The Destruction of American Cities

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the star, and the namesake Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This gives us an opportunity the 18th of April and the following day.

These are great anniversaries in America for the battles at Lexington and Concord.

So we'll talk about those two cities.

We'll talk about another really big city, Chicago, which is enduring another one of its hellacious weekends under a new

mayor

who's,

gosh, what a lefty.

That, and we'll get into some other things and get Victor's opinions on so much.

And we'll get to these things right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, this weekend past, I was going to a wedding.

I was driving to New Jersey and listened to

you and Sammy.

You had a

great podcast.

You seem to be doing

better from your bee

wasp or hornet attack.

How are you feeling before we get on?

I'm feeling better.

You know, it was funny, Jack.

After having, I think I told you, after having long COVID for 11 months, I got COVID euphoria and I felt pretty good and I'd never jogged in my life.

So I started jogging and

I thought, wow, I beat this.

And then, and I got stung all the time, as I said, because we have about 100 hives from the neighbors and ours.

It never bothered me, but apparently this condition I have, long COVID, this mastocytosis, long COVID, and then running, I guess, makes histamine.

And then the venom builds up.

But I'm waiting for all the tests.

But I am,

you know, I feel like

it's just,

I'm getting back to where I was, but it's just kind of achy from the, I guess, all the steroids and Benadryl they inject you with and adrenaline, they did it.

They just, I had it, I had to take that stuff for about a week and I didn't like it.

And then, but I, you know, I'm, I'm feeling pretty good.

I take that elevate water, that hydrogen-infused water that's great.

Comes some super water.

And a friend sends it to me, a couple doves

the wieners and uh boy i i get a really good charge and then i've given it to a colleague who's recovered from head and neck cancer and he uses it and it really helps him he thinks create more uh saliva so that helps i take a lot of supplements and stuff but uh

it's very

it's uh maybe we should uh drain drown uh chicago in some elevate water yes i don't know if you want to empower give them more energy but uh yeah, maybe.

Well,

let's talk about that, Victor.

Let's, you know, the

again, we're recording on Monday, the 17th, and this weekend past, it might have even been Friday a night.

Youths organized themselves via social media and just went on a

burn cars and loot spree.

And Chicago has a new mayor, Brandon Johnson, and his response to this

outrageous behavior has been to condemn critics, to say, don't demonize

these kids.

This kind of criticism is not constructive.

I saw him on some

TV interview and he and oh, it was maddening.

He would not,

yeah, he wouldn't condemn looting, except he turned the tables in his ideological way to say that, oh, the corporations are looting the poor communities.

Yeah, right.

So, yeah,

what's your take on that?

Well, I mean,

this is analogous to the mayor.

Remember in Baltimore, we gave everybody a place.

He said he wanted a place.

So I think he's channeling, what was their name in Baltimore?

So we gave everybody a place.

For those who wanted to burn and riot, we gave them a place.

And it's the same attitude, and it's a complete failure to take responsibility for your actions.

And it raises a larger question.

I was in San Francisco last Monday.

It's very tragic that there is very little traffic.

30% of these beautiful new buildings are empty.

They're trying to, it seems to me, clean up some of the feces.

And it was cleaner than I had thought outside of the Market Union Square fiasco.

But my point is: all of these mayors, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Washington,

St.

Louis, Memphis.

They all inherited these rich, vibrant cities.

You know, Carl Sandberg, Chicago, or I Left My Heart in San Francisco, or Boeing, Seattle, or Hollywood, Los Angeles.

And they were all functional, great places to live for a while.

And then the 70s and the great society came, and that made it worse.

And then we had the Giuliani, Giuliani,

Michael Bloomberg sort of renaissance, the broken windows attitudes that really under.

And then I gave credit to Bill Clinton.

He continued what George H.W.

Bush and Reagan did, at least in the sense of, you know,

being opposed to illegal immigration, he was, and trying to balance the budget.

And,

you know, Joe Biden's on record.

Remember about it's a jungle out there.

We have to give stiff penalties.

So, and they broke the back of crime is what I'm saying.

So now these new people enjoying the work of others that they inherited and did not contribute to, they inherited stable, vibrant cities.

If you went up to San Francisco in 2006 or 7, it had been, there was a radical change of,

I guess, the force or dynamism from the Menlo Park,

Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, old suburban Silicon Valley up to the city where you had all these young people.

They were mostly childless.

They were hipsters.

They stayed out at night.

It was very safe.

Prices were skyrocketing, and that was the place to be.

And they destroyed it, is what I'm saying.

They destroyed all these cities.

And they took them over.

And then they basically said, some people who were dead gave us a great inheritance.

This infrastructure is here.

And years of red state governance and sort of even conservative Democrat government.

We have a good system.

We got all this money and we're going to just live it up and we're going to try our utopian bromades where it's hire more people or raise pensions or give the teachers unions whatever they want or bring in the Soros DAs.

And in this space, and then of course there was COVID and the Trump derangement syndrome and the riots after George Floyd.

That was the catalyst, but they destroyed them.

They absolutely destroyed these cities as workable places.

And I think in the last year, I've been to downtown San Francisco, downtown Los Angeles, downtown Washington, downtown New York, downtown Portland, and downtown Seattle.

And they're destroyed.

I think they are, from what they were, as I remember them just a decade ago.

And it's really sad because they didn't create anything, these mayors.

They didn't build a building.

They didn't build a monument.

They didn't found a park.

They didn't do anything.

All they did was undo the work of other people.

And there is a racial element to it because basically

these

major cities are plus minority run, and

the tax base tends to be more in the direction of the white professional and corporate class who are, you know, to live there, they're pretty liberal and they put up with it.

And now they feel that the new Democratic Party is so racially fixated that even though they share their ideology,

even though they contributed to the policies that have destroyed these cities, that they have a target on their back.

And, you know, when you have California, Jack, when the legislature says that they're going to attack,

I shouldn't say tax, but when you pay your power bill, you're going to get an assessment on your income.

So, how much money you make, you will add 50, 100, 150 or so dollars to your power bill every month.

Yeah, why should that just be about power?

Why shouldn't they charge you bananas?

It is.

We're in socialism.

I think everybody has to take a deep breath and say, do not make fun of the EU anymore.

Do not make fun of Sweden or Denmark as socialists.

We are more socialists than they are.

We have higher combined tax rates than they do.

And this party is to the left of the European Socialist Party.

And it's...

It's socialism that's taken over this country.

And you can see it, whether it's the abolition of SAT scores or the abolition of competitive GPA rankings or hiring people not on the basis of merit or Stanford University bragging that they turned down 60 to 70 percent of the students who opted to take the SAT and got a perfect score.

It is insidious.

It permeates every aspect of our culture.

And they, what gets me so angry is these people for all of their victimization, all of these different groups, they didn't create

what they enjoy.

Somebody else created it and somebody else created under different premises and auspices than theirs.

If you translate what the radical LGBTQ and the radical Antifa and the radical BLM, all of that ideology, it wouldn't give them the wealth that they are squandering right now.

It would give you Cuba.

It would give you Venezuela.

It would give you Nicaragua.

It would give you North Carolina.

Detroit.

Yeah.

Detroit.

Chicago.

Well, we're turning every.

And the thing that gets me is that, so there was a tragic shooting in, I think it was, was that in Missouri, I think, where an African-American teenager got the wrong house, supposedly, and he was knocking on the door to find his brothers.

And he went up to a house.

And the owner panicked and shot him and didn't kill him, but wounded him.

And now, Mr.

Crump, of course and sharp it's a and that that that may be that may be found to be a illegal shooting if it is then he should and likely will face the full run of the law but what i'm getting at is is the media today is just obsessed on that while this rampant and there were shootings in chicago this rampant riot they are contextualizing just like they contextualize the three gang members who executed those girls in Florida, we still don't have one.

Just like we had in Alabama a shooting.

I think it killed four.

And when you have black on black or black on white shootings, it's a shrug.

But when you have these George Floyd incidents or somebody mistakenly shooting somebody who comes to his door, then we're all supposed to see that as a referendum on the toxicity of American life.

It may be, but the others surely are in terms of magnitude and damage and death are far greater, and no one says a word.

And that's what the media does.

And I don't know the answer to that, but violence is violence, and death is death.

And it doesn't matter what the color of your skin is, and you should report these things.

And as I said before,

if you

listen to NBC,

watch PBS, listen to NPR, ABC, read the New York Times, you would not get any iota that in terms of hate crimes, in terms of interracial crimes, in terms of disproportionate crimes of rape, assault, and murder, we have a problem with African-American male youths between the ages of 14 and 40 that are inordinately either double their numbers in terms of hate crimes or even higher, double their numbers.

I mean, it's six times more likely to commit an interracial crime, if you're in that demographic, than a white person to do that to a black person.

And about 55% of the murders are committed by about 4% of the population.

And no one wants to talk about that.

And what I just said, I probably will have somebody listening, and I'll get a note from Stanford University.

But my point is, if you don't talk about it, it's going to create more and more anger.

And I don't know what the answer is, but the answer is not Al Sharpton and BLM and these grifters trying to rush in their private planes to each time they find a focus or a loci of a white on black crime and then to exploit it.

It doesn't work.

They should work on Chicago.

Work on Chicago, Al Sharpton, Mr.

Crump, go to Chicago.

And I don't think the answer is not enough parks or not enough open space.

You know, Victor, there was that, I think it was in Minneapolis,

remember a couple of years ago, black cop killing a white woman by mistake, right?

I think it was from Somali, wasn't he?

Yeah.

You know, we talk about race all the time here, but that's because those, though, the ideology that's trying to destroy our found, you know, this republic use race as their weapon.

That's why BLM was so embraced by the left because race is, who wants to be called a racist in America?

That's the greatest fear of people who aren't racist, not a scintilla of racism in their bone.

That's probably most

Americans, and they're afraid.

Please don't call me a racist.

It started with Barack Obama.

When you go back and look at Boiler Plate, JFK, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson.

You name the Al Gore,

Bill Clinton,

even

John Kerry Rand.

it was all class and the underprivileged.

And remember John Edwards, Two Americas, and we're going to help the white working class, the black working class, the Hispanic working class, hard hats, blue collar.

That was their message.

And Obama came in and he created, he pumped up this dead word called diversity and he rebooted it like a Frankensteinian monster.

And he said that now it's not black and white.

It's 30% of the nation has been victimized.

It's immutable.

I don't know how you can do this, Jack, when you can construct your gender, which is much harder to do than your race.

But it's very strange that a person can say, I am a

biological female, even though I have testicles and a penis and a muscular skeletal system that is not like a woman.

But Rachel Dozel or Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill can't can't do that.

They can't change their, and Obama knew that.

And so what he was trying to do is get a permanent class of marginalized people, supposedly, that had claims against the majority.

And race then was immutable.

LeBron James is a victim.

Colin Kaepernick is a victim.

The Black Caucus is a victim.

The Duchess of Sussex is a victim.

Oprah is a victim.

Many people on the view are victims.

Now, they may be multi-millionaires and they may live in mansions and they may have private security details, but they are victims because of their race.

And once you do that, then you have a permanent class that cannot be upwardly mobile.

The reason Marxism failed is that every time they said, We're going to help you and we're going to help you and help you, the guy did pretty well.

And he came up and he looked at his paycheck and he said, I make 50, 60, 70,000.

I don't want to pay for this.

And

he advanced out of the grievance industry of the Democrats.

But once you change that and you say that all black people, all brown people, all people who are not white are permanent victims

forever from right, then you have a permanent constituency.

And that means

you also have to have a permanent oppressive class also, because they can't be victims unless Victor Davis Hanson is an oppressor just by virtue.

Absolutely.

And they don't care.

They don't care about your individual circumstances.

They don't care at all.

You know, everybody

is a different person, but they have a collective.

They have a collective.

They make one exception, one exception.

They despise black conservatives.

More so than Asian or Latino, because this paradigm cannot tolerate a brilliant guy like Tom Sowell or Shelby Steele or Clarence Font.

They cannot tolerate it because it just defies all of the propaganda they have imbued.

So they go after those people.

And, you know, I mean, we are watching a situation right now where probably the most corrupt family in the history of the U.S.

presidency is completely exempt, the Biden family.

They made millions of dollars.

If any accountant went into Joe Biden's various homes, and he looked at how much they cost, and he looked at his lifestyle, and he looked at the amount of income that was reported in that brief period after he, for the first time, and he was not a member of government, say from 2017 to when he was 2000, I don't know, 19 when he was a candidate.

He could not have made that much money.

He would have had to have won the lottery.

He would have had to.

And look at his tax return.

They don't care.

They'll go after Clarence Thomas until they destroy him.

And

that's very strange how they do that.

What did you think about him flaunting his son in Ireland?

He brought Hunter with him on that trip.

I think it's something that we're going to see because I think what he was doing was Jill called Hunter up and said,

this is just hypothetical.

I can't handle him anymore, Hunter.

He says anything to anybody, anytime, anywhere, I can't handle him.

He doesn't know where he is.

You better come on this trip.

And did you notice that Hunter sort of was at his dad's side?

And when his dad got confused, Hunter jumped in and said, no, no, dad, this is what he asked.

Yeah, dad.

And I think that was, he needs a full-time attendant.

And I think that's going to be Hunter's new role.

And that's going to put him so close to the president that no special counsel,

I mean, Merrick Garland is not going to allow that to any.

any special counsel to go after Joe Biden or Hunter Biden.

And so that's what's, I think that's what it's about.

Right.

But Jill Biden wanted, Jill wanted this.

Dr.

Jill wanted this.

She knew that her husband wasn't up to it, but she had dreams of being the next Michelle Obama.

And she demanded that he go out there.

And he lasted about two years.

And he's going downhill rapidly.

And now she's panicking because she loves the spotlight.

Every time she opens her mouth, people give her a pass.

But she is the most gaffe-prone person, First Lady we've seen in years.

I mean, she goes to a Hispanic, you know, and talks about tacos.

She goes right to the women's winner, and then she gets in that psychodrama about, well, we're going to bring the white team to that came in second, and then back and forth.

She doesn't know what she's doing.

And

she loves the spotlight.

So I think Hunter,

maybe members of the Biden family, are going to reappear, and they're going to help her steer him along.

And

Pushing the British prime minister out of the way, out of just,

I don't know,

brain fog or

dreaming of ice cream cones somewhere.

The New York Times would have had a headline on it.

And he said,

these kids said,

you know, what do you have to do to be successful?

Don't get COVID?

I mean, that whole trip in Ireland was a disaster.

And

he got confused.

He insulted people.

He shouldn't have been there.

There was no reason to take a family junket when the world is upside down.

Yeah, also,

the priest that gave Beau Biden last rights was there.

And yet, another example of him trying to

enfold himself in these family tragedies.

Well, he's told so many lies about Beau.

He's told us that he was, what, a combat veteran or he died in Iraq?

Or he's told us that

a drunken drunken driver, a truck driver, ran a stop sign and killed his ex-wife.

He tells lies about his entire family.

And

he gets away with it.

He keeps telling everybody that

he flew, I don't know how many thousand miles and he's or he's met Chi and so many hours.

It's just all so many miles on Amtrak.

He just, everything he says is a lie.

And this is very ironic because Donald Trump was a great exaggerator.

Sometimes he lied, but they were, they gave him no margin of error.

So it's time to bring veracity back to the presidency.

And then they got the greatest fibrillant in history as the president.

They don't say a word.

And, you know, it's, it's, uh,

I don't know what's going to happen to this country.

I wrote something to you today, you know, about how America could be saved because I don't want to be Eeyore all the time.

I want to be positive.

But when you look at what the Bidens,

I shouldn't say the Bidens, they're a construct for the squad, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the Obamas.

They're not functional themselves, but

they are the,

I guess, the veneer of this.

Useful idiots.

Yes, they were the veneer of this hard left revolution.

Pete Buttigig today

trying to remind us once more that

freeways are racist.

I can tell you what's racist is

Gavin Newsom, the way that when he

is going to continue this high-speed rail, we've spent $20 billion.

It's going to be $150 billion from Bakersfield to Merced and right parallel to it is the 99 freeway that is ossified in some places with just two lanes in every direction.

with 10 times the traffic it was designed for.

And they're mostly from Kingsburg down to Bakersfield.

I'd say 75% of the traffic is Hispanic.

And the same thing is true of 101 as it goes through the Gilroy corridor, you know, all the way into Monterey,

Monterey County.

And the same thing is true of I-5 on the west side.

It only has two lanes of each way.

And if you look at the names of the people who are both

victims and

at fault driving, it's mostly Mexican-American.

And I would say to Pete Buttigig, that's racist.

You could come in here with federal funds and fix these freeways.

But that's not what he's talking about.

He's not saying we're going to go and make the freeway system better so poor people or people of color won't get inordinately in accidents.

He's saying

the whole freeway system was created by racists.

It went through your neighborhood.

So what we're going to do is have a green solution.

That's what he's saying.

And that's going to be even more racist because he should come down to the service station a mile from where I live.

I call it the arena because

when you go in there, everybody is so strapped for cash, Jack, that they pay only cash.

You get a nine cents discount.

So you park.

Yeah, you park it.

It's over five bucks a gallon still, right?

It's getting close.

Diesel is about 560.

Gas is anywhere from 470 to 55 and up.

But what people do is they go into, they get in a long line because it's a cut rate price.

And then they park their car, park their car, and they go in and pay cash.

And then they don't, and then they come back and then they kind of say, well, maybe I can get another $5 worth, again, another gallon.

They go back in.

So a car, you know, it's not like you go in, stick in your credit card.

and you're out in five minutes.

It's every car is 15 minutes.

So you got a line out there.

And

I wish Pete Buttigig would go see that or Gavin Newsom and see the consequences in the real world of their ideology.

They don't see it.

He's a guy, you remember, that he gets in a black limo.

And then when the cameras are out, he pulls out his bike and tells everybody he's riding his bike to work in Washington.

Victor, we began this conversation

about Chicago, and you talked about San Francisco.

And I remember being there with you a few years ago, and

you've also talked about how quickly civilization goes off a cliff.

And you're right.

Eight, nine years ago, great city.

Now, my God, what a hellhole.

But the difference between eight, nine years ago and now, or the difference, say with New York City, which was a city that was circling the drain and was saved, I think, by Giuliani and

the great farmer Bloomberg.

What wasn't available then and is available now is is bandwidth.

And I don't know how these cities can come back

from

these catastrophes when people don't have to live there.

You had to live in New York City if you were in this business finance.

You don't have to anymore.

I don't know.

I know my daughter's looking for a house in the Auburn area, and

we're in a housing recession, right?

California, 500,000 people have left, but not that market.

That market from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe is red hot.

And why is it red hot?

Because everybody in the Bay Area that has families that go to school, especially are leaving, and they figure they can go out to a nice rural area in Newcastle or Grias Valley or Colfax and buy a home

and get an acre or two or more, and they can get on the Zoom, and they don't have to deal with this.

And I think that is, people just don't want to deal with it anymore.

They do not want to drive into the city park and then know that,

I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not just the crime, Jack.

It's the idea that the people who run the government in these cities have contempt for them.

So they know that if you drive into San Francisco and you park your Tesla or your BMW and you're kind of an affluent professional or your Audi on the street in broad daylight, there's a good chance that somebody will come in, smash your window, go through your thing.

And then you're going to call the police and they're going to come out in about an hour and a half.

And they're going to say, well, it looks to me like it's less than $950.

So it's just a miss.

We don't even do that.

And then they're going to say, somebody's going to say to you, well, why in the hell did you take that nice car into town?

And you know, too, that if you walk in San Francisco, if you go to a dinner or something and you think, I only have about eight blocks, I'll just walk.

And somebody comes up, like it's happened a lot.

The former fire commissioner was beaten, and we just had another, a gay man that was just beaten up at walking outside a hotel.

He was shot, actually.

They're going to the attitude: well, why did you walk out there?

Are you dumb?

That's your fault.

And the same thing about taxes.

Okay,

you're going to pay 13.2 taxes beyond your 39 federal and your 6 or 78 Medicare and Obamacare tax, but that's not enough.

We hate you.

So we're going to add $150 to your power bill.

And so I think people are saying, I can take paying taxes or I can take the crime, but I cannot take

paying taxes and still being hated.

In other words, get this abuse and they hate me and I'm giving them this money or I'm trying to play by the rules.

And I know tomorrow that if I go to downtown San Francisco and somebody shoots me, like Kate Steinley died,

they're going to contextualize that and say, oh, he was a poor illegal immigrant.

He wasn't really shooting at Kate.

He was shooting at the, yeah, he stole the gun and all that.

And we know that if he said he was shooting at wildlife, if he had shot, if he had deliberately pulled out that gun and he had shot a pelican or a seagull eagle,

that would be all through.

He'd be all through.

He'd be in jail the rest of his life because these people put more premium on certain pet causes than they do human life.

And so that's what's really tragic about

callous people.

They don't value life.

Right.

And back on the Pete Budig

line about contempt,

kind of of related,

Walmart has shut, I think all four, have four stores in Chicago.

They're shutting them down.

Yeah, because they keep attacking the corporate culture.

Well, they're not serving the community.

Whole Foods just shut down.

They're completely remodeled.

That was their signature store in San Francisco because they couldn't protect their employees.

And that meant we don't can't guarantee when they drive to work, they'll have a

safe place for their car.

We cannot guarantee they will not be attacked when they leave work.

And when they're in the store, they're in a dilemma when they will see people just walk out with things.

And

so,

and then we get into this cycle of, well,

the communities are being underserved because these green corporations break.

Yeah,

our local Walmart used to be a 24-hour Walmart.

And I went in there one night at 11 and they were closing.

So I asked the clerk, why are you closing?

Oh, we have one of the, and she said, I can't tell you.

I said, well, tell me.

She said, well, I'm leaving.

I'm not going to be here.

We have one of the highest thefts rates of any Walmart in California.

And they come in in the middle of the night and they steal alcohol and trash bags and they run out.

And so we don't have a 24-hour store anymore.

And that's what happens.

It's, I think I wrote a column once, Land of Thieves, and I think I was so frustrated because I had gone to the local Home Depot.

And I think I had said that they closed down all of their self-service aisles.

They do that periodically and channel these long lines.

So the chronic shoplifters will think, hmm, I better not go there.

The four big serve yourself and big barn door exits are closed.

But my problem was every time I bought a chainsaw, a weed eater,

anything

in a box, you know, Jack, I'd see tape on it.

And

that meant that it was either returned or somewhat.

And

I would bring it home.

And I swear, if it was a chainsaw and I had the little, you know, pump plastic little bubble to feed it and give it to start, it was missing.

Or if I had the off button, it was torn off.

Or

screws were missing from the weed eater.

And it was just people going in there and anything that didn't have a barcode, they would take.

I think what a lot of people do is they think, well, I have a product and I need some parts.

I'm just going to go to Home Depot and steal them.

And I walk out because there's no barcode on everything.

And that whole unwinding of civilization is really insidious.

And once you get into that mentality, that you have a right to do that.

And that's what we're really talking about.

That's what the woke ideology is really saying.

It says that woke ideology trumps traditional laws, that laws are made by wealthy, white, Christian, heterosexual, privileged, wealthy people.

And that they reflect that emphasis.

That's what critical legal theory is.

And so I am Victor Hansen, and I make $6,000 a year, and I'm very poor.

And I went into the store and I stole six almond joy candy bars, and they're going to prosecute me.

And the only reason they're they're going to prosecute me is because wealthy, white, heterosexual, wealthy Christian males don't need to steal almond joy.

So they made a law to hurt everybody that does.

Order is a

tool of enslavement or oppression.

And that's when you

order is heaven's first law, but disorder is

clearly the left.

Hey, Victor, we have,

we've got to move on and we'll talk about the beginnings of this republic and the people who died for liberty.

I don't know why, so

Chicago can become a hellhull.

But

let's note the

upcoming anniversaries of the battles of Lexington and Concord and some of your own thoughts of places you've revolutionary war, spots you've visited, and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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So, So,

Victor, yeah, tomorrow,

April 18th and the 19th.

And I have to admit, I'm a shame.

For the last couple of years, I've driven through Lexington and Concord many times.

I mean, I live in Connecticut.

I'm from the Bronx originally.

My wife, Sharon, is

about only 15 miles away.

She's from Leminster, Massachusetts.

I've never gone to the battlefields.

I've always, I've beat myself up.

Myself and my boys are going to go up there this summer.

Been to,

of course, Bunker Hill and Old Ironside, which is right next to it.

But Victor, even though you're a Californian, I have to think, I know

you come east every once in a while.

You've seen some of the Revolutionary War sites.

So anything that struck you in particular, maybe even as a military historian, about

I think it was in 2006.

I spoke for a Hillsdale College cruise on the colonial wars.

And I went to Boston with the Lexington Concord, old irons, just what you talked about, Bunker Hill.

Yeah, I think what was the theme of all of those battles is that they were

Ramboucho until Lafayette, and they brought some German Prussians, I should say, coming.

It was amazing that these private citizens were able, at least for a while, to hang on in these early battles against professional Hessians and then also British troops.

And then in these, you know, these major battles like Yorktown or Saratoga, they were able to actually field an army that was equivalent to the best armies in Europe.

And that's very hard to

comprehend how they were able to do that other than

they really believed in something and the British really didn't have their heart into keeping this colony.

One of the things that remember is that we were very fortunate that we were fighting the British because, had we been fighting

Germans or the Russians or any other group, I think

at Yorktown when they surrendered, they wouldn't have played.

If that's true, it's kind of a myth, but they played the world upside down.

But the point I'm making is that although there were a lot of atrocities on some of the British side,

I think Mel Gibson's, was it called the Patriot?

He really tried to emphasize that.

By and by,

There was some, yeah, in the south, there were some

Charlton, I think.

Charlton, and he was responding, and then Swamp Fox and the irregulars, and all that.

Frances Mary, and I don't know if they committed atrocity, but the British were clamping down on irregular troops.

But the point is, we were kind of fortunate that we were fighting a parliamentary system rather than an authoritarian system

because

there were people in Britain at the time that were not supporting what they were doing.

And then

we had a common language.

There were certain common accords that helped us a great deal.

But

we had a very small population base and we had very poorly trained people.

And yet from 1775 until 1778, we were doing pretty, I mean, it was amazing they could hold on until the First Continental Congress and the second, they could actually get in,

become

viable, and then you know

find gunpowder and musketry and start to emulate European set battle pieces.

I mean, we were irregulars, but at some point at a place like Yorktown, you have to field an army and destroy it.

And we were very fortunate the French were helpful and we had, I don't know, 32 French ships in the harbor outside Yorktown.

Well, Victor, the anniversary of the battles,

the first, what do they call the

once-in-battle farmers stood and fired the shot herd round the world.

That was at Lexington.

And you got to, yeah,

farmers, militia, not not

any professional soldiers.

And

the bravery of those guys, I think at the initial battle was,

I don't know, 50 to 400, some kind of sterile.

And to stand there and shoot shows some

amazing courage.

And I wanted to get,

I'm going to lump all this together, Victor, because thinking of courage and

what does courage mean against back on kind of woke stuff we were talking about earlier, in particular that.

Oh, oh my gosh, I can't remember.

Riley

Gaines, the swimmer, you know, what she went through at the University of San Francisco State University recently.

And of course, the president of the college comes out and praises the bullies and the demonstrators for the courage they show.

We always get these

academic responses now praising the

wannabe Jacobins or the actual Jacobins who are nasty.

But they talk about them, how courageous they are when they outnumber people 100 to 1.

But Victor, what's, yeah,

I'm curious.

I should have said, I think I misspoke.

I said, I meant Tarleton.

Tarleton.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was that guy.

He had a very funny life.

He was, wasn't he the character in the Patriot that was a villain of the whole thing?

Well, he was.

Yeah.

Because he was a villain.

Yeah, I mean, he did.

He had

take no prisoners, and he had the Tarletons, whatever they were, Raiders.

But the funny thing about that guy was

there was nothing recommending him.

Remember, he was kind of a dandy,

and then he was a slave trader.

But then the weird thing was that after the war was over, you think they would go after him for war crimes or something.

He lived to be in his late 70s, and he had a really successful career in Britain.

And I think he was a Whig.

And so it was very strange that

this guy who became notorious and hated in the States and kind of besmirched the integrity of the British Army was seen as back in Britain as kind of a folk hero that, you know, took it to the Americans and did, you know, with irregulars and didn't follow protocol.

And I don't know,

I think he may have been in hindsight

how Cornwallis, how he let Washington run away from him constantly, he may have been the highlight of the war from a British jingoist perspective.

Yeah, I don't think he got along with Cornwallis.

That was in the movie, but I think that was something that was actually true, that he felt that the way to win this war was to terrorize a population and attack the population base, burn their, you know, their crops or thing, and then intimidate them, sort of like the SS,

rather than just have a pitch battle and surrender.

I don't know how many he surrendered.

It was 30,000 or something, Cornwallis did.

It was an amazing

European-type army he just surrendered.

Well, Victor, back on the thought,

you have everything you're military historian

social commenter commentator uh a classicist and would you um give us the classical view of courage because it's a it's something that's at our the roots of our

our nation but it's also i think a term and a concept that's sorely abused um nowadays what what what How did the ancient Greeks

yeah they have it?

It was very funny.

I mean, we have courage and we have bravery, but they had so many words for it.

Um, by the way, the word courage comes from Latin core, heart, meaning you're hearty or you have heart.

And that

right, as

and remember, the ancients didn't really think that logic was in the brain, they thought it was in the heart, at least the Greeks did, so that emotion and

rational thought come out of the heart.

The cardia in Greek, or the core, which is in Latin, core cordis

as a verb.

I mean, there's been so many things in the bankrupt era of classics that are gender studies, but many of the words,

there's a little bit of class or male.

So

the word for courage is Andrea.

And that means manliness.

And there's another word, Aristea, which means that's in the Iliad, that a person's Aristeia is when they just go crazy and nobody can stop them and they're hell-bent, kind of like mad dog fighting.

And that Aristea is a wonderful word because it comes from the word Aristos, the superlative of Kalos, good.

There's also another word that can be negative and positive, Tolma,

daring, that you're rash, but you're also able to go out and do almost anything.

That's kind of like when you read

a Medal medal of one honor winner who kind of just says, I've had it, you know, with the Nazis, the Germans, and he just goes out beyond the

lines and kills you.

He charges the machine gun.

Yes, that's called Tome.

And then there's

a there's star sauce and that

borders on rashness.

But basically, Andreas is the most common word.

And in Latin, it's probably virtus, which is we think virtue comes from it, but that's not related to we're manliness.

It's from a different root.

But that idea is that it's cohesive, that courage is part of a person's character.

It's central to it.

You know, in the ethics, Aristotle says that courage is the most important of all the positive traits, because without courage, you can't do anything else.

You can be right,

you can be loyal.

But you can't do any of those things unless you're courageous.

And what does he mean by that?

He means that you do things

that you think are going to be beneficial to the collective or to your friends or family, even though they're going to be detrimental or at least very dangerous to yourself.

But you make

a self-sacrificial decision.

And that's what I think courage is.

Courage is the ability that when you see something wrong, you make an instant calculation.

Hmm, 78% of my sense is that this is wrong.

And 85% say if I speak out, I'm going to ruin my career.

And I'll do it.

And sometimes the reason it's called rash is that people can be very courageous.

And then when their act of courage is over,

they go home and their son says, well, you lost your job.

What am I going to, how am I going to eat?

Because you spoke out.

And that's the dilemma of courage.

So Aristotle says that, you know, you've got to have an element of courage.

And we don't have very much.

And that's why these bullies are taking over.

I mean,

Ridea Gaines,

she's taking on the

trans movement.

And that's absolutely.

Where are the feminists that should be having her?

Yeah, I don't understand that because

this is.

If you look at the stories in in the media of men transitioning to women versus women transitioning to men, I think it's nine to one, don't you?

It just seems to be so much more common.

Right.

Men are transitioning to women, like this, you know, this, what was his name, Mahoney or Maloney, or what's the guy's name in the media?

Dylan Mulvaney.

Mulvaney.

The Budweiser drinker.

Yeah,

he's not just caricaturing women.

He's making fun fun of femininity.

He really is.

He's acting silly and stupid.

And he thinks that silly, stupid activity of, oh, I'm a woman, I'm damned, is going to reflect well on womanhood.

Womanhood's not just that.

It's seriousness as well.

And he's not doing that.

And then this idea that you unleash these males, biological males, and they destroy 50 years of women's athletic accomplishment

and you don't do anything about it.

You don't speak out about it.

And And when you do,

if you're

Miss Rowling or Martina Navatorlova, then they demonize you.

I don't quite understand why women are being so quiet.

I grew up as a young kid, and my parents would take me.

We'd drive up in the station wagon.

It was pretty cheap.

You could go to the Russian American Games.

I think it was every two years.

I used the Bay Area Stadium.

It was often at Stanford University's old stadium.

And they had these two sisters, the presses.

You remember them, Tamara Press, and I think it was Olga Press.

And they were huge.

And they didn't, I mean, their shoulders were five times bigger than their hips.

And Americans were outraged.

And it was mostly women javelin throwers,

and shot putters.

They were just, this is not fair.

These people are men.

And the Soviets would never allow them.

They would.

test for their hormones once in a while, but they would never allow them to have rudimentary,

In those days, I guess it was hormonal tests.

But everybody was outraged that

the Soviets were supposedly taking men and pumping them up with a little estrogen to make them look superficially like women.

And this was a violation of women and men's sports.

But I don't think

this movement is going to capture public opinion, not because of bigotry, as they allege, just because

when you look at recent incidents, we look at San Francisco State and taking

the swimmer Ridie Gaines hostage de facto, and then the president of San Francisco State contextualizing the violence and not doing anything to the perpetrators.

And then you look at the Stanford University attack on Judge Duncan, and we remember that started because he didn't use the precise pronouns talking to a convict about a convicted felon.

And then you look at that violence going into the Texas legislature, transgender person.

Then you look at the person who attacked, or excuse me, who wanted to be the assassin of Judge Kavanaugh, who said he was transition.

Then you look at

what we saw in Nashville where that, and we still haven't seen the manifesto, that's been suppressed.

Believe me, if that was a MAGA white

MAGA guy, like on Daniel Horse, we would know everything, but they've suppressed that.

And what I'm getting at is that

a lot of people are saying, and then you collate that with the sports controversies

and

the violence.

And you don't get the impression that this is a

vulnerable attack group that you get from Joe Biden's rhetoric.

You don't.

And it's not, and somebody's going to say, well, you know, know, look at male.

I'm talking about by,

I'm talking about scientifically about 0.2

of 1% have genuine

gender dysphoria historically.

So you're having a very, very small rubric, but they're in the news in a big way.

And often it's not good.

And the rhetoric that one hears that you, you know, when you go after the author of Harry Potter and you try to basically demonize her, or she can't go out in public because she happens to disagree with you, something's wrong.

And I just don't think it's going to have legs.

I just don't, I think people are going to say no more.

Yeah, I know you talked about this at great length with Sammy the other day, and we've talked about it before, but

I don't get the sense this is I'm a woman trapped in a man's body,

which is probably the case for some people, but this eruption of

cross-dressing, transgender, whatever the heck you want to say.

I just think there's

I think there's a significant sexual, if I may use the word, perversion aspect to it.

Like, when did these drag shows become

bountiful in every American city?

And then when you, now there's one group of them around where I live, and you take the train and they plaster all their posters up on

the platform.

And then it's all very sexualized.

I'm sorry to say that the names are Dixie Normis.

Okay.

I'm a drag ramp.

Dixie Normis, Cherry Poppins, et cetera.

Things like that's that's

it's a very it's very testosterone driven.

It is something perverse going on here.

Well, I mean, the thing that I don't understand is there was a fetish.

and everybody recognized it.

It's in psychological literature, psychology, Freud identified it as transvestism.

It was a fetish.

And it was a certain type of sexual gratification that some men had when they wore women's clothing.

And

you know what was weird about it?

It wasn't necessarily homosexual.

You know what I mean?

The people didn't just wear women's clothing, although some did, and then go out and try to find sexual partners and act and play the,

and I mean male sexual partners, and then have sex as a male in women's clothing.

That happened.

But a lot of them were heterosexual, and they had no indication.

So that was an identifiable sexual fetish.

And we had another one that we created the word.

Remember Christine Jorgensen?

I think she was one of the first people to be

medically transitioned.

But my point is that we had another one called transsexualism, where that was genuine

sexual dysphoria, where a person's psyche and mental processes were in the wrong body.

And that was identified in the literature as a very, very, very, very rare.

So we've taken those two manifestations and we've bundled them into trans.

And we're now claiming that 15 to 20% of young people want to transition.

That's not biologically or psychologically

viable in the literature.

It doesn't exist.

So, what's going on is that this is a form of fad, self-attention, and impressionable young people.

And then, when you have the state come in and start to give them the power to make irrevocable decisions, whether that is taking very dangerous drugs or sexual

mutilation, essentially.

And that's what I don't get about it, because the left

had taken on big pharma.

And from the 60s on, it was always the People's Handbook of Pharmacy or the People's Pharmacy.

And you would buy these books.

I used to buy some of them.

And they were things, hey, you don't know the true story of Cipro and Lebiquin.

They're very dangerous drugs there.

You don't understand allopuranol is being pushed on people for gout, but it can change your very metabolism or singular gives you nightmare.

All of this stuff they told us.

And then to push these drugs that are far more dangerous on young, vulnerable bodies, it doesn't make any sense.

It just shows you that they don't have a systemic

absolute worldview.

They just are so relative, they change their values depending on the perceived need and the perceived advantages of having yet another victimized group that they can champion.

But I don't think this one's going to work because their strategy is to normalize this and to transition people.

And that's why they hate the word grooming.

But the point is that if you take the average American family and they are worried that their impressionable daughter or son is going to be told in a public school that transition is a viable option and they should consider it, and that happens occasionally, they're not going to put up with it.

They're not going to put up with it.

Well, we have one more little aspect of this

trans stuff to get to, Victor, and

we'll do that right after this final important message.

Back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

Victor, since

we're talking about a trans, and I thought we'd have some of these subjects.

Let me take a piece from what we were going to talk about on the next show and just wrap this particular program up.

And that has to do with the Dylan Mulvaney Budweiser, Bud Light controversy.

And just quick thoughts, Victor, is that first of all,

the president of Bud Light,

Brendan Whitworth, issued an apology that was not an apology.

And then today, as we're talking, Bud released a one-minute video

that is so steeped in patriotism and Clydesdale's, et cetera.

And Nambi Pambia, this is its response to try and cover over

this disaster it's created.

We're so sick.

Aren't we so sick of the Bud CEO mentality to basically lie to us when what he should have said was,

I don't have any respect for the Bud Drinker, and they're loyal and they should be and I'm going to take them for granted and I want to expand our base.

So I'm going to go trans, and we're going to get this character Mulvaney.

And we don't really care what you think.

And we're going to turn it over to some, I don't know, Ivy League grad that doesn't know anything, but she's a young person, and she's convinced me that she's got her hand on the pulse of the trans movement.

And then this woman comes on and says, well, your beer was too fratty.

And she's the epitome of frattism, from what we can tell.

And then they go out and they destroy $8 billion worth of capitalization in about a week.

And they really hurt the viability of a lot of distributors and stores, mom-and-pop stores, distributor.

You buy the beer, you put it out there.

You're in, you know, Bakersfield, California.

Nobody wants to buy it.

And so the same thing with Disney.

So we get the non-apology, this Iger guy.

They all wanted to go full trans, and they have lost billions of dollars of market capitalization and gotten a big fight.

We saw the same thing with moving the all-star game.

Remember that in Georgia with the airline, American Airlines, Delta CEO.

So, the question is, where do these CEOs come from?

Well, they come from Wolf business schools, and then they're yes men.

These are not people who built their own company.

These are not Elon Musk who build their own company in the tradition of American entrepreneurialism.

These are company men that come out of these programs and they're not self-employed, and they nod and nod and maneuver and network, and they get up the corporate ladder.

And then, at 55 or so, they get appointed to be a CIEO with one particular

agenda.

Don't screw it up, but try to

make everybody happy and try to reflect popular culture and don't be controversial.

And they have no sense because they've never been out of that corporate trajectory that curses them on.

They don't know.

They've never been a a truck driver.

They've never been a teacher.

They've never been a farmer.

They've never been a plumber.

They don't know anything about that.

And they don't know about the people whose products that buy.

And then they get shocked when people say, screw you.

I'm not going to Disney World.

I'm not going to buy beer.

And there's just enough of them that the translates into billionaires.

And then they come out with the non-apology.

I felt sorry for Nancy Martinez, the law dean, but when I read that lengthy apology, all I was waiting to see is these people have flagrantly violated stamps and university rules the punishments are clear they told a federal many of them told a federal judge various obscene things they put placards that we couldn't even put up

you've embarrassed this institution you embarrassed you've threatened you wanted to see his daughters raped and you're going to have to leave

As I said earlier, it's sort of like Admiral being

that they hung to encourage the others in the word of Voltaire.

That's what you have to do.

And

the San Francisco state president, she was even worse than the diversity, equity, inclusion at Stanford.

She didn't even mention the trauma that her university inflicted on an invited guest, where if they had not had those policemen, I think they would have been sort of like Euripides Bacchae in Pentheus.

They would have torn her limb to limb.

Because they were surrounding her.

And then they were talking about ransoming her.

I can't believe that.

So again, this revolution is not, it's not a grassroots

revolution.

You don't see 500,000 people like during the Vietnam War, you know, on Moratorium Day,

during the invasion of Cambodia.

You do not see thousands of people at the March on Washington to hear Martin Luther King.

Is it 62, the March on Washington?

You don't see that.

You don't see it at all.

This is a top-down corporate, academic, media, bureaucratic, Pentagon revolution.

And it's all based on the perception of these out-of-it, nerdy people that they have to do this to protect their own careers.

And I think they will continue to be so misinformed into all of us, each according to our station, try to explain to them, we are the majority, and we find this deleterious to our culture and our civilization.

And if you continue to do it, we're not going to list in the U.S.

Army.

15,000 haven't this year.

That's what they should do.

If you continue to do it, we're not going to buy Bud Beer.

If you continue to do it, we're not going to go to Disney.

And you can go get all your trans community and make that up.

Or you can get the hard left and you can make more power to you, but we're not going to participate.

And that's what's happening.

And it seems to,

for now, it gives a wishy-washy apology from these corporate lackeys, but at some point, they're going to have to do a little better.

Well, I'm still waiting for the 2020s version of the hard hats to come out.

Remember Joe?

Yes.

Peter Boyle, I think.

Peter Boyle, right?

Yeah.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have.

We'd like to thank our listeners for joining us today.

And thanks to all, no matter what platform you listen to this podcast on, whether it's Google Play, Stitcher, those who listen on iTunes and Apple can leave ratings, zero to five stars, mostly five stars.

It's a very highly rated show.

Thank you very much.

And many leave comments.

And here's a comment

from,

this is from Apple.

A serious question for Victor.

Victor, your ability to connect the historical dots is unparalleled.

Question, given all the truly insane developments of our current age, how do you stop yourself from descending into complete depression and hopelessness?

Alan, Los Angeles.

That's a good question.

When you get long COVID and then

you're 6'1, you weigh 190 and a little tiny, insignificant, trivial B almost killed you.

And you're writing the chapter on the fall of Constantinople and how the mega dukes, Mr.

Michael Notorious,

had to, when the sultan asked to have sexual relations with his teenage boy, and he was in capture in the captured city, and then he had to watch all six of his sons beheaded, and then they beheaded him.

And you're trying to write about things like that, it can be depressing.

But, you know,

but Victor, you look out of your house and see

the almond trees, and you're looking at the farmers.

That's what I'm looking at right now.

I'm looking out at my great-great-grandmother's farm and almond trees and nice 150-year-old house.

And I'm looking at my house.

Nice walks with your lovely wife.

Yes, and I'm looking at at my Dodge Ram diesel club cab pickup and I have wonderful daughter and son and grandkids yeah and I have a lot of good friends so I feel I feel really blessed one of the things

that I

was traveling this weekend to an event for the Hoover Institution and you

you know you can as I said earlier you can write 20 books nobody will know who you are but you be on Fox once and people will recognize you say come up

and they want to talk and they all it what what's really moving to me is they all say

we don't have anybody to speak for us thank you not that i'm their spokesman but we need more people yeah and there's a lot of people out there they're so frustrated because they're all their values and traditions are being assaulted caricatured lied about and they want somebody to speak back on in their defense and nobody does they feel

well that's somebody does that was that is you That was true.

And Trump did, but in a way that

could be crude.

DeSantis is trying to do that, I think.

And I think the Republican Party never did that before.

The Romney-McCain Party,

John McCain said,

these are the crazies.

Crazy birds, right?

Yeah.

Remember that Hobbits, he called them, didn't he?

Hobbits?

And then so did Mitt Romney.

What was his name?

Carlos Delecto, he was on.

So I think that we all need,

and that's the attraction of Tucker Carlson.

People can disagree with him, but he goes on there and he tells people

in the world, you're not crazy.

You're not crazy.

This is a story today.

These people are crazy.

You're not crazy.

And that's the appeal.

Everybody's like, Fox News, Fox News, Fox News.

No, they're really attacking.

Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, and Tucker Carlson because they tell the world you're not crazy.

These people are crazy.

These are the revolutionaries.

You have these people, you just mentioned they see you and they come up to you.

And despite never seeing me on Fox, people come up to me also.

And I'd have to say two things quickly.

One, my brother-in-law, Patrick,

I love him.

And his poor mom passed away at the wake.

This is a couple of weeks back.

And his cousins, Allie and Kevin, came up to me.

And they like,

Victor Davis Hansen means so much to us.

We listen to every episode, etc.

And then I mentioned earlier in this podcast, I was, I had gone to or drove to a wedding.

My dear friends, Ken and Lisa Sullivan and their daughter, Marissa, Marissa, got married to Luke, great guy.

But at the wedding,

Lisa, the mother of the bride, came over to me.

You have to come over here.

Our friends, they are such fans of Victor and the the show and Carmen and Paul.

They couldn't have been lovelier people.

And this has happened many times.

You mean the world

to you bring sanity

to a lot of, not that you bring sanity to them, you expose sanity and you confirm that they are not insane.

That's all I try to do.

All I try to do is to remind people that

they are A in the majority and they're not insane.

They're not insane.

What is going on is insanity, and it's a small group of people, a third of the country, a quarter of the country, who have hijacked our institutions, and they have influence, power, and money well beyond

their numbers.

And I just have to feel there's going to be a final reckoning in the next election, because if we can prepare, all of us.

can prepare to make sure we monitor the integrity of the election.

If we we can do that, then we can take back power.

And this time, if you get the Congress, as Trump had, you've got to unite.

You can't have Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell or John McCain trying to freelance and be popular with the left and sabotage a program.

You've got to get together and push things through to stop this.

Yeah, this great republic hangs in the balance.

And Victor, I think we're going to talk a little more about that on our next episode.

So until then, and thanks all for listening.

Thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared today.

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