassert itself, that there's a minority, a Don Le Mon type of African American, and there's other people in the middle class that

have different views on the world.

And Don Lamon idolizes the people in Chicago, like Josie Small and those people.

And then people in the middle have no voice.

So all the people on welfare and who are committing crimes or things in the inner city and terrorizing the middle the black middle class, the black leadership is patronizing, but they're not going to the middle-class blacks and saying, you people are being

terrorized by these thugs.

And we need these thugs

because we hold them over society's head and said, if you don't give us more stuff, the streets are going to erupt.

But we don't really represent you.

We don't really care about you.

You're just a middle-class bourgeoisie.

And

that's not going to be sustainable anymore.

Same thing with, I think, with Mexican-Americans.

Yeah.

And I would like to finish this segment before the ad with a quote from your recent article in American Greatness by the name of What the Left Did to Our Country.

And you end it this way.

And you went over it's an absolutely brilliant article.

It's at the website as well.

So come to victorhanson.com and you can have a view of it on our website and maybe join the website if you would like to.

But here's how you end the article where you sum up everything that the left's been doing.

And again, it's really a brilliant summation.

And you say, all the levers of power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries.

The people are not.

And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst, they very soon won't have a country.

And I thought that was a

wonderful ending.

I hope you're right about that, but go ahead.

Sorry.

And that I,

it wasn't new in the sense.

I just reviewed the damage that's been doing,

that's been done to the country.

And then I was curious, what was the, why are they doing this?

What's the driving force about allowing everybody to stay on the sidewalk?

Is it you don't want to build little, you know, compartments.

You could take Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the old baseball field site, and put, I don't know, five by five little Kwanzant, some kind of structure and bring people out out there.

You don't have the moral confidence to do that.

Is that it?

What is it about the smash and grab?

You can't just, if 15 black youths come into a store to rob it, couldn't you have an undercover detail to close the door and say, that's it, here we are, and then arrest each person, frog march them into a

bus, take them in.

If they're guilty, put them in jail for three or four years.

And we can't do that.

And if you do it to enough times, people won't do it anymore.

Why can't you do that?

And so, the fact that you're letting that damage be done to your society by the homeless or the smash and grabbers or the swarmers,

or you're allowing people,

you're telling the refineries, you're telling California oil producers, you're telling natural gas, you're not going to be able to do this.

And then you go down the 99 or something, you see $6 for diesel and $5.50 for gas.

You see all these people lined up paying cash and they can barely afford to drive.

And why are you doing that?

And so my point in that article was: are you doing it because you want to destroy society and you're an anarchist and out of the chaos sprouts a new utopian America under your Marxist direction?

Are you just so incompetent that you really don't care?

Or do you

is it because you have this utopian idea that you're going to

have a certain view of the world and you just don't notice, you don't know what's going on.

You don't know what those people in Reed did California or Bakersfield or Madeira are doing.

You don't really care.

Because life is pretty good in Atherton and it's really nice in Menlo Park and your ideas should make the world a better place.

But if they don't, well, that's their problem.

But you feel good about it.

I don't know what the motivation is, but it's really scary.

Yeah, it sure is.

It's really scary for all of us because we were all brought up with the idea that you're going to go to college, the more

blue chip the name of the college, the better.

So if you're going to go to,

I don't know, San Diego State, it's better to go to UC San Diego.

If you're going to go to UC San Diego, it's better to go to USC.

If you're going to

go to USC, it's better to go to Stanford and it's better to have a JD than just a BA.

That whole bankrupt idea, we all bought into it.

Then when you look at the people who are teaching at each tier you accelerate in the so-called prestige market, it gets worse.

And they teach crazy things and they're unqualified.

The higher you go into the Ivy League, the more unqualified professors you get.

They're going to indoctrinate kids.

They're not going to teach.

They're lazy.

They don't teach three or four classes a semester.

They always whine.

They're always looking for victimization.

There is no First Amendment rights.

There's no fourth, fifth, sixth amendment rights if you're accused of something.

It's contrary to the 1964 Civil Rights Act with segregated dorms and graduation.

So it's just,

it's just mind-boggling, this elite.

They're not elite.

And we've got to change our

whole attitude toward them that when we sit, when somebody's, if somebody says, hello, I'm Victor Davis hansen and i have a phd from stanford and i'm at the hoover institution on the stanford campus people have to say so what they have i could care less it's either what you do it's what you do you write something that's of value and if you do i will read it if i don't give a damn about your the letters after your name because your your class has destroyed this country And you are the people who ran out of Afghanistan.

And you're the people who got gasoline very high.

And you're the people who got this big debt, and we've got this

inflation.

And you're the people who made these crazy rules about

banning diesel fuel or banning diesel pickups.

You are the people who ban natural gas stovetop.

You're an idiotic, moronic class.

And the more letters you have after your name, the more suspicious we are of you.

When we get to that point, we'll be freed of these people.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and go to some messages and come back and maybe talk a little bit about Tolkien and Jimmy Buffett.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back and I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, I thought we maybe on this news roundup we'd have a little bit of genre relief and look at

Tolkien.

I really like the online magazine Quillet for the diversity.

It's not necessarily a right-wing or left-wing site, but they do have a lot of interesting articles that are written by specialists.

And a recent article written on Tolkien, and I'm afraid I don't have the young author's name, but they wanted to talk about the popularization of Tolkien's stories in movies, obviously, and their interpretation.

And this author concludes that Tolkien, quote, would have seen the urbanization of the countryside, the waning popularity of Christianity, and the increasing secular interpretations of his fiction as symptomatic of a society in decline, a society no longer capable of interpreting his words in the spirit in which he wrote them.

And the articles about about the Christian element in his Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit.

And I was wondering, I have a feeling you agree with that, but also your reflections on Tolkien's intent and his work, I thought would be interesting.

He was a Catholic moralist, and he believed in redemption, but the original sin of man.

So

When evil is in the world, it was like the serpent in the garden when

Isildur cut off, and according to the pre-Lord of the Rings mythology,

they cut off the ring of sword and they could destroy it and there would be evil and they couldn't do it because he was a flawed character.

And so the story is that good people

are trying to eliminate evil.

And there's a whole group of people.

who were committed cultures to do that.

And then, but they understand that they're in the minority and they don't have the power so sour and then there's temptation christian-like temptation sourman becomes the bad guy a lot of it is

and that's all lost to the modern audience and

he denied that it was a modern allegory but he wrote it i think

shadow of the past the second chapter it was written in the late to his son christopher he wrote parts of it he was on i think he was on the ark royal at sea in World War II.

But he was really looking at the Cold War and World War II in terms of Christian piety and divine redemption and fall.

And it was, and the red eye, I think you could argue, was his fear of the Sovietization in the 30s and what it was becoming.

It was no longer dormant.

And it had made a pact with Sauermann.

And he was sort of good.

I think he was sort of like,

I don't know, Germany had been part of Europe, but he had no idea that he was, I think, as I said earlier, he was the hawk under the eagle's talon.

And they made this alliance.

It was kind of like the Ribbentrop Pat.

And

that they had all the power.

And so

they were overthrown by, I think, the good people that he was, while he was writing this, he was seeing that the Allies were winning, but that

they might have had to use methodologies to win that, by definition, made them sinful.

I don't know if that would be the atomic bomb or the ring or whatever, but

it was allegorical.

He said it wasn't, but it really was.

And in the end,

The point is that they got rid of Sauerman and his master, Sauron,

but the good world had been stained and destroyed through that

effort.

And so, after World War II, the English countryside and the idea that you could live in peace in a sort of a pre-technological, pre-industrial world, a decentralized, it's gone.

And so, certain people that were essential to that world have to go to the Grey Havens.

The elves have to go away.

The men of Gondor

they're going to die out.

The wizards have to go away

because they were part of the pure

moral world that these industrialization destroyed.

You can see that with Sauerman when he cuts down the ants, trees, and he makes these horrible machines, and he creates this race of super orcs.

And

so he's saying,

Yes, we defeated evil in World War II, but in the process, we got into the modern world.

And we can never go back to the 19th century England or the 19th century West as it was, because we had to be complex enough to stop the evil among us.

So that's why the elves go to the Greyhaven.

They represent a pre-civilizational kind of woodland people who lived with nature.

You know what I mean?

He was an anti-industrialist, but he was also scarred in World War I.

He was in the trenches, almost got killed.

And then the other thing about it is there's a,

in one sense, the entire trilogy is almost a i don't know what you call it a gambit a plaything so that this anglo-saxon scholar could have all of these names all of them are out of the

they're not they're out of the period of english and germanic history and icelandic history you know from maybe 800 to 1200.

So etymologically, all those names have something to do with the character.

Salerman is, I think, crafty or deceitful.

Sauron is, and

the Hobbits are English people, and they have English names going way back.

So for every one of those Bilbo or Photo or Sauerman, you can find somebody in Anglo-Saxon Norse dash Norse mythology with those names.

And he incorporates a lot of Norse mythologies from time to time.

And, you know,

So the alphabet, he spent hours on the Elvish alphabet, the dwarfish alphabet, the pronunciation, the etymologies.

And most people who go to the movies don't even care about that.

And

what did the modern adaptation do

to Lord of the Rings?

Well,

I like Peter Jackson's effort, but when you have Legolas kind of surfboarding, like he's a silver surfer in Marvel

comics.

Yes.

I noticed that.

Yeah, he does.

Or all of a sudden, after the first show, the first Fellowship of the Ring, the orcs were too dark.

And then all of a sudden, they became what?

They became, by the time of The Hobbit, they're all white.

And

you got the impression that Tokian felt the coursers of Umbar, they were sort of Middle East,

sort of like pirates or corsairs in the Mediterranean, early Mediterranean world.

What I'm getting at is that all the evil people could not, in our world, represent challenges to the Western Europe where he was.

And that's what he did.

So you have this question, should you represent the author's world and criticize it, or do you change it

to something he never intended, but is useful or compatible with your contemporary view?

And that seems to be, I mean, even Beckett now, and Beckett, excuse me, even Macbeth now,

there's a lot of Chicano professors that want to go back and redo Macbeth so the language is perfectly politically correct.

And it represents something that Shakespeare never envisioned.

And they think that's fine.

Well, why don't they just write their own play rather than hijack the name Shakespeare to give their own bankrupt ideas currency?

And so I think you really have to honor the author's intent or don't do it.

And so whether you like it or not, orcs were dark.

I don't know if that was racist or not, but I don't know it was.

And when he says that men were half orc, he says they were swarthy in the book.

And for

the first Fellowship of the Rings, that was pretty true to what he wrote.

But after that,

it had to adapt to modern taste.

But it's a Christian morality play superimposed on the world of politics, geopolitics, of which she grew up.

And it was a pretty scary time when you had this huge Soviet monstrosity that people had never encountered before taking over the largest country in the world and trying to reach through both during World War II with this pact they had made

with Germany.

And Germany had been, in Tolkien's mind, Germanic culture was one of the great fonts of the ring

legend and all of this rich forest mythology.

You know, the ants probably came right out of Germanic,

and all of a sudden this had been allied with the Soviets, and then they fought each other.

And then

Saurman was betrayed and destroyed, but Soron was too, but

at what cost?

The cost was that the civilized West

had fouled itself in the process or had lost its purity or the people that had and it was time for them to get out and go away.

I don't know if that means that Tolkien's saying that all the people who lived in the pre-industrialized, pre-World War II have no place in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, so they've got to get on ships and go to where they came from in some mythological

la-la-lam that's without industry or evil, but that seems to be where they're going.

I think the, you know, they, when

in one of the passages, I haven't read the books in years, but I think they get a, as it ends, they get a glimpse of the gray, of the world on the other side of the gray havens, they say, and they see a far better place than they'd ever seen before

as the light shows where they're going.

Yeah.

And that's.

I think people really got angry at the hierarchy, too, that he had.

You get the impression that the elves are the most pure of all people.

And they live forever.

They're immortal.

And they're closest to the original creatures on Middle-earth.

They have all sorts of telepathic powers, the high class.

And then you come to the next group is the men of Gondor, the original ones, and they're almost all gone.

And then the people who took their place in Gondor, there's a regent, and then you've got the,

you know, the hardy North folk, the Viking type people,

the writers of Rohan, they're tough, they're not corrupt, but they don't quite have the legacy of the now decadent descendants of Gondor lineage-wise.

But they're kind of hardy and pre-civilizational themselves, and they're very tough people.

But you can't marry one of them with Aragorn, for example.

You just

have to have a daughter.

Yeah, they're in a different class, and people didn't like that, that he has a whole hierarchy of who's then.

And then the dwarves, there's a little bit of anti-Semitism in there because they're just obsessed with gold, especially in the Hobbit.

And they get fixated with gold, and they're short, and they have large noses.

It's kind of really anti-Semitic, and they have beards.

And

he's been accused of suggesting, but he likes the dwarves.

And they have this alphabet that might look a little bit like Hebrew, more so than the other languages in the book.

And that was considered anti-Semitic.

And then, of course, the orcs, they represent apparently non-white folks of non-European lineage and you put all that together and and it's not going to work well in the 20th 20th and 21st 20th and 21st century it's not going to work well unless you adopt it and change what he he saw and that's what they've done in the movies and popular culture

Yeah, they seem comfortable with the anti-Semitism, however, but that's a whole nother story.

Maybe they were they were that is It's important.

So a modern director or a modern adapter, is he going to

make the dwarves less gold hungry or less greedy or less squatty and fat?

Or is he going to make the orcs whiter and more?

And the answer is

he's not going to, he doesn't.

fear the anti-Semitism, but he does fear orcs being black.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, last thing on on our agenda is

Jimmy Buffett recently died on September 1st.

And of course, we know his songs from, you know, sort of party songs, right?

Or at least kickback and enjoy yourself songs, Margaritaville, Come Monday, and

changes in latitude.

And I was wondering of your thoughts on Jimmy Buffett.

I met him a couple of times.

In a summer, I saw him in a couple of venues.

And he was very, he was sort of, well, he was a billionaire.

I mean,

it wasn't just Jimmy Buffett by the time he died.

It was Jimmy Buffett Incorporated.

I think he had restaurants.

But

he had a niche, and that was sort of the

white upper middle-class professional between the ages, I'd say right now, of 45 and 75.

And that worked really hard, had disposable income, and just liked to, at certain times, wear cutoffs or Hawaiian shirt or go have a daiquiri or a margarita and just kind of, you know, listen to music,

didn't want any messaging from it, didn't want any revolution, just wanted to hang out with like kind.

Then the music would unite them, and it was very easy to listen to.

It was the professional casual class's answer to the deadheads and that what great for dead, great, grateful dead devotees of the counterculture there's guys that you know in my family that smoked dope and they loved the dead and they followed all their concerts and then when they got old they still followed what the last remnants of the grateful dead

and so that jimmy buffet had that same group of people that were kind of laid back and there was the bruce springsteen crowd they were absolutely devoted to springsteen But the Buffett people, I think, were a little bit more affluent and they weren't quite as counter-culture and they didn't, we weren't really into music as protest or any of that stuff that you hear in Springsteen or the Dead or anything.

It was more just

you worked hard all week, go to a fern bar,

have the music, maybe dance, and just have some daiquiris

and

relax.

And you earned it.

Live and let live.

And you earned it.

And being, hey, bro, don't judge, don't be judgmental.

That kind of,

And I think he knew.

I don't think he ever claimed that he was any prophet of any particular socioeconomic group or had any particular message.

I think

he would always say that I developed a type of music that was easy to listen to and pleasant and relax people.

And then the lyrics were sort of I screwed up, who cares?

Or manana kind of world, right?

Yeah.

And a lot of people and a stressful

life

adapted to it in a way.

He was kind of, you know, Mark Nofer has a

All the Road Running.

He did that album with Emmy Lou Harris.

He has kind of the same kind of following, but a little bit different.

But it's very soft music.

It's very well composed.

And it's just some of the lyrics are just about,

well, the world's kind of crazy and I'm not going to try to make

sense of it.

I'm just going to try to go with the flow and enjoy things.

But it is kind of crazy.

Mark Nolford more so than Jimmy Buffett.

He's just one of those guys that's a typical American.

They start with nothing.

And

we'll talk about him later.

I'm writing an article on Oliver Anthony.

He's the same type of guy.

I don't know if he wants to be as wealthy as the rest.

He could be.

He's got a lot of talent.

He's got a good voice.

He's got a good sense of music.

But it's very weird about this country, especially in the age of globalization.

You hit on a particular cachet

or a particular music or a particular

chain of books or a product, and you just

it's like some kind of, I don't know, it just replicates itself, replicate, or it just takes off over 8 billion people, and then you become fabulously influential and

more power to you.

But that's who he was.

Yeah, he had a fan club called Parrot Heads.

I didn't know that.

I knew that you were talking about it.

Parrot Heads.

I don't know what that is.

Go ahead.

I have another member of my family who idolized in and would go to his concerts.

And

her idea, she's a little younger than I am.

Her idea of

a wonderful weekend would be to go to a Jimmy Buffett

concert.

well it sounds like fun yeah it does and

and

i don't know i think a lot of people came out of the 70s the 60s and 70s look at the music that followed they don't think it was as good

and so they're trying to retain that pleasant happy memory there was all the memories there

wasting away and margaritaville death didn't that uh shoot him to fame i think that was yeah he doesn't know really where he is doesn't care he's got a hangover just yeah

That's it.

It is what it is.

That's right.

It's all part of the culture.

Oh, very sad.

He died of a very rare and aggressive cancer, Merkel cell carcinoma.

I think that's a very virulent form of melanoma.

Yes.

Skin cancer.

So I guess if you were writing about being in the sun in the lower southern hemisphere, that's one of the professional

hazards.

But I think he was, was he 80 almost?

Yeah, 76.

So

still too young.

Yeah, still too young.

Absolutely.

I had met him once and I heard him play.

And he

I think he really despised Don From.

I knew he said some things before he started playing.

That was kind of funny.

I remember being at the time, I thought, wow.

We must really hate the guy to talk about him right before he's going to play a song.

All right.

Well, thank you, Victor.

That's the end of the Friday news roundup.

We're glad to hear all the tales of Victor Davis Hansen and his wisdom as well.

Okay.

Thank you, everybody.

Yeah, thanks to the audience.

Okay, bye.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.