Our Military and Our Meritocracy

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

And Victor Davis Hansen is the star and the namesake.

And he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a best-selling author, a syndicated columnist, a regular essayist.

He is a farmer.

He is a professor.

And he hangs his hat on the web at victorhanson.com.

And I'm going to tell you later in this program why you should be subscribing to that.

There's a lot of cultural things we're going to talk about today.

And today's podcast will be up on the adjustthenews.com that's where that's our home on the internet i think we should begin the show by talking about

something that happened last week it was the birthday of the marine corps the marines take their birthday very seriously and a very serious marine our friend bing west a great

just bing's one of the great great guys

He was also a very popular writer.

He wrote a piece for National Review with his thoughts about how the dynamics of the Marine Corps are changing and not for the better in his view.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on that and other things right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, Victor, I

you know, personally love Bing.

Uh,

in my previous life at National Review, he used we used to do the cruises, as you know, you were on several of them, and uh, some, I believe, with with Bing.

He's just uh, just a wonderful, wonderful man, a real hero, a warrior, and a great writer.

And he's written before about his concerns of the changing dynamics of the Marine Corps.

And on the 10th, he wrote a piece for National Review, and that is the Marine Corps'

birthday.

And he is

complaining.

Well, it's a legitimate word, complaining wisely, about how the focus of the Marine Corps is changing from the grunt, from the actual Marine, from the guy who's

hitting the beach at Iwo Jima or in the jungles at Vietnam.

They're changing the focus

to a missile-based

military

operation.

And this has to do with China, as I guess all military focus of America

should be.

Victor,

I think you looked at the piece and I'm pretty sure you understand Bing's concerns.

You can address them, please, but if you have any larger

thoughts of your own about the dynamics of the Marine Corps,

is it?

I hate to even put it this way.

The Marines, through their leadership, in decline, is America less secure because of the way the Marines are being reconstituted and

with missiles becoming a priority?

What are your thoughts about this?

Well,

as I understand what he's saying is that there's a general trend in the military, Navy, Air Force, traditional Army,

to go digital, go computerized, go missiles, go, you know, rocket sophisticated lasers, hypersonics,

fourth generation aircraft, et cetera, et cetera.

And then there's the Marines.

And the Marines are not antithetical to all that, and they embody that equipment, but

there is a term in American history called send in the Marines.

And that means that we haven't transcended time and space and the human condition to the extent there's not going to be send in the Marines.

That means there's going to be an embassy somewhere that's stormed.

That means

that

there's going to be a request for a brigade of Marines to go into some god-awful place.

And the techniques that make the Marines the only people who can do it are physicality, muscular audacity, mastery of small arms fire, rapidity.

And so what he's saying is don't tamper with that.

And don't take money away from that and make them into

sort of, you know, techies like they're playing video games.

You know, they're going to be directing missiles and sophisticated platforms at a great distance, but that's that's okay.

But in a zero-sum budget, you're taking the heart out of the Marine Corps.

And don't think you've transcended that because there's always, given the human condition, going to be a situation where man A is going to have to fight man B.

It can't just be push a button all the time.

It doesn't mean you

don't know how to push a button, but there has to be an element of the U.S.

military

that,

my God, there's going to be a lot of Benghazis, there's going going to be a lot of

situations in the future.

I don't want to have another Lebanon or

under Reagan or

Benghazi under Hillary as Secretary of State.

But there's going to be situations like that where you're going to need men on the ground.

And there's special forces, there's Delta and all that, but it's the Marines that have the largest number.

And so he's very worried about that as an ex-Marine.

And we all should be worried about that.

It's part of a larger trend, to tell you the truth, that is

a duality.

And one part is

computerized 21st century technology is going to replace the human role.

And we see it with drones.

We see it with

sophisticated artillery, et cetera, computerized batteries.

And then the other part is that the Marines, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, are part of a social revolution.

It's almost Napoleonic.

They're a nation in arms.

It's almost like

the Maoist idea that we're a national liberationist army.

By that I mean that transgenderism, gayness, women, feminism,

all of the racial, critical race theory, white supremacy, all of these things are going to be embedded into these military units.

And they're going to reflect certain ideology.

They're going to be ideological rather than just punitive on the ground.

And so he is saying,

okay,

but the Marines are separate.

They exist beyond time and space.

They're just unique and they're the toughest, meanest SOBs in the world in number and force.

And they're an American iconic arm and they've been very successful.

My God, I mean, if you want to take Ibo Jima, you send in the Marines.

If you've got a storm sugarloaf hill, you send in the Marines.

If we didn't have the Marines, we'd need to invent the Marines.

You would have to invent them.

And there's certain people in the United States, when they turn 18 and they're going to join the military, they opt out for the most rigorous training, the most physical type of

service, and the idea that if we get into a crisis, they're going to be in the worst possible place.

And that draws a particular unique individual.

And

you don't want to tamper, excuse me, do not want to tamper with that.

And we've had this discussion in another context, a little wider discussion, about these families, some from rural America, some south of the Mexican-Dixon line, who inordinately, generation after generation,

They send their children to the Pacific in World War II.

They send their children up to the Choison Reservoir in the Korean War.

They send their children to Wei in the Vietnam War.

They send them to the First Gulf War.

They send them into Afghanistan generation.

And they are superb fighters.

And they're not representative of the rest of the country.

We've moved on from that type of skill set.

So they're the old breed that E.B.

Sledge wrote about.

And they're invaluable.

And you don't tamper with them.

If you're Mark Milley, you don't accuse them without evidence of being supremacist or white rage.

If you're Lloyd Austin, you don't say you're going to go through the ranks and look at them.

You don't make them go to mandatory ideological indoctrination.

You don't get a bunch of technocrats to say, we're going to turn you in from grunts into sophisticated people behind a keyboard pushing buttons for missiles.

There's plenty of people.

in the U.S.

military that can do that.

There's very few that can do what the Marines are doing.

Well, Victor, part of the soldier-specific, well, Marine-specific

mindset is in the field, men in the field fighting.

And

there's a lot of that going on in the world right now.

It's in Ukraine.

And we haven't talked about Ukraine in a bit.

It's certainly fighting that involves everything you've talked about, missiles, et cetera, but it's

really about the Ukraine soldiers

man by man

fighting and pushing back the Russians.

And they've

had great success, continued great success.

The headlines in the last few days are that the Russians have pulled out of Kherson.

And I think it'd be a good segue here, get your views on what's happening in

Ukraine right now and any kind of

ramifications you might think this has for Russia.

I mean, besides losing a war, any broader or greater ramifications for that?

Well, it's a tragic situation because here we are nine months into the Ukraine war, and due to the heroism of the Ukrainian fighter, the incompetence of the Russians, the stupidity and unnecessary adventurism of Vladimir, we can use all of these exegesis, but here we are nine months, and there's been 200,000 people killed, probably.

on both sides and maybe in civilian and military and there's probably another 150 200 casualties, wounded, missing, etc.

Okay.

And we're just about nearing the point where the war started.

In other words, they're going to push, they are pushing back and they're entering the predominantly what was Russian-speaking majority borderlands.

So then the question is,

what was it all about?

And the answer is World War I.

It's the same thing.

It's four years in the trenches and it's not going to be resolved.

I don't see

that

the old principles of interior lines

don't apply.

That is, the Russians expand way beyond their ability, way beyond their logistical capability, and they have extended lines and they're pushed back, pushback.

The Kiev gambit fails.

They're pushed back, pushback.

And then their interior lines shrink and they're getting closer to the border.

They're putting convicts.

The Wagner group is there.

They're digging in.

And so now we get to a point where,

does Mr.

Zelensky want to

change the status antequo?

In other words, as he's saying,

the purpose of this defensive war has now changed.

We're not going to get Russia back to where they were in those disputed Russian-speaking borderlands.

They don't exist anymore as they were before the war.

There's probably people that have moved or ethnically cleansed or killed or gone back to Russia, or maybe they're sick of Putin and they're not so Russian as they thought they were, whatever the situation is.

It's time in Zelensky's mind to go all the way to the Russian border.

And that's where we are.

And the problem with that is that the border doesn't just stop.

There's going to be, as there is now, raiding across the border.

So if you see a huge supply depot of oil or track vehicles preparing to assault and they're in Russian territory, There's going to be, and there has been, airborne assaults inside Russia.

Or if you see another big convoy of the Black Sea fleet coming in to a Crimean port and you might think, well, we're at a point now where we can free the Crimea,

but we have to sink that.

But we're getting into a very

edgy point because there's a lot of things going on.

Ukraine is exhausted.

They've lost 6 billion people.

They've lost 100,000 dead.

They don't have in many parts of the country electricity or running water.

People have been under a horrible ordeal.

The initial enthusiastic zealous, we're all Ukrainians now has started to fade as it gets cold in Europe and there's no natural gas coming from Russia.

And people in Germany are sitting in hot rooms as if you know, in an apartment building.

Hey, let's all get together and let our body heat do what our natural gas used to do.

And so it's a changing dynamic.

Inflation is soaring in Europe.

It's going into, it is in a recession, a stagflationary recession.

And here in the United States, we're getting close to $100 billion.

Our stockpiles of javelins,

missile platforms, sophisticated artillery, shells, batteries, barrels,

it's pretty low.

And these are very expensive weapons.

And then you just don't click your fingers, even in normal times.

With our supply chains, it's going to be longer.

So there's a lot of centrifugal forces, and they're all in play.

And we're looking at Mr.

Zelensky and we're saying, you have been very brave, you're gallant, we're all behind you.

We are supporting your military.

It's basically the United States now, and we're propping up your economy.

But what is the end game?

Do you want to push every single Russian out of the

area that was Ukraine so that we go back pre-2014.

If you want to do that, this is how many costs, lives it will cost.

This is how much billions in aid you will need.

And there's starting to be a little pushback against Mr.

Zelensky when he tells Israel, what are you doing?

Why aren't you supporting us more?

And then Israel says, you know what?

When we go after Hezbollah,

We fly into Lebanon to protect the sovereignty of Israel from these attacks originating in Lebanon or Syria.

And guess what?

There's Russian pilots that wave to us.

You want us to fight with them?

Because that's what will happen if we turn into an active participant on your side.

And the Germans are starting to say to them,

our support of you means, and our stupid policies mean we're not, we're literally going to be in a pre-civilizational mode.

And there's a lot of people on the far left.

The far left has much more discipline.

So the AOC squad, Talib, say, this is crazy.

We're intervening in the foreign affairs of a different country and da-da-da-da.

And let's get out of Ukraine.

And they just slap them down.

They said, that's it.

Nope.

Withdraw the letter.

You don't do that in the Democratic Party.

We have absolute control, not in the Republican Party.

So we have a large group of people who are saying this is incompatible with the mega

agenda because

the United States is not in a great situation right now.

We've got inflation, we've got crime, we've got an open border, we've got terrible fiscal policies, we're in a recession, we've got high inflation, and just how many billions of dollars do we have to pour in when people can't afford gas and food to the Ukraine?

And Mr.

Zelensky, until recently,

has been obtuse.

His basic rhetoric, and I don't blame him because people are dying around him, but it's basically

you give him a billion dollars and he says, what have you done lately?

And then the next day he says, What have you done recently for me?

And so he doesn't understand how he comes across, but it's always,

I mean, and then he's chastised.

So he never says, Thank you for the aid, and you've kept us alive.

It's always,

ah, somebody just told me I should say thank you because I sound too ingracious.

So I'm going to say, I thank you.

It's always forced.

And so I don't know how sustainable it is, but

we're starting to go down a pathway where the end

is not good.

Because if we get into a Verdun situation, which we have been de facto, and we're right along that border, and Zelinsky wants to kill and expel all those Russians, then he's going to need pretty much a permanent pipeline of American cash,

American weapons.

And that's after nearly nine or 10 months of draining the U.S.

strategic supply.

And we've got Taiwan

to worry about, and our NATO partners.

And we're kind of alone now.

I mean, everybody talks big in Europe, but they it's either beyond their wherewithal to really be helpful or they're worried about energy.

This is all aside from the fact that we have created a Russian-Chinese alliance.

Turkey kind of now and then joins it.

Maybe an Iran is in it.

And who knows about India?

They are buying Russian oil.

So

we just kind of said, it's kind of, it was kind of an extension of the

left.

They got, I mean, I think it's fine to support Zelensky.

I support Zelensky, but the very zeal, it's like they took down their Russian collusion signs on their lawn and they put up help with Zelensky.

It was almost

a cry of the heart that, you know what, Putin was horrible.

Yeah, we all knew he was.

And, you know, if he didn't collude and ruin an election and get Hillary defeated, then he went and invaded Zelensky.

But it doesn't matter now.

Forget about collusion.

Now this is the real Putin.

We were trying, we were getting to this anyway.

So you got this strange thing where these democratic leaders who gave us reset, which was appeasement, in 2009, suddenly

they went into Russophobes during the Russian collusion, and now they're national liberationists, and they want to intervene.

I mean,

I won't mention names, but some of them, people I know and admire, they want to do all sorts of things.

They want to give them sophisticated aircraft.

They want to give them tanks.

They want to conduct raids deep into the borderlands of Russia.

They want to sink the Black Sea fleet.

They keep saying, oh, Russia won't do anything.

They're not going to use nuclear weapons.

Come on.

What would be the strategic value of dropping a tactical nuclear weapon?

There would be none.

You don't know that.

And we've got this sick man, this sick evil man, Putin.

We've got this crazy Wagner group and this guy that's running it.

And there's so many variables.

And we're just kind of blinkered.

And we say, we're going to give them all this money.

And they're going to expel all these Russians.

And they're going to free Ukraine.

And it's going to be a Western country.

It's going to join the EU.

And we're not going to really say yes or no in the future to NATO.

And

I got in big trouble in a conversation where I said to a colleague, I won't mention the circumstances because people would find out very quickly who it was, but I said something to the effect: do you remember we said we had a sphere of influence that we hadn't been involved in liberating Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

We felt that it was on our territory.

Forget about the MOP, but that was our domain.

And the Soviet Union came in and said,

we are going to back a revolution because we feel that Cuba is not being represented by the people.

So we're backing a communist revolution in your backyard, and we're going to give them the weaponry to do it.

And when that succeeded, they gave them strategic weapons.

And we just said, ain't going to happen.

You're not going to do that.

In fact, you're not going to get close to Cuba.

We blockaded it.

And we were willing to blow up russian ships in our home sphere and if necessary stand them down and we did because we had an enormous nuclear advantage right but the the point was this was our territory this is our background we have a historical relationship with cuba you don't you don't come in here and spread your ideology right on our border and

because

Communism is bad and democracy is good and we all believe that.

We think that, well, it's not analogous analogous because

soviet union was evil and and we were trying to defend i don't know what

what we were trying to defend in cuba against them the idea that soviet union couldn't come in and

a country that was a right-wing dictatorship into a right left-wing dictatorship but there is some

some analogous things to worry about.

We're in Russia's backyard and we are telling them that this historical part of Russia, that it broke away, that we are going to give it the wherewithal to go to war and humiliate Russia in the national scene and get back every inch.

And then we're going to basically tell Ukraine, a free, liberated Ukraine.

Now you're a part of the West and all of that, what that means institutionally.

I'm all for it, but I'm not stupid.

I think that you would have to expect that any nationalist leader, aggressive, kind of a fascist like Putin, will react.

And are you ready?

Are you ready for the reaction?

That's all I'm saying.

Because it's coming.

If you keep doing it, it's coming.

Victor, I can't help but be curious.

Um, mentioning the Cuban Missile Crisis, you must have been,

what, seven or eight, nine years old when that happened?

I'm just curious.

Do you have any?

I was nine years.

Seven years old.

Yeah, I remember what it was.

I was at Eric White's school on the west side of Selma.

It was predominantly Mexican-American, and

that started.

And we went to the Fresno Fair.

It was in October.

And guess what?

They had a whole exhibit immediately of bomb shelters.

And there were the steel bomb shelters, the concrete bombs.

They were basically, to tell you the truth, cesspools.

I mean, you know, septic tanks that people were trying to make a buck out of with drilling a hole in.

And then I can remember the local Boy Scout leader came to our house.

He was going to each farmhouse and he said,

my mom at that point was home, wasn't working.

And she said, You and your boys,

you were going to have a nuclear war, and you have to have a bomb shelter.

But if you don't have a bomb shelter, you have to have the Boy Scout-approved meals.

And it was Campbell's soup and stuff.

And he was selling out, you know, on the side, well, here's a big box of Campbell's soup and beans.

And then do you have ammunition?

You know, I thought the Ruskies were going to land.

And then we went to school, Eric White.

And Mr.

Kaggle said to us,

we actually had an intercom that was really something, you know, where a guy could sit on a microphone and each speaker in the class.

Right.

And he said, your teacher is going to teach you how to get under the desk in case of a atomic, atomic, not nuclear, atomic attack.

So she would say, five, four, three, two, one, get under the desk.

Or if you're walking down the corridor,

jump into a doorway where

it had a header, I guess, it was going to stop the building from collapsing on you.

And then there was, you know,

and then there were certain people in the medical profession.

You all have your iodine capsules, you know, I guess that was going to stop you from getting thyroid cancer or something when the fallout came.

So that was pretty scary.

Yeah.

And

that was all the missiles of October.

And

what, 60 years ago?

Yeah.

Yeah.

60 years ago.

60 years ago, right?

To this, to this October.

And everybody said this is not going to happen.

And remember about the solution of the it wasn't just khrushchev blinked everybody said oh he blinked jfk stood him down we had we had the greater nuclear arsenal no we made a secret deal to get a lot of missiles out of turkey that were pointed at russia and we gave concessions off the books that people didn't fully know to years later to and wisely so to back down

but it wasn't just we're the he-man that humiliated Khrushchev.

It was we have all the atmospherics, like you're not going to break this blockade, or we're going to do this to you.

But then on the other side, we were saying quietly, okay, what is bothering you?

Oh, right near your borders, we have strategic nuclear weapons based in a NATO country pointed at you.

We'll get them out for you.

And so there were concessions.

Donald Kagan wrote a good book, The Causes of War, and he discusses that.

And it's almost, I mean, he was, he was, he was a good friend of mine, he was a great scholar, and he made the point that if you look at the entire

scenario, we did give a lot of concessions.

Yes.

And so, what I'm getting at is that

nobody's more pro-American than I am, nobody's more pro-democracy than I am, nobody, but if you think that you're going to take the entire Russian people and you're going to humiliate them over this historic part of Russia because they have a sinister leader who tried to grab it and he failed.

And all these people have died, and we're going to push them back.

And how are we going to push them out

completely of Ukraine?

We're going to have to do it with some

preemptive kind of

expeditionary acts.

And I mean, expeditionary in the sense of in the sea or air outside of the space of Ukraine.

And I don't think that's a wise thing to do.

Well, Victor,

okay.

Thanks for that.

Now I'm going to move on.

And

I have a brief question.

I want a brief answer from you, like a one-word answer.

Do you know?

Hard for me.

I know, but do you know what will cure racism?

You said that's where you say, no, Jack, what?

No, Jack, what?

Masks.

And we're going to get to that topic right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Before we get into masks stuff,

Victor hangs his hat at VictorHanson.com.

And why you are not a subscriber to that important website is beyond me.

For those of you who are not yet, it's Victor's, everything Victor writes can be found there and his various appearances on

other, you know, many podcasts.

By the way, last night I was at a dinner for the Yankee Institute in Connecticut, and the principal speaker was Megan Kelly.

And I went up to her and she knew my voice from she's a big fan of this podcast.

And I know she told me you were going to be on her podcast

this week.

She's one of your, as you know, Victor, one of your biggest fans.

But anyway, a lot of

a lot of stuff that Victor writes for

his website is exclusive.

They're called ultra articles.

You cannot read them unless you're a subscriber.

What does it cost to subscribe?

Five dollars is

a test, stick your toe in the water event.

You are going to love it.

You're going to wonder why you didn't do it sooner.

Discounted subscription for a full year is $50.

Um, I really encourage you to do that.

Victor has a piece up right now, his most recent uh

ultra piece is called A Drive into Oblivion.

It is really

beautiful writing, Victor.

Just is really stunning.

Well, it's a it's sort of after we finish anyway, that and much more can be found at victorhanson.com.

Yeah, well, we can talk about at the end if we have a little time.

But then, um, also, as for me, I'll I'll just let you know quickly that Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

Why don't you sign up?

It's free, no risk, not selling your name.

I provide 12, 13, 14 recommended readings, links, and excerpts of things I've come across the previous week that I believe intelligent Americans like you

would appreciate

knowing about.

So that's civilthoughts.com.

Victor, about the masks.

So

Carol Markowitz,

the opinion editor and occasional writer at the New York Post, writes a piece on masks, racism.

And let me just quote this at the beginning of her piece and then have at it.

Here's what she writes: Is there anything masking can't do?

Except for control COVID spread, of course.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, she didn't write this, the once

revered New England Journal of Medicine, purports to show that mask policies in schools work to contain COVID.

But that's not all.

The authors conclude: we believe that universal masking may be especially useful for mitigating effects of structural racism in schools, including potential deepening of educational inequities.

End quote.

Sure, masks help fix structural racism.

Why not?

And the next study will show masking fights climate change.

Know what this study shows is that much of the medical establishment continues to be intensely woke and deeply dishonest because of it.

Just as the experts told us.

Gathering in crowds wasn't okay in the spring of 2020, but just weeks later protesting for Black Lives Matter somehow was.

This dishonesty is going to hurt us all for a long time.

Victor, this is, I don't know, I should say jaw-dropping because what else would we expect from the New England Journal of Medicine or The Lancet or the Science magazine, these other places that have been overrun and now fully embrace woke and leftist ideologies?

They're supposedly places of science, right?

Except they're places of politics, really.

Victor, what are your thoughts about what Carol's written here?

Well, I mean, she's on to something, and that is that

what prompts somebody to do a study?

I think all of our listeners should realize that if you're a young professor in the medical school at a major university or an academic institution or a law school and a business school, you want to get tenure, you want to get a name, what line of research do you pursue?

If you say, I'm interested in protective equipment in times of pandemic, and you want to go out and measure the efficacy of masks versus not masks and the type of mask, it'll be be valuable, but there won't be much pizzazz to it.

It's not a guarantee of career advancement.

But if you say there's a racist component to it or a,

you know, a weapon against structural racism and you want to have more people wear masks and maybe the science isn't there, but you start to do the racial angle, then it's going to find, you think, a persuasive audience, but it can be persuaded, I should say, and you're going to get attention.

And I mentioned this in a podcast with Sammy, and I try to every day because I've had this long COVID, but, you know,

I was always trying to find the latest blind study to see how the research was progressing and evolving.

And maybe, you know, I try not to read blogs or individual accounts, but scientific stuff.

And I swear, Jack, that 25% of the labor and capital is not on finding the exegesis, the explanation, the analysis of what is long COVID and how to treat it, or how to prevent it, or how to help people that have it, four or five million people.

But it's this particular group is not getting the equity in the treatment.

This particular group has a higher percentage.

This particular group, as if we're not humans, we're all different tribes.

And that is, it's part of what I'm talking about: is this diversion of capital and resources away from merucratic, disinterested, empirical scientific advance to this tribal commissariat, auditory, you know, audit, audit, audit,

institutionalized legal thing.

It's not productive and it's a waste of capital.

And you can really see it.

The other issue is,

you know, it's always structural racism or systemic racism.

It's never racism.

So what they're saying is, I can't find any evidence whatsoever that it helps or hurts people because it's not evident.

But I'm so sophisticated, I can tell you it's systemic.

I can say it's structural.

I can say it's implicit because there's no evidence for it.

But there is no

responsibility on your side to say that I have to produce evidence because it's everywhere.

It's like saying,

you know, we all agree there.

Prove it.

I don't have to prove it.

It's everywhere.

And that's what they do with systemic and structural and implicit and implied, uh insidious racism they always use an adjective in front of it there's also a

asymmetry about this whole racist thing when you start and cultural appropriation and this and that and so

you know you hear that um

this that and you and i have talked about that and you were going to bring it up i think about the

plays that deal with channel yeah go ahead

yeah the lion the lion king Here's the headline of today's New York Post.

It's called Cowardly Lion.

Broadway boots white sign language interpreters from hit show.

Why?

And this one

signer who was a white guy.

And he's like, no,

we can only have blacks because

the Lion King is a black musical.

Is that not racist?

Yeah, it is racist.

It's absolutely racist.

And

I guess they're saying you're taking an African theme and culturally appropriating it and using white people, but it's never symmetric.

Well, what was Hamilton's?

What was that?

I mean, that was basically, you can't have it.

It was applauded.

That's what it was.

I know.

You can't have it both ways.

You can't say,

like Nicole Hannah Jones, that the founding fathers were white, heterosexual, Christian racists,

but...

We're going to make black characters play these white Christians and then say they're good because we changed their color or you can't say that each each particular group has particular genres that you have to

you have to follow therefore we can't have Japanese playing but the violin or we can't have black uh sopranos indulging in a European genre

opera singing or

on one hand it is Joy Reed would tell you that it's culturally appropriating indigenous fashion for a blonde girl to have dreadlocks, but it's not for Jory Reed to dye her hair blonde as if she's a Viking princess.

So it's all asymmetrical, and it's based on this asymmetry of the application of logic.

And it's based ultimately on this particular group claims that in the distant past, it is distant.

There's not overt racism as they claim today.

There were these transgressions.

And the more wealthy and affluent we are, and the less that we experience racism, the more we want to find racism so it can accelerate and prepare our careers.

And that's what is happening.

And there's very few people that say, no, no, I'm not going to do that.

But it's going to take a toll because if the nation,

if it's Mark Milley looking for white rage,

or it's Harvard Medical School talking about how many surgeons are of color, or if you're looking at repertory admissions at a you know, MIT,

or you're picking everything from the sign prompts on a Broadway play to how many actors, then ultimately, you're not using meritocratic criteria.

And what I mean by that is

you're getting back to what we were doing in the past, where we excluded people of color, not always on the basis of merit, but by discriminatory racist practice.

And we suffered

from that.

And

now we're going right back to it, and we're not tapping all of the resources that we have.

And it's all based on a sense of envy and inferiority, a sense of it.

I'm not saying actual, but you start to see that when people come here, it's not based on race, Jack.

They live in an area that has got one of the largest Punjabi populations in the United States.

And they are an elite.

I mean, in terms of farming, in terms of mansions, houses, terms of cars they drive, types of businesses,

the medical profession, the legal profession, they dominate

in sense of the disproportionate to their actual numbers.

If you look at their income, it's way over the standard so-called white income per capita.

And the point is, as one of them pointed to me, pointed out about three years ago, look at me, Victor, I'm jet black.

Why have I been able to succeed?

According to these people, I should have been failed.

And he said, I know a lot of African Americans that are lighter than I am, but they say skin color.

What's going on in this country?

And I said, you figure it out.

I can't.

And the point I'm making is, again, that

this is not a sustainable proposition in a multiracial society, that you have one overarching principle that governs so-called racism and determines who's the oppressor, who's suppressed, who's the victimizer, who's the victim, and you can't articulate it.

If you start to say skin color, then you say, huh,

dark black, Punjabi, light-skinned black.

Punjabi is not a victim, light-skinned black is.

Then if you say it's because of historical circumstances, you say putting Japanese Americans in a camp or treating Chinese as expendable labor on the Great Railroad, the Transcontinental Railroad, is not exploitation that was endemic, that stopped the Asian community from reaching parity, but

this was to the Latino community.

And so it's very complicated.

And

it's not logical.

And so, and it doesn't work historically.

As I said before, you either have to have a level of coercion in a multiracial society to enforce one culture, like the Soviets or the Ottomans did,

or, you know, Brazil's not necessarily, they don't play dominoes in Brazil.

And the same thing with India.

These are multiracial societies that are pluralistic, but they have a lot of violence in them based on tribal rivalries.

Or

you either have to do that or you have to have an integrated, assimilated, intermarried society where your superficial appearance is incidental.

And I guess just to finish this rant, what I just like about this whole racial industry is

everybody in this generation wants to claim this victimhood.

We know that, but there's no gratitude.

Nobody ever says, if I'm open, my God, I have more money and more power than almost anybody in the United States.

This is amazing.

And I'm in history.

Or if you're LeBron,

I can't spend the money.

I have white security guards.

I have anything I want.

My God.

Or nobody just says, if you're a black leader, yes,

put Derek Chauvin in prison, but he's one person.

And yes, he represents authority, so it's doubly bad that he put his knee on George Floyd, but we're killing 9,000 black kids a year in Chicago.

And those lives are just as important as George Floyd.

And we, as a community, since we

talk about ourselves as a community, we have a responsibility.

And what I don't like about this whole racial thing is these racialists, they pick and choose when there is a collective voice and when there is not a collective voice.

So if you're Jory Reed or Tiffany Cross, you say

in the abstract, white people, white supremacy, white privilege, and then you talk about black people as if everybody is in two

different camps.

But then, as you, that requires stereotyping people.

And so then if somebody says, well, Jory Reed or Tiffany Cross, you have some responsibility.

to talk about what's going on in your community in Chicago because it's dysfunctional and it's dangerous and it's nihilistic and suicidal.

Now, what are you going to say?

And the first thing they will say is, that is racist because you're making me responsible as if all black people have to be responsible.

And that's exactly what they do,

stereotype white people.

So then you say to them, and I've had this conversation hundreds of times, and I said, okay, then let's not make people collective.

Do you think a Stanford student who grew up in Atherton, who happens to be white, has anything in common culturally, politically, socially with somebody driving a forklift in southern Illinois?

No.

And yet you lump them in as white.

Right.

Right.

And so if you, once anybody, anybody lumps somebody in as white or black or brown, then they better be careful because that's going to boomerang.

They have set the parameters that that's what we're going to do.

And therefore, my tribe, I'm responsible for every single person in my tribe.

Personally, I have no affinities other than basic humanity and Americanism and my fellow citizens.

But other than that,

I don't have any special empathies for the bicosta left-wing elite because they're white.

Right.

I care less about their skin color.

But you see, that...

that's where we are now that we pick and choose.

Somehow you, yeah, you and George Soros are on the same team.

Yeah.

Joy Reed has her dyed blonde.

She has her dyed blonde hair.

And as I say, I'm going to say to her, listen, what would I say if I said, listen, I came from a Scandinavian family, and I really resent the fact that you're dying your hair to emulate a Scandinavian when that's culturally appropriating my ancestors.

Because if I took my bald head and put, you know, dreadlocks in it, that's what she would say to me.

And it doesn't work this way where you say, we're going to have the Lion King and all black actors.

And then somebody's going to say, okay,

the Viking set on HBO is going to have only white people.

And you can't do that.

And you're going to say, well, there's historical circumstances that say it has to be.

Well, historical circumstances have gone

to the 21st century.

And if it's not going to be over now, it's never going to be over.

And we've had a black president.

We've had higher black turnout in Georgia than white.

More blacks voted,

excuse me, more whites voted for Barack Obama than they did John Kerry

four years prior to the Obama.

So there's data there, and

it never ends.

And

I don't know where

it's going to end, but it's not going to end well.

I can tell you that.

It's not going to end well.

This constant binary, oppressed, oppressor, oppressed, oppressor.

And now we hear...

What, there was a noose found on the construction site of Barack Obama's library in Chicago.

Is that right?

I heard something something about that.

Yeah, but was it just, but I don't know.

Is it like the, remember the noose on the

race car?

The door of the race.

Yeah.

And we know how that ended.

And we know Jesse Smollett's noose that he said was, well, he even had it around his neck as he, in one hand, had a sandwich and another hand had a cell phone.

And he fought off bleach in mid-air.

And he beat the, you know, he scared the living daylights out of these MAGA brutes, these white, horrible people that hunt the streets of Chicago looking for empire stars.

So that's what we're supposed to believe.

And it's, we've had incidents where I work about a noose that did not pan out as it was alleged.

And so when you start to see these incidents, it's prima fascia

proof of two things, or at least evidence of two things, that there is an intense desire to play a victim, and there's not enough victimizers to go around.

So they have to be fabricated.

Yeah.

And that's what's

disturbing.

Well, this gold in them are hills of being a victim, as,

you know, what's

who's the guy?

I can never remember his name who wrote all the critical race theories books,

Xavier Kendi, you know,

Professor Kendi.

You know, he gets $20,000 for an hour Zoom.

Yeah.

But in the last analysis, nobody of any race, if somebody tells me in the year 2020 that

Stanford Medical School and I have an eye problem, if they are admitting into their ophthalmology class, or maybe if I have a leg problem into their

surgery

cohort, and they're doing it on the basis of whether you're white or not, I don't want that surgeon because I feel that it's not merucratic.

I know that there are people that are Punjabi, Asian, Black, Latino that are brilliant and they're not getting a chance.

And that may end up hurting me.

I want the person to, I want the playing field level, of course.

But when you start doing that, inevitably you're going to tamper.

with meritocracy.

And the weird thing is that the critics of America depend on meritocracy because

you get in an airplane, I've just been flying this week, and you want the best pilot, you want the best air traffic controller, you want the best baggage handler, you want the best mechanic.

You don't care about the race of the person.

And when you start tampering with certain things that are not based on meritocracy, then you're going to be into a comic-like situation of the old Soviet Union or something like the Arab world where

being a first cousin gets you hired.

And this country was based on certain unspoken meritocratic concepts that we've all branded racist.

But in the last 50 years, we've made enormous progress and we had reached sort of

an idea that we were going to pick the people with the best credentials.

And that meant that we all benefited because we had these brilliant people in science and agriculture, manufacturing,

health.

And I'm not sure that's true now.

I think that most of the universities are not admitting people on the basis of merit.

They're not grading people on the basis of merit.

They're not teaching classes that encourage merit.

They're not teaching classes that are essential to

perpetuating excellence.

They're sort of auditing people and surveilling people and censoring people, but it's a waste of time and capital and money.

This, I guess, gets to the core of what Mark Carroll was writing about.

I mean, it's ideology is dictating

a sentence.

Well, medicine is an art, but let's call it a science.

It's certainly not anthropology as well.

It is, yeah.

I try to go online and look at these, you know, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine,

anything, journal of infectious diseases.

You'd be surprised how many articles do not have.

the

Western empirical tradition embedded in it.

It's all about

this is the resource.

We don't know if we can get more resources.

This is the therapy.

We're not interested in proving the therapy.

We just want to make sure that this particular group and that particular group gets

historical repertory attention and action.

And that's not going to work.

It's just not going to work.

Because that researcher, and that's an easier thing to do, by the way, than to find a cure for, or to have a vaccine for COVID.

And so that's what it draws people.

And in my own field, when I look at classical journals today

and I look at what they were doing 50 years ago, it's just,

I mean,

it's just sad because we had scholars who could literally walk into the Athenian agora and read inscriptions at sight.

And then look at the letter forms and within five minutes date the inscription.

They can tell you exactly which,

you know, which stonemason was charged in the sense of they could identify similar scripts on stone.

They could tell you exactly what the role of that is.

And that knowledge is lost.

And so I could see it before I retired when we would hire people.

My general idea was if I could interview somebody who got a PhD before 2005 or 2003,

whatever, I picked arbitrary dates.

I could be assured they knew Latin and Greek very well.

They could even write in Latin and Greek.

They had a good knowledge of Latin literature, Greek literature, Greek history, Roman history.

And they knew some of the peripheral or very important, I should say, tangential numismatics, archaeology,

epigraphy, art history, archaeologists.

As if they were from, as if they had lived at the time.

Yes.

And then now, yeah, some of these people were absolutely brilliant classicists.

And now,

that's one of the reasons I've retired because I started to interview people.

These were from blue chip places.

And, you know,

in those days, there were no jobs.

And Cal State Fresno was a CSU.

And we had a big, you know, six people in a classics department.

Classic, that was pretty unusual.

So we had a lot of applicants.

And some of them were from blue chip.

And you would ask them to read, you know.

Can you just read this for me?

It's just right out of the Civil Wars of Caesar.

Can you read this?

It's Lysias against Aristophanes, Eratosthenes.

Can you just read this?

Just this basic book one of the odes of Horace, Poem 5.

Just read it.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

I shouldn't have to do that.

Can you tell me what your dissertation is?

Yes.

The construction of manhood in the cult of

at a cult in Ephesus.

And then you say, How far is Sparta from Athens?

Nothing.

You know?

How many plays did Euripides write?

Nothing.

How would you date the dialogues of Plato chronologically?

Nothing.

How would you,

you know, would you want to just tell me the main elements of Salamis, Marathon, Chaeronea?

Nothing.

So all of the things that the students wanted to know, the building blocks of society.

Just give me

a quick rundown of the difference between the Doric order and the Ionic order from foundation to architrave.

Just do that.

Tell me the difference.

Can you give me a good example of what the theme of Metopes

are on the temple of Olympian Zeus versus the Parthenon, Silch?

And how is a trireme?

What is a trireme?

What are the names of the three bench of rowers?

How fast do they go?

Do they row with a sail?

Nothing.

Nothing.

And it was all specialized, politicized, weaponized research.

Well, the word scholar is

dying

or misapplied.

It is because I had a radical transformation when I was about 45 because I was taught by classical scholars at the UC system and at Stanford.

And I resented that at the time as a rebel because,

Victor, This is what you're going to take.

You didn't choose.

You go into the chairman.

This is your, you're going to take Greek composition.

you're going to take Latin composition this quarter, and we're going to teach you how to write Ciceronian Victor, not

Livy's prose, not Tass.

You're going to write like Cicero, and you're going to write classical Greek prose.

You know, we're not going to write sloppy stuff.

And you're going to translate this from Dante into Latin and Greek.

And then you're going to take a manuscript tradition of Aeschylus.

And then you're going to do a rapid reading of all seven plays of Sophocles in 11 weeks.

And then you're going to take comparative Latin and Greek grammar.

And I thought, oh, my God, this is unimaginative.

It's boring.

I'm 21 years old.

I want to read about hoplites.

No, you're going to do this.

And you're going to learn about to date manuscripts from unctual scripts to minuscule, et cetera, et cetera.

And it was, and now I look back and I think, wow, those guys were giants.

They had all of this expertise.

They gave their time.

They trained a whole cadre of classical scholars in a discipline.

And it really advanced the field.

So we were really, and then all of a sudden it was,

it was,

you know, it was weaponized.

It was politicized.

It was this particular group in the present, you have to find, you know, an extraneous, all of a sudden, instead of understanding the metrics, the grammar of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the plot, the themes, the characterization, the historical landscape, what made it a great piece of literature.

It was,

oh, we haven't paid attention to the feminist struggles of Penelope.

And their worst feminist struggles are, let's not demonize Cyclops.

Really?

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, you know,

we're almost out of time.

And I think you had,

we had, i had inferred that maybe we'd get some time to talk about the piece you had uh written for

um

of your website victorhanson.com but i know it's part one so maybe next maybe we can go

i'll just say one thing about it i sure i i was in a weird mood i was can i just say that it's called a drive into oblivion so that's uh it was it's wouldn't talk about it was just driving down a road nearby right after we finished a podcast and just thinking of all the people when i was a full-time farmer that are dead and some by suicide some by accident and had you know and it was in some way associated with the collapse of small farming yeah the onset of globalism i was thinking and i got i said how in the hell did you get in that mood and then i had remembered that two weeks earlier i saw you ever see the movie uh 12 o'clock high 12 o'clock high sure yeah

remember the scene where dean jagger sees that little jar and he goes out and he rides out to that in the window of the shop.

Yeah.

And he goes out to the tarmac.

It's all full of wheat weeds.

And all of a sudden he gets into that mood where they're back into the

D17.

That was what I had that same effect.

I was just driving down this road to go.

And I just thought, oh, wait a minute.

I know that house.

Oh, my God.

And I was back in there.

And then I just pulled over and then.

I drove along.

I said, oh, my God, I can feel this coming over me.

I know that house too.

I remember this guy.

I know how he he got died.

Oh my God, I sat with this guy for three hours at a standpipe when he was telling me he was going to kill himself because he couldn't make it on $500 raisins and he couldn't afford his tractor payment.

I was just remembering all that.

It just came over me.

So that we can talk about that next week.

Yeah, well,

again, I want to.

repeat to our to our listeners, I mean, it is exceptional writing and very personal and very exceptional.

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you've shared.

And to our listeners, thanks very, very much again for joining us.

I know many of you don't miss an episode.

If you're new,

new listener, welcome.

You can find all the past episodes at Victor's website.

Go click on the podcast.

Well, the thing you click on for podcasts, and it'll take you back in time.

And

even many of the things

that are uh, not evergreen are still well worth listening to.

And I think I might have mentioned this on a previous podcast.

I know I told you, Victor, even the stuff you and I did originally when we first started doing podcasts at National Review, yes, those podcasts are still very well listened to.

I didn't know that, yeah, yeah, yeah, because people can't get enough of VDH.

Hey, let me let me uh

read something that has been left, uh, a comment that's been left on

um Apple podcasts.

And folks at Apple can leave a rating, can rate the show one to five or zero to five stars, actually.

Nearly everybody gives it five stars.

So thank you for those who do that.

And folks also leave comments.

We read them, read the comments here, read the comments on Victor's website.

And this comment is from Fagelmom,

and it's titled National Treasure Indeed.

I always enjoyed clips and interviews of VDH, but in the last three years, I became something of a devoted fan and am now a full-fledged addict.

The breadth, depth, and penetration of his intellect is singular.

I'm thankful that his long COVID symptoms are abating.

Every time he apologized for his brain fog, I wanted to shout to paraphrase Tevia in Fiddler on the Roof, if this is brain fog, then may God smite me with it and may I never recover.

Exclamation point.

So that's Fagelman.

That's very, I think it's really cool.

And I agree with her totally.

You know, Victor, Victor, on his very worst day, is better than nearly any of us on our very best day.

So thanks for that.

Thanks to everyone who's who listens.

Victor, thanks for all your

sharing all your thoughts and wisdom with us today.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening once more.

Much appreciated.

appreciated.