Our Broken Kaleidoscope
In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss the recent diplomacy of Turkey, India, and Ukraine. Then they examine transgendered activism and current cases of black-on-white violence.
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Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host.
The star namesake is Victor Davis Hansen, who 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.
His official website is victorhanson.com.
We'll talk more about that later.
And Victor also has another online
aspect on his CV.
He's, I don't know, we'll create the title, editor-in-chief or boss of the Hoover Institution online publication called Strategica.
There's a new issue out, number 83, and it's got two important pieces in there, one on Turkey and one on Ukraine, which we're going to discuss or get Victor's thoughts on, on, and other topics, including a recent piece Victor has written, a syndicated column about race everywhere.
We'll talk about those and other things right after these important messages.
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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.
Victor, so as you know, because you're the boss of it, Strategica is out, issue 83.
And folks, you should go to the Hoover Institution website and put Strategica in the search box and it'll kick it up.
And David Goldman has a piece in this, the lead piece in the issue is titled, What is America's strategic interest in ukraine and victor if you would uh give your thoughts on his piece and your own thoughts where they may or may not differ from from david's but prior can we talk about another attending piece uh to go david goldman's uh lead essay and that's by uh zaphiris Rosidas.
I don't know if I said that.
Yes.
Rosidas.
Yes.
And it's titled Turkey and the West, a parenthesis or historical shift.
And if you indulge me just by reading the first short paragraph of this essay, a poll conducted in December 2022 by the Turkish company Gezisi found that 72.8% of Turkish citizens polled were in favor of good relations with Russia.
By comparison, nearly 90% perceived the United States as a hostile country.
It also revealed that 24.2% of citizens of Turkey believe that Russia is hostile, while 62.6% believe that Russia is a friendly country.
Victor, Turkey's a member of NATO.
I thought they were our ally.
Turks hate America with friends like Turkey who needs enemies.
What are your thoughts about this particular piece?
And then your thoughts about David Goldman's piece.
I first went to Turkey when I was 20 in 1973.
And I've been there about 10 times and each time I have returned it has become more Islamicist under Erdogan so there's Turkey that that had the military adaturk traditions of secularism
you know the European alphabet no fezes
no religious discrimination westernized and with Istanbul as a window on the West and now there's the Islamicist movement or counter-movement, and it's getting more and more.
So, part of the problem is inseparable from Erdogan.
He is a dictator, and he violated his own constitution.
He hounds out enemies after the failed coup attempt of a few.
He's paranoid, and he says crazy things.
So, in the last 30 days, he said that Athens may wake up one morning and find a missile coming heading toward it, or in the night, excuse me, from Turkey.
And he said that the Dodecanese islands, which have been adjudicated by a post-war treaty, and they had been Greek since antiquity.
I know the Italians took them for a while and the Ottomans took them for a while, but they were Greek.
And he's questioned their sovereignty.
And he's gone into Greek airspace.
He goes into Greek.
I think in 1996, they almost had a war there.
So
that is a real problem.
The NATO Charter doesn't doesn't say you have to be democratic, but it implies that you should after the Cold War, especially.
And
Turkey is an anomaly because it has outside of the United States the largest military in NATO, and it's the only non-democratic government.
It's the only Muslim-dominated theocracy in NATO.
And yet, NATO says they've got a lot of soldiers and
they control entry into and out of the Bosphorus during the Cold War.
They were very valuable in monitoring the Soviet fleet.
So there's a problem.
And now that problem
is it's too big and powerful
and hostile to be in NATO, but it's too big and powerful and hostile to be outside of NATO and in the hands of our enemies.
That's the official position, as I understand it.
And it knows that.
So it demands that it be a component participant in the assembly of the F-35, even though they have bought
an anti-aircraft system, missile systems from the Russians, which apparently, if they're in charge of components in the F-35, they were able to give the Russians that information so that their missile system
would be successful against an F-35.
They have tried to veto the applications of Finland and Sweden.
You know, treat me nice, or you're not going to, I'm going to, because any one country can veto the entrance of another.
The biggest problem we're having with them is
what would you do if they repeat 1974 and they were to invade Cyprus again?
or they would send a missile into Athens or they try to sink a Greek ship or they would, they're fighting over Aegean natural gas now because
they're two NATO members.
We've never had a situation where two NATO members other than 1974 almost went to war with each other.
And Erdogan is especially angry because after the revolt of the colonels, remember in 1967, and then the Yannidi's takeover in 1973, and then that dictatorship, which was very unpopular and incurred a lot of anti-American wrath because it was supported by the U.S.
government as firmly anti-communist, a socialist interregnum came in under Papandreou, and basically from 1974 to 2004, it was very hostile to the United States.
And that was the pre-most of that was the pre-Erdogan days.
So we were very familiar and tilted toward Turkey.
And now everything's reversed because the last few governments have been very pro-American.
And let's face it.
Greece is a democratic government.
It's a Christian country.
It has a long history of immigration to the United States.
There used to be even a Greek lobby, as you remember, in Congress.
And
it's Western.
And Turkey's not.
And so
our relationship with Greece is closer than it has ever been, even though we understand that Greece has got 11 million people and these guys got 80-something million, 85 million.
So Turkey has all the assets, and it has this record of brutality toward its neighbors.
I mean,
what does Israel, Armenia, the Kurds and Greece have in common?
They've either been exterminated or attacked or
at almost attack or been in hostile relationships with the Turks.
But Israel had a good relationship
too long ago.
And now
it's trying to build bridges back again because of a shared,
they have a shared worry about Iran.
But
under Erdeon, they got very hostile to Israel, say, 10 years ago.
And the Israelis were trying to desperately reforge those earlier friendly relations.
But I guess what I'm saying is that
in these series of essays,
and there's there's been a series of them by Zafiris.
He's basically saying,
if you came from a different planet and you said Turkey is in NATO, nobody would believe you.
Its culture is antithetical.
Its government is antithetical.
It's anti-American.
It is not to be trusted.
It's closer to the Soviet, to Russia than it is to us.
And
why is it in there?
And I guess the answer, as I said before, is it's too big to be outside, but no, nobody wants it inside NATO, and nobody wants it outside NATO.
That sums it up.
Do you think,
first of all, I mean, Erdogan
said or claims,
was it successfully claimed and persuaded a population that the United States was behind the coup attempt?
Whenever, what was that, like 2015 or 2016, something like that?
Yes.
And
was it, was,
I guess what I'm trying to say is:
have the Turkish people, in your estimation, Victor, have they become,
the poll numbers here show them hostile to America?
I think they are because they've been under almost 15 solid years of propaganda.
And
I'll give you two examples of what they're doing.
So
the Emperor Justinian built Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, the church, was the largest dome in the world till the 15th century Vatican.
And
Justinian built it in the 530s AD.
And when it was taken in 1453, of course,
Muhammad II turned it into a mosque.
And of course, they put all of these minarets on it, etc.
And then they copied some of the architectural planning for the blue, so-called blue mosque, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay.
Everybody had understood, especially under the young Turks
anti-otomist movement after World War I,
that
they were going to be second, and that would be a United Nations
site.
And it was.
And when you went to, when millions of people go to Istanbul, what do they go?
They go to the Topcapi Museum, they go to the Hippodrome, they go to the underground cisterns, and they go
to Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.
So it was a museum.
And now Ergenjung turned it back into a mosque.
And
it's, and he claims it was always a mosque.
I mean, he just wipes out a thousand years of Byzantine history.
And then the second thing is, as I said,
I think they're called,
well, we have these B60s or whatever they are.
They're huge
Cold War relic, dirty atomic bombs.
I think we've got, we had at one point 70 or 80 at Insular around the corner, you know, and you go down to the coast, and then it's over, I think it's even east of Anatolia, way east.
But in that big base,
Erdogan has hinted, and during that coup you referenced, the United States lost control of their own Air Force base.
And for a moment, there was a question whether they had control of the nuclear weapons.
But Erdogan, in various speeches, has referred to it as a joint American-Turkish arsenal.
And he's made it very clear the United States can't take it out.
And so there are, i've been told there are plans or there are contingencies or there are ongoing efforts to take a bomb out but we don't want them there anymore is what i'm trying to say jack right and and it's very difficult to to run missions in syria and stuff from that base anymore so um
and if
you had another crisis with Greece, I'm sure the first thing Erido Yan would do is shut off that base and try to get his hands on those bombs if they're still there.
And so it's not, it shouldn't be in NATO at all.
David Goldman is.
Answer his question.
What is America's strategic interest in Ukraine?
That's his piece.
Yeah, I mean,
David, I try in that group, I try to get different views all across the map.
So there's no one consistent,
you know, paleocon, isolationist, interventionist, neocon, left or right.
And right.
so David is a realist.
And David's point is that
you have about three interests in Ukraine.
The first is you do not drive, as Kissinger warned, Turkey, I mean, excuse me, Russia into the hands of China.
You triangulate, that either one will be no better enemy.
no better friend to each other than to us, and no worse enemy than to us.
So we triangulate the three of us, the United States, China, and Russia, and we've lost that now.
Two, we've driven, we've kind of created a new alliance, where we don't talk about it, of China, India,
Russia, Turkey, Iran, and of course, North Korea, all of these countries that violate sanctions, sell, buy.
and trade in Russian oil and are increasingly anti-American.
And that was a result that he's very worried about.
The third thing is that
he can't see why, given that there's large Russian populations in the Donbass region and the borderlines with Russia, borderlands with Russia and the Crimea itself,
why we can't have some kind of international plebiscite or oversight that adjudicates and lets those people decide whether they want to go back to Russia or
be in Ukraine.
And there was a a Mince II agreement that when Ukraine left and they had the initial warring in the 90s, that that would be adjudicated, which never was.
And then third,
why is the United States draining
our logistical, strategic, whatever reserves of shells, missiles,
armor, vehicles here when we have Taiwan on the one hand, over here,
we have an open border.
We have China.
We have all of these other issues.
And that Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
Whereas
we have alliances, they're not NATO members, but we have alliances with Japan and Australia and South Korea.
So we have interest in the world, but he doesn't feel that Ukraine is inside that orbit.
He's not saying just abandon them.
He has no problem giving them some wherewithal, but the idea that you're going to give them all these excellent weapons and they're going to have superiority over the Russians and you're going to drive every Russian out from their 2014 borders, he doesn't think is practical.
He didn't think it's going to happen.
Or I should put it another way.
He thinks that to make it happen, you would have to have a level of armament and offensive preemptive attacks into Russia that wouldn't be compatible with peace.
Right.
You know, it's disturbing about that India is
getting wiggy, the technical term.
But
I'm no foreign policy person, as you know, Victor, but a few years ago thought this is good.
I mean, relations with India seem to be pretty good under Trump and their own hostility to China, but that India may be...
having problems with America.
Well, Morgan Modi, I think he's got problems with the Biden administration, and he understands that historically his problem has been,
its problem is two.
On its western side, it's got a problem with Pakistan.
And on its eastern side, it's got a problem with China.
And it doesn't really have a problem with Russia.
And Russia has always...
been a way, a method for China to play off China versus Russia.
So India, we thought, had the same interest in Russia not being alienated from the West because it was a break on China.
But
that's not true now.
And so it's, it's, put it this way, India is not going to cut off Russian oil in the way that Israel is not going to break
with Russia entirely because they have interests.
And those interests are existential.
India needs Russian oil, period.
Israel needs to be able to operate to protect itself in Syria, that Russia controls the airspace.
And the problem with Zelensky is, and I would be just like Zelensky, he's fighting for the very lifeblood of his country, but he makes these demands on all of his allies that I am the only national interest that you have, given that Russia is an existential imperial power.
And a lot of people look at the decrepit Russian economy, its problems.
It's down to 140 million people almost.
And they say, you know what?
It's inept.
But it's dangerous because it's cornered and it's wounded and it's got all these nukes.
But Zelensky doesn't, he has a bad habit.
His wife goes into international vogue-like settings, shopping.
It's not a democracy, as we thought.
He suppresses the press just like any of his neighbors do in that part of the world.
He has this tendency to, he doesn't mean to, but no sooner does he get a supply of sophisticated arms than he sort of says, oh, that's not enough.
That's not enough.
I need more.
I need more.
Yeah.
I need more.
And it comes with loaded with sanctimony and the implication: if
you don't give it, you're evil.
Yeah.
I mean, and then you have this, he appeals,
he's politicized it,
and
half the country has a long memory.
And when I mean that, they remember the Ukrainian ambassador writing op-ed during the 2016 election endorsing Hillary Clinton.
They remember Joe Biden's son on Verisma.
They remember going back earlier, Victoria Newland and interference in Ukraine, that Orange Revolution, all of that episode.
They remember Lieutenant Colonel Vinman and his brag that he was offered three times the Minister of Defense while he engineered the impeachment of a U.S.
President.
So they feel, you know what, this country tends to interfere in U.S.
internal affairs a lot, or it invites a lot of corrupt people to profit in it like the Bidens in a quid pro quo fashion.
And it shouldn't be telling us know what we can and cannot do when we're giving them over a hundred billion dollars and to win we would probably need to give them 400 billion so that's the subtext behind the goldman article and i'm sure that it's not going to be popular at where i work at the huber institution but again i'm not endorsing i'm just trying to give everybody a different view take on ukraine and that part of the world and we have another person who feels exactly the opposite joe joff in that same issue and he's a German intellectual.
He's the editor of Zeit, a very influential magazine, news magazine in Germany.
And he would disagree with David Goldman.
He's an interventionist, and he keeps trying to egg his country on to take its proper role in NATO and to rearm.
And he feels that, you know, Russia has brought the West back together again.
And Kiev's,
I think the the headline was, what, Kiev's our
war is our own.
Yeah.
And it wasn't in good shape.
It was falling apart.
And it was all, you know, Germany was a lackadaisical member, but now the Ukrainian war has galvanized NATO.
But I think what galvanized NATO was Donald Trump
hitting him over the head so that they would pay $100 million more and rearm just in time before the Ukrainian invasion.
Yeah, well, will NATO countries be galvanized when they have to pay to rebuild ukraine the trillions of dollars it's going to take is is uh beyond me hey victor let's move on the thing by the way that's strategica on the hoover institution website folks go you'll you'll find easily find it um let's talk about
um transgender activision
uh
activism excuse me activision is it's the game company uh call of duty transgender activism and we'll get to that right after this important message.
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So, Victor, I've seen a number of articles
on transgender activism.
And this has to do with teachers.
You know, we've talked a lot about the transgender movement in past podcasts, but I'm going to bear with me here for a second.
There's a couple of things in the Daily Mail, which I read regularly.
Here's a chunk.
And it's talking about the writer is talking about
across the country, some various places where fights are going on.
So this week, a California high school history teacher revealed she has helped students change their gender at school without their parents' knowledge and said it was necessary in some cases.
Olivia Garrison, an unabashedly progressive, non-binary person, told the New York Times that, and they use the pronoun they, they felt it was their job as a teacher to protect kids, sometimes from their own parents.
My job, which is a public service, is to protect kids, Garrison said.
Sometimes they need protection from their own parents.
Clashes between parents and teachers, such as Garrison, are not always solved in the principal's office and end up in court.
Here's an example: single mom of two, Aurora Regino, who's from Chico, near you, Victor, somewhat near you,
says a school counselor encouraged her fifth-grade daughter to transition to a male without notifying her.
Regino, the mother, bashes California's parental secrecy policy.
And a school counselor who affirmed her daughter's vague female-to-male transgender request within minutes and even pressured the child.
There are other cases cited, one in Spreckles, a place in California, where teachers
and school administrators are actively lobbying and intimidating or pressuring children who are not even teenagers yet, many of them, to engage in
gender change
explicitly
without the parents' knowledge.
This is across the country, Victor.
And
there's a larger agenda, isn't there?
Yeah, yeah.
So I'd like to say that.
0.001%,
001
are
gender dysphoric.
We know that.
And the phenomenon, as I said earlier on a podcast, it's known throughout
classical literature.
And there's a passage of Diodorus.
and fragmentized, I remember in his discussion of the Third Punic War, where he has a little ex-cursus, and he talks about a case where somebody was born with the opposite sex organs of what they thought they were, and
they had to have some kind of a primitive procedure to produce male organs.
So it's known, known, known
that it's a scientific phenomenon, but it was very rare.
And to the degree that the transgendered movement tried to protect people that were sexually dysmorphic, it was fine.
And they saw that as an extension of the civil rights as they had seen Latinos and gays and women out of the black American experience.
But as always happens,
we go from
let's discuss gay marriage to you're an existential bigot if you ever doubt gay marriage.
So we've gone from live and let live with transgenderism to every single person in the school must be a prize that they have a choice.
And that's where people draw the line.
And they said, you know what, and
you represent the state, you teachers, and we represent the family.
And you're not going to intrude between the child-parent relationship.
You're just not going to do it.
And the state says, you don't own those children.
We're sort of like Plato's Republic.
We own them.
The collective owns them.
It takes a village to raise a child, not a parent.
And so we're going to interfere.
We're going to teach.
We're going to, and this is straight out Marxism, as we all know,
Linus ideology that you have to go into the family and you have to separate the children from the parents and you have to propagandize and brainwash them into a particular ideology so they're hostile to their parents and they have greater loyalties and affinities to the state and that's what that's what this is about so they feel they being the hard left, that if you can get millions of kids in the schools to break with their parents and to experiment with what is a very, very rare phenomenon and mainstream it, then it's one additional reason why you should champion the state.
The teachers, the medical boards, they have the power and not
the parent.
What's ironic about the left is, of course,
They are always hypocritical.
So we have heard from them, Jack, for 50 years that big pharma is evil and big pharma uses us as guinea pigs and big pharma always has a drug as a solution, not counseling, not organic,
not integrative health measures, but big pharma chemicals.
And what is this entire...
transgender movement pushing?
It's pushing radical experimental surgery on preteens in some cases.
It's talking about very dangerous hormonal treatment, suppression of hormones.
It's all big pharma.
I can't get over it.
And
it just shows you again that the left has a hierarchy of ideologies and they just drop and discard whatever they want without any consistency for the larger agenda of taking control and having power.
And so everybody, they want a situation that we are rapidly approaching, where every single parent who sends their children to school and knows those children intimately since the day they were born is nevertheless going to be shocked because one day the child will come home and says, I know you name me Tom, but you repress my natural constructed.
You thought I was naturally a boy, but I'm not.
I'm socially and culturally constructed as a woman.
And you did this to me.
And then I need, you you know,
I need surgery, I need hormone suppression, I need estrogen, and vice versa.
In the case of women, it's sort of, well, in the case of both, it's mutilation.
And that's where we are.
And so everybody's afraid of the teachers.
And they all come out of school of education.
Many of them don't have children themselves.
They're advocates and they want to
break up the family and absurd that control, whether it's critical critical race theory or transgenderism.
And you can really see when it's really started in 2016, that everywhere that Hillary Clinton went on every campaign stop, she said, I want to welcome the LGBT
community.
And then what was it, the LGBTQ?
Or I don't know what it was, transitioning Q, I don't know, queer, I don't know what that was.
And then there's plus or something.
They keep adding letters to it, as if there's all these constituencies with millions of people out there.
And again,
we can talk about this in the Association of Race, but you want to get, you have, you want to rendezvous with Yugoslavia, you want to rendezvous with Rwanda, you want to with a sectarianism in Iraq, just keep it up because you're re-tribalizing America.
Yeah.
Victor, you know,
I thought there was a little glimmer of hope a year and a half ago when Youngkin won in Virginia.
And a lot of that seemed to be, had to do with parents
finally embracing their
parenthood of their children, at least in school, which, you know, you send your kids to school and you think you hope.
And to get, really get involved and down and dirty and fight and go to school board meetings.
I mean, it takes a little gumption.
It takes gumption just to go, never mind to speak up.
But they did.
And that's, you know, so there were political ramifications for parents embracing parenthood and their rights as parents to
oversee their children.
And I think that kind of waned last year.
I think the midterms really depressed people, the Senate court.
I think they thought,
given the polls and given the state of depression among the left, they were very optimistic.
They thought, you know,
we've hit peak.
I wrote a column called peak woke.
I still think we're at peak woke, but we, I mean, that we've passed it.
When I look at what Dave Chappelle or Bill Maher is writing or this long Columbia Journalism Review denunciation of
basically
the Russian collusion hoaxes and stuff.
So I think we're over the hump.
But I think people thought we were, I did, I thought, I think we thought that we were going to pick up six or seven seats in the Senate and maybe 40 seats in the House.
And therefore, we were going to pass legislation and force
Biden to veto it, but we certainly would stop
all judicial nominations.
And we didn't.
And all the things that we thought were hokey.
Oh, nobody's going to fall for the demagogue on Will versus Wade.
It goes back to the states.
The states can decide.
It's not prohibiting, or we'd say, nobody's going to think that just get rid of a marijuana conviction is going to make you vote for Biden, or you don't have to pay back your student loans, or you get 10 cents cheaper a gallon because he's draining this.
And it all worked.
It all worked.
It all worked.
And it was like Roadrunner.
and Wiley E.
Coyote all over again.
It's like we've been there, we've done it.
We went through 2018 midterms.
We went down to the 2020 election.
We understand ballot curing, vote harvesting, non-election day, absentee ballots mailed everybody.
We understand Mark Zuckerberg's 419.
We understand what the left is going to do and they're going to raise this and we're going to be ready for it.
And we weren't.
The same old, same old.
And so I think that caused a lot of depression.
And
when I say that I think we're over peak woke, it's because people are dropping out.
They're just not, as I say,
they're not participating in the American Cultural Project.
They don't watch the NBA.
They don't go to a Hollywood movie.
If you told half of America, what's a Grammy or Tony or Oscar, they wouldn't know.
They don't watch that stuff.
You think they watch The View?
They don't, they've CNN destroyed itself.
Nobody watches it.
It's got it's like smaller audience than music.
Yeah, the audience for Don Lamon, as you call him, I think is 330,000.
And so I think a lot of people just feel, you know what?
I find myself
in a very weird position.
because everywhere I give a talk and I don't talk about strife, but I get these these questions, you know,
of,
well, don't you think we're having it, we're on a civil war or how can we be compatible?
So what I'm saying is there's a lot of people when they look at the 120 days of writing and they look at the January 6th treatment,
or
they look at the Baltimore reaction versus the George Floyd reaction.
or they look at the statistics of hate crimes and interracial crimes versus what is said about them.
Or
they just feel like
the country's crazy.
And they look at the homeless or they look at the border or they look at deliberately stopping gas and oil production.
It just, they don't, they can't figure it out.
And they don't have the power to stop it, even though they have the majority of the population.
And so, and they, and they become extremely dissatisfied and depressed.
And they're, they're looking at, you know, one of the things I have to start doing is be more positive and not just point out the pathologies of this country right now, but what you do about them because I get overwhelmed with emails and letters.
And when I go give a talk, you know, it's kind of runs like this.
Yes, yes, we've heard, we've heard, we heard.
We know California is terrible.
We know it's overtaxed.
We know our schools are no good.
We know the roads are no good.
We know high-speed rail is a boondoggle.
Why did this happen?
What are we going to do?
That kind of stuff.
I can tell you why it happened.
I do it all the time, but what we're going to do, I can't,
because I can't, with all good
conscience, say to people, just go out to vote and you can vote Gavin Newsom's whole bunch out of office.
You're not going to be able to do it in this state, not with 10 million absentee ballots, or should say mail-in ballots missing.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Well,
my point, by the way, on the parenthood
stuff was in part that I do think the Republican Party, for a brief moment, were the party of parents and then dropped that rhetoric.
And it is, maybe it was just rhetoric
at a certain time, but it's to me seems an inspiring, potentially inspiring political point.
It's not to be partisan, but it's to energize and empower the parents to actually be parents.
And this is one of the tools of fighting back against this broad insanity insanity and the perversion of our children.
So, Victor, we're going to talk about a column, your most recent syndicated column, Race Everywhere, and some other news stories kind of in the same ballpark.
And we'll get to that right after this final important message.
Back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
A little plug for myself first.
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Here's an excerpt.
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not charging again it's free i would i do it because i think people uh would enjoy uh being uh exposed to other sources of interesting uh articles so you can sign up for that at civilthoughts.com so victor
you you wrote a uh your most recent column race everywhere and i want to lump three other
news news articles into this since we're going to be talking about race one is
sarcastic, although it's just tragic.
There was a Republican councilwoman,
Eunice Duumfour,
who was shot dead.
She's from Sayreville, New Jersey, and she was gunned down behind the wheel of her SUV outside of her home.
She's a black woman, black woman, Republican.
Nigerian, Nigerian immigrant, I think.
Yeah.
You know, where's, I wrote you, where the hell is Al Sharpton?
You know,
a black woman,
elected official shot down the street.
Is it a problem because there's an R after her, her name?
I don't know.
Last I looked, no one's been apprehended yet.
Then two other news stories, Victor.
We saw, many people saw this account of these
kids on a bus just beating the hell out of the southern kid in Miami.
This has been ongoing bullying.
And what is what's the
Miami school system's response?
Well,
it's wrong that this video got out.
Not that they're allowing this,
take your kid out of the school.
We can't protect her, right?
Right.
And there was a woman.
There was a bus driver and an attendant on the bus.
And they were exonerated.
They didn't do anything wrong.
You know, immediately, you know, the union kind of mindset comes into play there.
And then the last race-based thing was the story, I forget the name, that the doctor was a California doctor on a bicycle, hit by a car.
And then the car driver stop, gets out, and he stabs the guy.
He's dead.
And
the driver, who was apprehended,
the alleged murderers of, I saw mixed race.
And
look, I hate to get into this because I just, I don't look at anyone except, I like to think of Martin Luther King mindset, you know, content of character.
But, you know,
why is it he's black?
You look at the picture, the guy's black.
Why is it mixed race all of a sudden?
Is that to lie because he's a black guy who killed the white guy?
You know,
there is no such thing.
Excuse me.
There is no such thing as mixed race when you're applying for affirmative action.
The 1/16th drop of the old racist Confederacy applies.
So if you want to join the tribal gaming commission and you say you're Native American and you just need 116th, you don't say I'm mixed race.
And Barack Obama never said I'm mixed race, at least when he wanted to be the affirmative action minority candidate.
So when people want to stress their features and they feel that it has a particular
reward behind it or it's advantageous, there's not mixed race.
It's only mixed race when it's the other way.
And so, as I said before, if you were a person from a planet X and you landed on American shores and you said, hmm, let me study this strange species of humans, these Americans.
Ah,
and
you could say, well, when we came in 1950, people who were black were trying to pass for people who were white.
And now we've come back, and people who were white are trying to pass
as people who were not white.
So therefore, it must be that in 1950, it was advantageous to be white because it was a racist society.
And now it must be advantageous to be non-white because it's a racist society.
And that's what anybody would
see
if you were
disinterested and empirical.
But
the funny thing is, all of these cases show the utter intellectual poverty of the left.
For example,
when
people
When we had the George Floyd case,
people would say, well, yes, that was terrible what he did, but there's almost 10,000
African Americans killed every year.
They say, yes, but it's not the government doing it.
That's different.
These are the police.
These are public servants.
Or if you said,
yes, but if you look at interracial crimes, African Americans are six times more likely to commit them against whites than whites or blacks.
They say, yes, but that's a private thing.
It's not the government.
But this is the government.
This is a school bus.
This is a government school bus.
And this nine-year-old girl was attacked in a terror attack by two, I guess he was 14, another was much younger, and they tried to kill her.
And there was a government employee that represents our public schools, a hallowed down institution.
It did nothing.
And there was an attendant on the bus that did nothing.
And that was a racist attack.
And nobody said a word.
Nobody said a word.
And let me ask you, Jack, or maybe
all of you who are listening: do you really believe if there had been a white bus driver and a white attendant and a predominantly white bus, and there was a nine-year-old black girl and two white teenagers beat the crap out of her without any intervention, that there would not be a national scandal right now?
And the opera.
Cities would be burning.
Cities would be burning.
And so it's all predicated on asymmetrics: that we had a terrible history of slavery and Jim Crow, and we have absolution.
And we have, okay, that goes so far, but we're 60 years out of the civil rights movement now.
And there's a whole two generations or three generations that grew up under affirmative action.
They don't know anything about Jim Crow.
They have to take it by your word.
The legacy of racism is still there and all that.
But if you keep having these asymmetrical situations, another thing was asymmetrical.
The left always told us, remember that book, Words Matter?
Was that Cornell West that wrote that?
Words Matter.
And the point was that you have to be very careful in your speech about race.
You have to use the proper vocabulary because it filters down to the street and it can cause violence.
And the left is always saying, I didn't feel safe.
And so we've been subjected since May of 2020 to a constant mantra of white privilege, white rage, white supremacy, white privilege, white rage, white, white, white.
Joy Reid on TV saying, guess what, everybody?
This is now, we're down to 66% whites.
Or Ellie Mostel, the lawyer from Harvard that's on cable TV.
Oh, I just don't want to see white people anymore.
Remember the New York psychiatrist who said she
was speaking at Yale and she had dreams of shooting white people?
Yeah.
And I dreamed that I shot somebody.
And we get that all the time, all the time.
Remember Sonny Hostin on the view that white Republican women were like bugs going to raid if they voted?
So that's just all okay.
But I'm telling you that you may be right.
Words matter because it filters down.
So we have a doctor who did more in one year to help humanity than his attacker did his entire life.
And he's riding his bicycle.
And this
person of color swerves and I'm going to say why I said person of color in a second he swerves and knocks this doctor who saved countless lives off his road bike and he you can see the video he just splatters through the intersect as somebody who's been in the same situation with a two
bike accident I can tell you you're lucky you're alive
And that's not enough.
That's not enough.
He has to go into the intersection and finish him off and execute him.
And then he's supposedly, if you read the Daily Mail account, he says white privileged.
And he's angry.
So it's a clear hate crime.
I haven't seen Merrick Garland give a press conference that this was a hate crime, that the person uttered a racist, contemptible slur that explains why he
destroyed somebody's life with his car and then finished him off in the intersection.
And we're supposed to be like the Florida case.
We're supposed to say, you know, things happen.
But
it's all predicated on this idea that
the white supremacist, the white rager, the
white privileged person has all these advantages and he's very dangerous.
And remember the African-American, I don't feel safe.
Remember Michelle Obama?
I just don't feel like my kids could walk out someday.
They could just walk out and be gone.
Well, yeah, Michelle, because statistics don't lie.
And there's almost 8 to 10,000 African Americans murdered by African Americans.
And there's very few murdered by non-African Americans.
But they don't tell you that.
And so you're getting to the point where
If you keep it up, I don't know what people are going to do.
And we jump the racial shark with the,
you know, with the Memphis shooting.
So
if you say that the five black officers who beat to death a black suspect
who hadn't really done anything wrong, and they did that out of white racism, and then you say trying them for first degree or second degree murder is white racism, and then you say that the grassroots appeal of a crime-ridden neighborhood for police help
was the catalyst catalyst that created the scorpions, an anti-crime unit that is predominantly made up of African Americans on the prompt of the black chief and the black assistant chief.
And if you say that's racism, then there's no other, there's no hope.
You can't do anything because everything is racism and nothing's racism.
So I guess what I'm saying is that when you look at this so-called white boogeyman, you would expect certain characteristics of the white privileged violent oppressor of the people of color.
And we can go down them very quickly.
He must be homicidal.
Well, no,
that white male commits
homicides, according to the FBI data,
in less percentages than his percentage in the population.
He's what the left calls the underrepresented.
So then he's what?
Well, he's suicidal.
He kills himself at twice the number.
People who are prey on other people don't kill themselves.
People kill themselves out of despair for a variety of reasons.
But white males are killing themselves at double the numbers of Latinos and blacks.
Well, then maybe he just avoids military service and lets people die in his place.
That's what they said about Vietnam, even though it's proportionally representative.
I could use that taboo word in matters of life and death.
But no, I mean, as I said earlier, and I've quoted that ad nauseum, white males died at twice their numbers in the population in our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Well, then maybe he commits hate crimes.
That's what he does.
That's what white people.
No, he's underrepresented in hate crimes.
Well, then maybe he's, oh, well, he's overrepresented in interracial crime.
No, he's underrepresented.
He's a victim more than he is a victimizer.
So by any empirical data, you don't see the data of a white dangerous predatory male, which we're told he is, in very racist fashion.
So then you say, well, what do you do then?
Well,
you put adjectives in.
You say racism is systemic because you can't really see it because the data is not there, at least in your terms of your definition of a violent, white, privileged, white rager.
Or you say it's insidious or an aggression is a micro.
It's still there.
It's just micro.
And you can really see it, what other things are going on.
We fought the civil rights battles to stop, it really started over not just voting, but housing, because African Americans would go to a landlord and they say, nope, I'm not renting to you.
And they had all these ballot propositions in California in the early 60s, and they were, you know, open housing.
And they didn't win because people wanted, as landlords, to pick and choose who could, they had to turn their property over.
And the courts then said those were unconstitutional, and we had open housing.
But
how you go on these universities, Jack?
I walked from my apartment at Stanford through the campus and they have black and Latino and Asian.
They have all of these theme houses.
That's the word.
They're segregated houses.
You can't go in there if you're not the particular race.
They have safe spaces.
And at Pomona.
Can I just say, Victor,
you raised these points in the column you've written about many things, but about the housing.
People should really check out this column.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, and then you can pick the race of your roommate if the person's not white.
If you're a white person, you say, you know what?
I never thought this was true.
I believed in the vision of Martin Luther King, but my African-American fellow students have told me that birds of a feather flock together.
So I just want to have a white roommate.
Can you imagine what would happen?
So it's all predicated on a historic
oppression by
the institution of slavery.
And yet, but we're in the 233rd year of this country, and we're 158 years out of slavery, and it's not resonating.
Not when you have these sky-high crime rates, especially after the George Floyd, and not after you have these loony,
Jesse, Juicy Smollett,
five black policemen are
killing another black person because of racism.
That's not going to sell.
And when you see these interracial crimes, like two African boys terrorizing, trying to beat to death a small little girl on a bus with impunity that nobody will intervene, or you see
apparently a part African-American, you say mixed race, but if he deliberately swerves to kill a doctor who he thinks is white, and he's so angry at white people that he even mentions white privilege as he goes and executes them in an intersection and nobody says a word, then you're very, it's not going to be sustainable.
It's not going to be sustainable.
And I quoted the National Association of Scholars when they said 173 schools they surveyed, 42% racially segregated residents, 46% racially segregated orientations, 72%
racially graduate.
And that's not.
what it really means, segregated.
That just means that in those particular
activities,
you can't go in if you're white.
So, if you have a black graduation and a Latino says, I'd like to go on, they probably let you in.
If you have a Latino graduation, you're black, they probably let you in, but not if you're white.
That was the hallmark achievement of Barack Obama with diversity, that he created an updated Jesse Jackson Rainbow coalition.
And ultimately, you know,
it's so chaotic because you mentioned mixed race, but they don't know what makes an interracially, an intermarried and interracial society.
They don't know what makes a person a particular race.
They just take it on trust.
So if Stanford says only 23%
of the incoming class is going to be white, that is less than 33% of what its actual numbers are in the demographic.
Well, they don't know what the actual DNA of the person who says he's Latino or black are.
They just take it as their word.
I don't think they ask for DNA.
I don't think they ask for genealogical tables.
But they do offer, you know, incentives not to be white.
And the more you say that, the more they call you a racist.
But all you have to do, there's a reason why Elizabeth Warren said she was Native American.
If you took away affirmative action and her law professorship at Harvard and you just had her living in Oklahoma as
Elizabeth Warren.
You think she would say that she's Native American?
I don't think so.
And
ultimately, this isn't going to work, and it's not working now.
And as I say, and I've said this ad nauseum,
tribalism is like nuclear proliferation.
Once somebody goes nuclear, the next person says, next nation says, not this pig.
I got to go nuclear.
So I can already see it, Jack, and
I can already see it.
And I think that any
racist minority person who wants to identify by his color or his appearance or his culture and exclude other people is inviting.
that to happen with other people.
So when I go places as strangers in heavily minority areas in which I live,
I've never seen anything like it.
There's almost a natural affinity.
People come up to you.
Hi, how are you?
As if you're the last person that looks like me in this community.
Or when I go see somebody from high school, they'll say, what happened to all these white people?
They all left.
Oh, I didn't leave.
And they say that to you.
And
it's, it's, do they, is that what you really want to happen?
That 67% of the population is going to start identifying as white because it's okay if you're African-American.
It's okay if you're Latino.
It's okay if if you're Asian.
And then you're going to say, well, you're the majority.
No, you're not.
There's six states.
Texas is one.
California is another where the majority population is not white.
It's a majority, it's a minority majority where there's no majority.
And
whites are not the largest number.
In California, they're not the largest ethnic group.
And if you start looking at privilege, well, there's, as I said in the column, there's 15 or 16 ethnic groups.
They're all there: Sikhs, Pakistani Americans, Arab Americans, I think
Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans that are making more money than so-called generic whites.
So, this is something that the left created, and they thought that it would resonate and get out the vote, and they could win because their economic policies were elitist, they were bicostal focused, and they turned off the old Hubert Humphrey JFK white working class.
They drove them out of the party and they became parole voters or they became Reagan Democrats or blue dogs.
And
Obama brought some of them back in because they couldn't stand John McCain and Mitt Romney.
But by and large, the Democratic Party said to themselves,
We don't like these people, these working white religious nuts in the middle of the country.
I quoted a couple of things to that extent in The Dying Citizen, where one immigrant from Pakistan said, This is good.
Let's get rid of these people, get them out.
And remember, Bill Crystal got kind of a hot mic at the AEI, where he said, You know, I don't know what's the problem with the illegal immigration.
Everybody kind of gets used and lazy, and that's what's happened to white people.
So it's good to bring in people to replace them.
And I had this CEO, minor CEO, I quote in the book where she said after the 2016 election, these people live in shitholes.
Excuse the language.
They're awful.
Their schools, and she was talking about the Midwest,
or the CNN reporter says, I'm at a Trump rally.
I have more teeth than everybody here put together.
Or the stroke page, remember that?
We went into Walmart and you can smell these people.
Or the deplorables, or the irredeemables, are the clingers, or Joe Biden's contribution of dregs,
John McCain's crazies, all of that stuff.
And they keep pushing, pushing, pushing, and they shouldn't do that because it just divides people.
And you're creating an artificial bond that's not there by race.
I can tell you that I don't know a lot of white people.
I'm sure I'm not one, who feels when I see a white person, I'm intrinsically have more solidarity than the Mexican-American friends I grew up with.
But if they keep pushing
those elites, say to the Latino community, you are Latino first,
then,
and the black community says, we are blacks first, and we're not individuals, we're only collectives.
And
whites are collectives as well, then you have to act like a collective, and that's not good.
And so,
And, you know, when you say white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, white, you're talking about 240 million people as if they're all the same.
I don't have any affinity with Al Gore.
I don't particularly like John Kerry.
I don't want to be at a party with Nancy Pelosi.
I'm sorry.
I have nothing in common with him.
I'd rather be with Jose Acosta in Salma, you know what I mean?
Than with Nancy Pelosi or Diane Feinstein.
So, but
is that what, I thought that's what we're supposed to be.
But if these groups keep saying, no, no, no, no, you can't have it both ways.
You can't be an individual and a collective.
You can't say all white, you can't be in the view every day and say, all white people do this.
They're like cockroaches going to white, white, white, or Mark Milley, white, white, white, and then not say black, black, black, Latino, Latino, Latino.
So
it's headed.
in a bad direction.
And we have a rendezvous if we're not.
If somebody doesn't stand up and say, stop it, shame on you.
you're a racist.
No matter who you are, white, brown, black, yellow, you are a racist.
Every time you talk in racial terms, you are a racist as a collective.
Every time you do not mention the individual, but you talk about the collective, you are a racist.
It'll stop.
And when they call us racist, every one of you who are listening, you said, I don't care what you call it.
I'm not a racist.
You're the racist.
You're the racist.
You're the racist.
Professor Andy is a racist.
He said that.
He said that.
Al Sharpton, you mentioned Al Sharpton.
Al Sharpton is a bona fide racist.
He made his career in racism.
He projected power through racism.
He's never apologized for Tawana Brawley.
He's never apologized for Crown Heights.
He's never apologized for the rhetoric about, you know, put your yarmulke on and come over to my house, get it on.
He's never apologized for his anti-Semitism.
He's an out-and-out racist.
He's never been called to account.
Never has.
Farrakhan hasn't.
Never.
And it's just amazing, you know, that
with the double standard, when you have a picture of Barack Obama smiling with Farrakhan, and that's considered okay.
And if you had any other white politician with a Ku Klux Klan person, he's done.
done.
He should be done.
But not Barack Obama with Farrakhan.
And the picture was suppressed during the campaign for eight years and so
it there's got to be an equality under the law and equality of treatment and if it's not it and as we speak jack people are saying where have you been jack and victor
don't you know how the world works that's why i am moving and they're self they're self-selecting well i know how the world worked and victor we you know you and i have to honestly say looking the racially america was
my youth anyway, lots of was not a pretty picture, but it was clearly improving markedly and happily, I thought much better than now, right?
And then all of a sudden, it had a because
ideologues started hitting these themes, things have gotten better.
I can tell you, right now, things were getting better.
I graduated from a rural school in 1971, in which the community was about
50%
Hispanic, Mexican-American, 10% Asian, and African-American, and 50, 45, 50%
so-called white.
When I was a senior,
they had student body elections, and I was the campaign manager of
Jose Avila.
a Mexican-American, and he was running against a very prominent white kid
in the community.
And everybody, you know, in the white community said, wow.
And I tried to explain, I don't,
I think Mr.
Lilla is a much better candidate.
And he won.
And the next year, I can tell you that the student body president was African-American.
And the year behind me, and this is in a town that had about three or four percent African-American.
And his sister was the vice president
in the class ahead of me.
And I can name, I mean, it was, I'm sure if you went back and asked them, were there racism?
They probably say yes.
But
there was not these types of racial incidents.
There really wasn't.
And it wasn't just because
the whites controlled everything.
It was already starting to change because of immigration.
And the population had gone from 90% white to 88% white white to 85% white.
But another thing that people don't understand, you show me any majority culture, racial group anywhere in the world, anywhere, and you will see tensions
and that particular majority group be faulted for not being sensitive to minority groups.
And that's what's happening right now.
When you see the Latino majority, it's being faulted by other groups.
And you can see that with that famous LA Council hot mic, where three Latinos were racially stereotyping in disparaging fashion, whites, gays, Asians, and indigenous people from Mexico.
And the kid, the adopted kid was black, right?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's a mess.
And that's why a lot of people just,
they don't.
They don't want to get near it.
They don't want to get near this topic.
They don't.
They just want to be left alone.
And
I I think the left is really erred.
You can really see it when you look at, listen, I mentioned Bill Maher or Dave Chappelle.
There's people, black, white, whatever.
They're getting scared about what's going on.
Because
when you have the out, out,
we just saw in California the execution, the execution of a brilliant doctor.
Right in broad daylight, a man ran him over and then walked up to him and shot him in the head and executed him him and muttered white privilege and not one there hasn't been any coverage of that there hasn't been any statement by the president there hasn't been anything
and
that's and there hasn't been anybody talking about this except the people that downloaded this girl on a bus and those were iconic moments of just pure racial hatred And nobody said a word.
And they involved, in one case, the government.
Well, Victor, we
we went over today.
It's okay.
There's no official time limit, but
we're given kind of parameters.
But that's roughly about what we have, except we will conclude with the usual business we do at the end of these podcasts to thank everyone who's here listening, no matter what platform you do that.
From
some who do it from iTunes slash Apple,
rate the show zero to five stars.
Most practically everyone of five stars.
Thank you very much.
Some leave
remarks and comments and we read them, take them to heart.
And I always read one at the end of the show.
Here's one from
LDTAZ, LD Taz,
and it's titled Voice of Reason.
I've been listening to VDH since prior to the 2020 election.
Unfortunately, I had not been aware of the vast knowledge, expertise, expertise, logic, reason, and good old common sense existed in
an individual that was willing to shout it from the rooftops.
And to think he resides in my backyard as a fellow citizen of the southern San Joaquin Valley here in Vesalia, California.
So glad I found a voice of reason in this tumultuous and chaotic time in the USA we are we find ourselves.
And I spread the word of EDH to everyone I come into contact with, of whom share the same values as those of us who believe in our republic.
Thanks for your voice and willingness to share with all of us.
What a blessing and breath of fresh air.
Love the VDH show.
That's LD Taz.
So thank you for that, LD.
Thank you, all else who listened.
Victor, thank you for your great thoughts today.
Appreciate it.
And folks, we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
See you next time.