Actors and Musicians

Cooler temperatures are rolling in and as always, Quince is where I turn for false staples that actually last.

From cashmere to denim to boots.

The quality holds up and the price still blows me away.

Quince has the kind of false staples you'll wear non-stop, like super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60.

Their denim is durable and fits right and their real leather jackets bring that clean classic edge without the elevated price tag.

What makes Quints different?

They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen.

So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands.

When the weather cools down, my Quint sweaters are a go-to.

My cashmere short sleeve that works under any jacket, formal or casual, or my thick, long-sleeve, go-everywhere, do-everything sweater that pairs with any pant or jogger.

Quince products are my favorites, which is why I went to Quince to buy my recent very beautiful purse that leaves the house every time I do.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's quince.com slash victor for free shipping and 365 day returns.

Quince.com slash victor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Hello and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our weekend edition, and we're going to look at some movies and music.

I know that there's been a lot of requests for more of your thoughts on movies and music from what you've already done with Jack.

So we're going to go into it for the weekend edition and hope everybody can enjoy their weekend with this.

But first, let's go ahead and listen to a few messages.

We're back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is available at his website, victorhanson.com.

That's H-A-N-S-O-N.

And you can join with a subscription or join for a free subscription if you just want to get on the mailing list, or you can get VDH Ultra material by a subscription of $5 a month or $50 a year.

So please come join us

at the website.

Victor, how are you doing today?

I am doing better.

I'm just about strangled long COVID, five months and counting, but I'm smelling the flowers.

I'm tasting,

on my drive back from Stanford today, I stopped at Casa de Fruta and I tasted every egg, every oatmeal morsel,

and

my hearing is becoming better,

and my neuropathy is better.

And I'm on the verge of suffering COVID euphoria.

But I can't say that because if I do,

I'll relapse like I have three or four times.

But I want to just say, reiterate to all anybody out there listening that has long COVID, it's a terrible autoimmune, hyperimmune response, but it is self-limiting.

And I say that not based on my own experience, because I'm not quite over it, but

I've been reading, I read every night, an hour, sammy on yeah double-blind medical studies and while they're kind of frightening about some of the um

symptoms the symptoms seem a reversible and b self-limiting so you have to be optimistic because it will end and i was at a point in july and august i thought it never would but it does end yeah and you can fight it yeah

all right So let's go ahead and

take a look in a little more depth at some actors that you think are the great actors

of the film industry that would be good yeah that's a good thing to do yeah um

actors american maybe huh yeah well definitely maybe you could just touch on people that are not my favorite but i think were america's best actors

or maybe world actors and you know if you think about it dispassionately who has the greatest range that's acting right now?

I think it's Gary Oldman.

If you think about the Churchill Churchill portrayal

or that deranged, what was he?

The

chief of the narcotic squad in the is it the professional, that movie that he was?

Oh, yes, the professional.

Yeah, with Jean Renault.

Yeah, that was, I mean, it was scary, and he was brilliant as Dracula.

He was in the book of Eli as some deranged nut.

Yeah.

And then he was in

True Romance, remember, as that horrific drug dealer that

he was supposed to be,

I don't know if he was supposed to be kind of an albino African-American or what he was trying to do in that role, but whatever it is, it's uncanny how he assumes personas.

One of my favorites is Frederick Marsh.

I think everybody who's ever seen inherit the win when he plays Willie Jennings Bryant or he's in the best years of our life.

I like that role so much because because he's mr upstanding banker father of you know and then dutiful husband and and decorated veteran and yet he's kind of wild the way he drinks and carries on and yet he's really good i have another favorite i was thinking maybe jurgen talk now

and do spoot

perfect yeah he was

What did he say that?

Remember when they get up and he just looks and they finally get out and they're on the Mediterranean and he says, you have to have good men.

You have to have good men.

Great quote.

And he was in the first Dune

and he's a brilliant actor.

I think he's in his 80s now.

But getting to the ones that I think that I like, and I think a lot of our listeners in my age group like, it's not because

intrinsically they're all Gary Oldman with that talent, but that they have this dark side.

In other words, we know them as heroic actors, and yet we get accustomed to their predictable roles.

And then every once in a while, they get into these roles and they reveal a dark side that really contrasts with their image, both professionally and privately, as a person.

And it's kind of eerie.

And one of the best was John Wayne.

I mean, he started out in that 1939 classic, John Ford's

stagecoach.

Remember that?

Yeah.

He played the Ringo.

Was it

yeah, he played Ringo kids?

Yeah, Dallas was his girlfriend, Claire Trevor.

She was a wonderful actress, but he was a criminal, right?

And he's going to leave and he's going to burst out and take off.

And then he sees the Apaches are coming and he comes back.

But he's kind of on the wild side.

Yeah.

And he's a good-hearted person, but he's not the hero of the later

John Wayne.

And then, you know, that I'm not a big fan of Howard Hawks.

He did some good, he was the one that did those, And I know you like them, Sammy.

Those

film noir, you always talk about film noir.

Humphrey Hobart.

Remember that one?

Yeah.

The Big Sleep.

Oh, yeah.

And Have and Have Not.

He was, I think he directed those.

But,

gosh, he did Red River in 19,

that 1948 Western, where is it?

Yeah.

With Montgomery Cliff, was it?

Montgomery Cliff.

And John Wayne is a,

with Tom Dunson, that character?

He's almost pathological.

Remember, he wants to hang those people who

deserted and took some of the stuff.

And he's going to, he has a shootout.

He wants to shoot that person.

He tells Montgomery Cliff your problem is.

You didn't kill him.

He's got this really dark, dark side to him.

And he plays it brilliantly.

And of course, at the end, he's going to sort of

revert back to the good John Wayne, but it's almost as if he's a Dr.

Angel person.

It's a brilliant portrayal.

And

the final one that he did, like that was a searcher when he played Ethan Edwards.

He wants to kill.

We've talked about that before, Natalie Wood.

And he has that same, you know, dark streak.

And, you know, the thing about John Wayne is

even when he was in his 30s, like that stage coach, 1938, 39, he looked old.

I mean, he looked mature.

He never looked too young or he never looked like he was small on the screen.

That's something that we look at characterization, we look at dialogue, we look at method acting, but there is something that's

intangible.

You can't really describe it.

They just fill up the screen.

And he's been in Red River, he just dominates.

He's big.

And he's only in his 40s, you know, and he looks like he's 60.

Wasn't he six foot five or something?

So he literally dominated.

Yeah, he was,

and he did the same thing in The Searchers.

And

what about, what did you think of his portrayal and true grit and how do you compare that was kind of a caricature of his earlier roles it was good it was that's what he won an academy award he was good uh in that ron howard movie the shootist yeah that was his last when he had cancer he sort of playing his own flight

but uh he he

he was um he was brilliant in red river and i think i think it was

you know it was remarked as everybody was shocked that um he could do that.

And nobody really thought that, you know, he had been tight cast as this sort of

good-looking, nice kind of guy.

And all of these Westerns.

And then Howard Hawkes kind of took him

and he made,

he did something that was even, in some ways, that role is more impressive than the searchers.

What about the man who shot the Rudy Valence?

I thought that was a really good part for him.

He was kind of a frustrated.

It's a really good point.

He played that same

sort of wild

person that you can't build the West upon.

That was what I liked about

the West.

You can't build the West on Ethan Edwards

or Tom Donovan in Manisha Liberty Valence, but you need those people to create the foundations to make the West.

We've talked about that before, because they don't play by the rule.

He's willing to shoot Lee Marvin in the back or the side, even though it's against his own code.

So I think there was another actor that it's like that, and he's my favorite.

One of my favorites is Bill Holden.

And I don't know why it was.

He always played with role.

You know, he was in so many

Sunset Strip, wasn't he?

And

Sabrina, wasn't he?

Sabrina.

Yeah.

But I liked him, that the other side of him.

And he was that way in Billy Wilder's Stalic 17.

You remember that?

Yeah.

He's the wise crackie and everybody thinks he's the snitch and they beat him up and he doesn't give an inch and he's kind of selfish and he's hoard stuff and he plays on that and yet he's really heroic and he want he wants to find out who it is and so they don't all get killed.

And he's, he, that was a brilliant portrayal.

He was,

you know, all just as a side, all these guys, they die so young.

I mean, they die in their 60s.

Eil Brenner, Bill Holden, Gary Cooper, they were all, I guess, to keep thin in those days before we knew much about nutrition and

fitness, they smoked.

They smoked three or four packs a day and then they drank.

And they either got esophagic cancer or lung cancer.

It's tragic because they were great actors in their 50s and 60s.

But,

gosh, and that other, David Lean was such a good director in that late 50s bridge on the river Kwai.

He was, remember, he escapes in the Japanese prison camp, he's home free.

And then

they ask him to go back.

And he makes fun of the British.

They were willing to die anywhere, anytime for the Empire.

And this is silly and it's stupid.

And you don't really need him.

And he plays that Stella X17 rolling yet.

He's deep down inside, very heroic.

So he gets to the key point in the movie.

And all he has to do is just say, blow up.

the bridge.

And the guy doesn't do it.

And he knows that this young kid is incapable.

He's known that the whole time.

And then he knows that he has a choice.

And if he goes across the river, he's going to die.

And maybe he has a bitch.

And he does.

And then Alec Guinness inadvertently falls, but and he gets killed.

Speaking of great actors in that movie, Alec Guinness played a really brilliant part.

I thought he did in that movie.

Yeah.

David Lane was just, when you think of his movies, you know, Lawrence of Arabia,

Alec Guinness was in that.

He played King Saad, didn't he?

Yeah.

But Alec Guinness, like, he, he plays this part where he's so, I guess, British, if I can say that.

He just wants to make the best bridge possible, even though it's for the Japanese.

Yeah, he has no strategic sense.

It's just all tactical.

And that's kind of an American unfair caricature of British, you know.

Yeah, that's true.

We'll go with it.

But also, stay with that movie because there's that Japanese actor in there,

Seisu.

Oh, I thought it was Hayakawa.

Maybe it was the one that

played the

sergeant or the captain, the guy that led the, that

ran the prison camp.

He was, that was a brilliant part, too.

He was, I don't know.

I mean, I know our

female lady listeners were mad at me because

I'm not talking about great actresses.

But there are great ones.

There are great ones.

Yeah.

I'm just speaking of Red River.

Remember that hyperactive

is her name Jean Drew?

The one at the end that John Wayne makes a pass at her and she's in love with Martin.

She kind of overacts in the whole thing.

She was really good.

But then that, and my favorite Bill Holden role was that.

classic Sam Peckenthal when he was kind of washed up in his 50s.

Bill Holden had been an alcoholic.

He died.

I think he hit his head.

You know, he was,

he hit his head in his apartment, bled to death.

They didn't find him, I think, for three or four days.

It was really tragic.

And in that movie, he's Pike Bishop, the head of the well bunch.

He's over the hill.

West is over with.

The locomotives are there.

There's gasoline-powered cars.

The lifestyle that they're used to, it doesn't exist anymore, and they won't quit.

And so you know how they're going to end.

And he's kind of playing the role that he was at that point in his life.

That he'd done these great things and he's always very bitter, but he's tough.

And you think, just when you think he's a nihilist, he's not.

He's idealistic.

He's willing to get killed.

And he comes up with the idea that he's had it with

he's had it with the corrupt federales.

And he's going to

go back and wreak havoc on them for killing their friend, or at least imprison him.

And then, when they kill him, he goes ballistic.

And that was that was Sam Peckinpaugh's best movie, and he did wonderfully in that role.

I liked him in two.

I don't know if it was as well directed, but it was a Michner story, The Bridge at Tokyo Re, a Korean War movie.

I think it was 54.

It was in that area of the timeframe of the searchers, I think 1954.

He was in his mid-30s.

That's when he really hit stride.

He's that American that's been in World War II, as a pilot.

He's a lawyer back, I think, in Colorado in the war.

They call him up.

And I think Grace Kelly is his wife, isn't she?

And what the hell is he doing there?

You know what I mean?

And he flies this terrible mission and they take out the bridges.

They take them out.

And he wasn't supposed to, nobody was supposed to make it.

And they make it.

And then this commander who did the right thing said, well, we have fuel and we have bombs.

So let's do another secondary target.

And they go there and Bill Holden gets shot down.

And then it's like each moment he's going to make it and get back.

He doesn't belong there.

And then he doesn't, he has enough fuel to get over the hill and then crash.

And then they'll pick him up and he doesn't quite make it.

And then he crashes, but don't worry, Mickey Rooney's coming and they helicopter to rescue him.

And then they get shot down and killed.

But don't worry, he's got a handgun.

And then they're going to strafe.

and keep the North Korean communist.

And then that.

And then he ends up killed in a ditch.

That was that sad.

Yeah.

And, you know, we talked about Frederick Marsh, but he was that captain.

I think he's an admiral, rear admiral or something.

George Tarrant was a, it was a, that was based on a real figure.

And he made that famous statement when he gets angry at the commander comes back and he says, why did you go to the second?

Because he really liked Bill Holden.

That was his favorite guy.

You know, basically saying, why did you get him killed when he did the mission?

And the guy tries to tell him, look, I don't play favorites.

We have missions and we have secondary missions.

We win the war by doing the job and then we keep doing it.

And he died.

And I understand that, but it was a good mission.

And then Frederick Marsh kind of looks out.

You remember, and he says, Where do we get such men?

And he talks about.

And I think Reagan,

who was, I think he was Bill Holden's best friend.

He really was.

He gave a really good little eulogy or a statement when Bill Holden died.

It's hard to, Bill Holden was a conservative.

and uh, Reagan took that line, or maybe Peggy Noonan did when they were talking about the boys at Point Le Cauc and all that and said, Where do we get such men?

And they made fun of him.

He said, Ah, he's just living, he's just regurgitating a Hollywood line, but it was a great Hollywood line, so why not?

Yeah, it needed a second use.

But you know what?

I just saw the other night, that movie, The Unforgiven, and

you were

the Burlancaster.

Yeah, the Burlancaster, you know, who's

yeah, but also, you know, speaking of...

Everybody was in that.

I know.

Speaking of great women actor, that I think her name is Lillian Giesh.

Is that her name?

Lillian Gish.

Yeah, she was born.

She gets shot and killed in that movie.

She's one of the movies.

Yeah, she does.

She did a great job as the mother hiding the fact that the young girl was Native American.

The only problem with that movie is that

Aubrey Hepburn doesn't quite look Native American.

Yeah, well, that's problematic.

Didn't what's his name direct that?

I got to check that.

It was John.

What's his name?

I don't know.

The famous director, but it was a great movie.

And it was underrated.

Burt Lancaster kind of went out on his own a lot.

Yeah.

You know, and I think he did that as his own movie company.

John Houston, maybe?

I think that's.

Oh, yeah.

It was a John Houston film.

Yeah, he was a brilliant guy, kind of crazy.

Yeah.

Burt Lancaster always looks really fit in all of his movies.

That's what I always notice about him.

Well, he was a gymnast, acrobat, everything.

It's really, really incredible.

Yeah,

he was,

he's kind of a,

he was really good in Elmer Gantry.

That was a brilliant movie, too.

Yeah.

You know who else is a really good

woman actress, female actress is that Myrna Loy in the best years of her life.

That's one of her roles, but she's always really.

She's funny.

She has such, she's such, she did that perfectly.

That's the ideal.

I mean, she was really running the whole family while he was gone.

Yeah, exactly.

And then she was always

didn't take him too seriously when he was outrageous, but she never, she never ankle bit him.

She was so loyal to him.

She was like saying, she was almost saying to the camera, yes, he's nutty and he's a drunk now tonight, but this guy is a war hero and he's a banker.

He's a good man.

I'm going to stand by him.

That's what I like about her.

She reminded me of my mom.

She was that kind of way with my dad.

and i you know when you said i just remembered you said hirokawa sesu hirokawa that was yeah yeah that's you're right about that so that was the river cry yeah so bill holden was gosh it's such tragic that he died so well yeah and then you know another guy who has that dark side that i really like is denzel washington i i think he's brilliant And he, you remember in Glory when he first, that was his first big role?

He was that kind of angry black soldier that didn't go, thought, thought, you know, they're using us and this and this.

And then he ends up being the most, one of the most heroic.

And

you can see both sides of his attitude.

But I know a movie that people didn't appreciate, even though it made a lot of money.

Everybody, and you know, another guy who's brilliant was Tony Scott.

Yeah.

Remember, you know, we all think of Ridley Scott, but Tony Scott did Man on Fire.

And I think that was the second remake.

It's much better than the original.

Yeah, it was much better.

People didn't like that movie because of the gratuitous violence remember he says well yeah that's true time time

i i have all the time in the world you have what remake you have 45 seconds i think it was he created that scene where you walk and the fire is behind you that's so many scenes now where you walk away and you leave

my favorite yeah my

my favorite part of that movie is when the the he he blows up the um i don't know nightclub and all those people are outside

and they're all dancing and

oh that really barbaric scene where he cuts that guy's fingers off that guy was a great actor that mexican actor but he and then he just says you know

you're gonna

and then he says professional professional professional i'm so sick of professional professional professional professional and that guy that played the crooked cop under the bridge was brilliant too they had some great actors from mexico in that movie they also had the Italian guy, right?

Um,

Guyan Carlo Giannini, or whatever Giannini, yeah.

Yeah, he was brilliant.

He was supposed to be this horny over-the-hill guy.

I don't know how that guy lived so long.

I think he's still alive in his 80s.

He was a chain smoker, and he was a brilliant.

He did seven beauties when he was young, it was a brilliant movie.

But yeah,

New York was in that too.

Comeback Part for that crooked lawyer, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, and uh, Tony's, I think, didn't Tony Scott direct True Romance?

That was a brilliant movie.

That was such.

And, but anyway, and the other one that critics didn't like, especially, and

I'm just thinking it was, I don't know, six or seven years later was The Book of Eli, you know, Book of Eli.

Yeah, I thought that was a great movie.

I did too.

It had

that same

duality in Denzel Washington that you saw in Man on Fire.

You remember

Christopher Walken, they say, what is he going to do?

And he said,

he's an expert in death.

He's going to create his masterpiece.

And that's the same thing in the book of Eli.

He's kind of, you don't know whether he's a divinity or he's been divinely inspired or where he got his superpowers or what the extent of them are or whether he's kind or mean.

And then at the end,

sort of like Man on Fire, you find out he's a saintly character, sort of like John Wayne and the searchers, and at the end, Howard Hawkes, uh, Red River.

But, you know, I was thinking as we were talking about these, there were some really good, um, I don't know what the, I guess you'd call them character actors, but

Ben Johnson pops up in all of those John Ford Western.

And that was his greatest role, was one of the wild bunch, the final four with Warren Oates and Ernest.

That was Ernest Fortnine's greatest role since Marty.

And

was that Edmund O'Brien in the world?

Oh yeah,

he was great in that role as the drunk and the old man.

And he kind of even surpassed the John Ford Manor Felt Liberty Balance when he was the

editor, remember?

Yeah, that's right.

He was.

He was the newspaper guy in that.

Yeah, he was.

John Carradine was a great actor.

He was the noble southern gentleman and stagecoach, remember?

And then his greatest role was, I came here with a carefully prepared speech.

That's the Man of Shout Liberty Balance.

Balance.

And then he crumples it up and throws it down.

They pick it up and there's nothing there.

He was a great, and he was a wonderful actor.

He had a lot of three children that were really good.

And Walter Brennan was another great actor.

You know,

when I was

a student, as a graduate student at Stanford, I met this guy who I went to, I was living the first year in the university graduate resident.

There was this guy who's kind of a film student, right?

And

he and his girlfriend were there, and I was talking to him.

And he said to me, because I was talking about Westerns, because I was

and he said, well, you know, Stanford has a great tradition of Westerns or great actors.

And I said, no, they don't.

You know, what's your favorite actor that was in those,

you know, the alien movies that she was.

Oh, Sigourney Weaver.

Yeah, she, I think he, you know, I guess he was mentioning her.

I said, name one.

And then you know what he did?

He said,

he said, Richard Boone, you know,

Hap Gun Will Travel.

The guy in Ombre said, you got Hardy Hard Bark.

That great.

And he goes into

the stage station, he points that guy out.

I'm not talking to him.

I'm talking to you.

I'm going to take your ticket.

Or you can go outside.

And he was uh gosh he was a brilliant actor and he was a stanford student stanford student and he was a war hero so i was kind of amazed and i said name another one thinking the guy was lying he said jack palance i said no he wasn't jack palance

and he said he was a war hero and he went to stanford they all got really close to graduating and jack palance was was a stanford student yeah you know remember he played wilson

You know, one thing we didn't talk to is in the 50s when these were made, how we demonized the South, but Hollywood, which was mostly left-wing people, they were desperately looking for an underdog, a victim of northern white oppression, right?

In a weird, kinky way, they glorified the lost cause and the southern rebels.

So in all these movies, the evil guy is the Yankee and the the noble, heroic, solitary figure fighting against the odds is the ex-Confederate, Ethan Edwards.

Remember, he's, I don't know what he was, Quantrell Raiders or something like that in the searchers.

I think that,

and that was, you know, he was supposed to, you're not supposed to quite know what he was doing.

But in Shane, remember Shane was a Confederate?

And he said, you're a no-good Yankee liar

to Wilson.

Because he said, remember, he said, then all of them were trash.

Lee, too.

And that's when they shot the other guy.

So, anyway, to finish that story,

I remember I told that guy, okay, you got two.

There's no more, you know, that played in Western.

He said, oh, yes.

Hank Warden.

Remember that guy, old Mose,

that was in the searcher that always plays like he was crazy.

And he's

plays in all of those John Ford.

He's the John Ford stock company actor,

cattle, you know, cattle company or whatever they called him.

He went to Stanford and he was in engineering and he graduated.

And he was a, I think he lived to his 90s.

He was a brilliant actor.

Wasn't Festus from Gunsmoke of Stanford alumni, too?

I don't know.

I thought Festus was.

No, maybe not.

No, remember from Gunsmoke?

I better be careful,

you've been right all along.

I thought Tim Curtis was his name, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

He had a wonderful,

he had a wonderful voice.

Yeah.

I like that name, you know,

Festus.

Quirkius Festus was

a governor of Judea.

I just remembered that.

Victor, let's take a break and come back and talk a little bit more about movies, and then we'll turn to music.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back, Victor.

So I think the only person I haven't heard you talk about that I'm kind of fascinated with is Dana Andrews.

I thought he had some really good parts.

And I understand that he was very shy and that it was, you know, so he got on stage.

It was not very comfortable for him.

That was my

recollection.

At least he lived a little older.

He was a chain smoker.

I think he died in his mid-80s or early 80s.

Yeah.

So he made it.

Gosh, he was so good in

the Oxville Innocent.

Remember, he's hung in that.

It's tragic.

Yeah.

And he tries to plead.

He's so rational and these nutty people, kind of like the woke people.

And

the best years of our lives.

Remember, he was trying to do everything right.

And he was so proud that he had been on.

I put the bombs right on the target.

And he had this uniform and he was married to a trashy wife.

Yeah.

And she was like, you're no good.

And you're boring.

And I'm getting out of here.

She went through all of his carefully saved money.

Yeah.

He was everywhere.

He played in the Battle of the Bulge, Devil's Brigade.

He was a great actor.

They always say that he and Bill Holden were very good people.

You know,

we mentioned Jack Palance.

He was in another movie I just thought of, and that was Monty Walsh.

That was a great movie, the first one.

Tom Selick did the remake, but it was

Lee Marvin.

And

it was the end of the West, and they're all in this failing last-generation cattle ranch.

And

Jane Moreau was in that.

She was really good.

The director was really good, too, Freyer, whatever his name was.

But I liked Monty Walsh.

It was a wonderful movie.

Yeah.

You know who you forgot to talk about from The Wild Bunch?

I know, because there were so many great parts in that movie, but that Emilio Fernandez, who plays Mypache.

Apache.

He's the most important thing.

He was sort of the Gary Cooper of Mexican cinema.

And

he's in another Pekkin Maw movie, too.

He's brilliant, absolutely.

And that one scene, they cut it out of the director's cut where he's at that train and he's with that little boy and he's raving fire and the little boy wants to be like Mapache.

And then there's so many sick lines in that movie when

the guy's girlfriend is with Mapache and is it

Warren Oat said, look at that henoral with his tongue in your girl's ear.

You know, it's just Sam Peckinpaw lived in Corscold.

And as I said in an earlier broadcast, his brother was Denver Peckinpaugh, the Superior Court judge.

And my mom was one too.

She got to know him.

He carried a gun, as I mentioned, with Jack under his robes.

And they had a little catalanch.

And Ride the High Country might have been his, you know, his breakthrough movie, but it might have been his best movie.

And Warren Oates was in that.

It was yeah he you know that sam peck and paul always has these kind of really

i i guess that the only word we have for it is lowlife characters that say some really sick things

there is no tougher area believe me than the sierra valley foothills and whether you go to prater or dunlap or horse gold that's sort of the uh

It was originally people who from the Oklahoma diaspora retired up there because land was cheap, you know,

and you could build up there without much regulations.

And then it became sort of

a white flight area.

But I go up there a lot to Huntington Lake and Shaver.

And

when I go in some of those markets, you know,

my friends at Stanford would not believe that.

I mean, they demonize the Stanford professor at not the Hoover, but the Stanford professors.

They demonize the white class, but they would be terrified of them.

you know who we found to play that part and other people caught on to it too was struther martin he was so he was yeah he was he's a certifiable genius he was in a lot of uh peck and paul movies yeah he was brilliant too so

lq jones gosh pat uh garrett and billy the kid lq jones was in that that scene slim pickens was another one another swede from kingsburg warren oates yeah i was old boy i was eight years old and uh

i went out in 384 my grandfather broke horses he was a swede and there's this big heavy guy that was there and he was on his way to the woodlake rodeo to be the clown which wasn't far from my grandfather's farm and my dad said to my grandfather his father

well dad you know he's a big star now well you know i don't know that but he's a hell of a horseman and he his name was not slim pick it was he was swedish yeah i think he later moved from kingsburg to texas and got dropped the swedish accent got a southern accent but it was slim pickens oh wow and i met him when i was like eight years old

and wow that's incredible yeah it was because it was right

in a year or two he became famous and dr strange love is riding the atomic bone down to russia

yeah

he that was another great role he says you know when he's talking to the crew and james earl jones there.

And we have no,

we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or national origin, as they're all going to their death.

And he hands out condoms and, I don't know, chocolate bars.

And it's just.

Speaking of great actors, George C.

Scott was so brilliant.

He was human.

He played in the hospital.

And then, of course, Patton.

He really created.

He was.

very young for that patent role.

I think he was only 49 or 50.

He was just

supernatural.

All those people,

you know, the British are better actors as a whole than Americans.

You can see that when you compare an American HBO to, say, Game of Thrones or something.

But when you get a good American actor, a brilliant American actor, like, you know, George C.

Scott or Bill Holden.

or Denzel Wash, they're just as good, but they're entirely different.

Yeah.

I, you know, I used to really like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino because they were great actors.

But the more that I watch their movies, the more that they kind of overact, if you know what I mean by that.

Yeah, they overact and the same part, you know, that crazy, nutty.

Yeah,

when you look at the brilliant

portrayal of Michael and the Godfather, the early godfather one and two, and then you compare that role to a brilliant portrayal in Heat.

It's just Al Pacino is just overacting in here.

Ah, what the hell?

He's gone.

He's through the coupe.

And he said,

oh, ow, ow, who, who, who, who?

You an owl or something?

He starts yelling.

But in Michael, it's like deadly, silently underacted.

Yeah.

So it's, it's, it's more effective.

But yeah, George C.

Scott was, you know, you know, he was,

you know, Christopher Walken was a great character actor.

He would never be able to have that scene

in true romance, that kind of racist scene when he's talking to

the father of the main guy.

I want to say Christian Bale, but it's not Christian Bale.

No, it's his dad.

No, I know, but that's the Ridley Scott movie.

Yeah, the true romance.

Yeah, it's Chris.

It's

what's his name?

The guy that was in

Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper.

Oh, yeah.

Wasn't Dennis Hopper?

Yeah, he was playing the dad.

Yeah, he starts talking about eggplant.

And Christopher Watton plays psych,

you know, psycho roles very well because he's probably a psycho.

Be careful about that.

Well, I don't mean that in a bad sense, but he's got the ability to scare people.

Let's turn subject, Victor, to musicians.

I gotta stop because I'll go on forever.

We wanted to talk about

music already, Sami, but you can go.

yeah

i wanted i wanted to talk about musicians who are not of your political bent and that you like anyway

so ours gratis

yes

gratis artists ours great ours grata artiste art for the sake of art art yes and are there

yes there's a lot of them that i have weird tastes as i got letters from our jack conversation because i bet Bruce Springsteen is one of the

left-wing.

I thought that Nebraska album was brilliant.

And even the one after 9-11 was brilliant, but I got tired.

The point I'm making is he took that New Jersey

earthy working class guy.

And if you look at how he acts or lives or his politics, he's an elitist, a multi, a billionaire elitist, right?

He charges, what, $450 a ticket

or more than that, $2,000 now for the elite seats.

But he always lectures everybody.

But

that Nebraska album was really good.

It was brilliant.

It was just wonderful.

Another, speaking of people like Can't Stand

is, what's his name?

Roger Waters, the guy that was in Pink Floyd.

But for a brief period, maybe not a brief period, but for years, Pink Floyd was

the rock band.

You remember in college?

Well, you're younger than I am.

No, but it was still, yeah.

That wish you were here.

Wish you were here.

Can't tell heaven from hell.

I think he had the record, didn't he?

All of our listeners will correct me.

I think he had the record for the largest concert ever in person.

Oh, really?

Wow.

Yeah, it was 400,000 and 500,000 people in Germany, maybe in Berlin.

Yeah.

And

he's an anti-Semite.

He's always attacking Israel, no matter what.

He attacks Israel.

Israel, he tries to get people to boycott Israel.

He won't play in Israel.

He calls them, it just makes me sick.

He's obsessed with Jews.

He's anti-Semitic.

And then he hates the United States.

I was reading the other day about prominent people and

prominent celebrities that have kind of become

like Stephen Seagal, you know what I mean?

He's not prominent, but people we know

in public life that have become fanatics of Putin supporters.

Yeah.

And he's been defending, I think he's even gone on Russian today.

He defends Putin and says, no, he didn't do anything wrong.

And China doesn't do anything wrong by

if it takes back Taiwan and we're the cause of all the problems.

But that does not mean that

Wish You Were Here and the Wall and all those are not good songs.

You know, another weird

group that is absolutely ridiculous

was that four non-blondes that in the 80s, late 80s?

And they have what's up.

What's up?

Their one song.

Did they do any other songs?

Linda Perry, I think

it was one of the first lesbian bands.

Yeah.

And I remember I was teaching at Fresno State, and that movie came on, and they had the first videos, you know, like what was the name of that?

Well, they had videos on TV.

MTV.

It was called MTV.

It was called MTV.

And she had a stovepipe, Lincoln-type hat.

Yeah, I love that hat.

Yeah, he had Wicked Witch of the West kind of stockings with big stripes.

Yeah, cool.

And

what I like about that song was Jackson Brown, we'll get to him, I suppose, another guy that's politics.

But I like songs that completely...

The Moody Blues did that too.

They have one rhythm or musical score, and then almost immediately they just stop and they go into another entirely different,

you know what I mean by that?

Yeah.

And they did that with that.

What's up?

You remember at the very end?

Yep.

They just slow it down and it becomes,

it just becomes a completely different song.

And

I don't think they ever had one other song that made it.

I think you're right about that.

I think that was it.

And then, you know,

I just want to shout revolution and all that stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

That's a

revolution.

And I'm on my hill.

I'm on my way up my hill of hope.

The lyrics are tried, but there's something about the music in her voice that's very engaging.

Yeah.

And

another, you know,

I went to two or three, my kids buy tickets, the Jackson Brown concerts in Hanford or Fresno.

He went to a concert where he insulted everybody in the valley.

Yeah, I was at that concert too.

Didn't he say something like, what do you think they were yelling at?

No, they all he had all these new, you know, he wanted to be creative.

So he didn't want to just play the pretender, right?

Yeah.

That album.

But they were all yelling for the pretender.

Pretender, pretender.

And he's

no doubt

running on empty.

And then he said, this isn't the goddamn rodeo.

What are you people?

This isn't a rodeo in Hampshire.

And

then he kind of stormed out a little bit.

But

he's a very good performer.

And

the pretender was sort of like all of the songs that he's a true revolutionary and everybody's sold out.

But

he's a good example.

I play him all the time.

I listen to all of his music.

I can't stand his politics.

And I think even Johnny Cash

played some of his songs.

And

he's another example.

But you know, in my defense, if you think think about songs that I grew up with, I was born in 1953 and everybody listening, we had no choice because every single music was politicized in the 60s and 70s.

So every single, it is that way today.

The only people, can we think of people who are conservative that sing?

No.

Eric Clapton, maybe?

Just country singers.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Country singers.

Some of them are not, but some of the, Clint Clint Black is definitely.

I think he's moderate.

He's one of my favorite.

That's true.

I've known him, and he's one of the nicest people in the world.

Anybody ever has a chance to listen to Clint Black?

His personality, his values, he's just a saintly character.

I really like him.

I've never,

it goes back to what Jorgen Prockino said.

You have to have good men.

to be around.

You can't do it.

I was thinking that the other day of that quote just came into my head when he said that, because you, you know, we're into this great, we reject in graduate school, they always make fun of Carlisle's great men theory, you know, great man theory.

And he wrote that 1840 essay on heroes, basically saying without, you know, without Napoleon, you wouldn't have this, and without Elizabeth, you wouldn't have, and he was right.

But, you know, Marxist.

bottoms up histories as the histories made by the masses, the undiscovered.

And I kind of bought into that in a sense, not Marxism, but the other Greeks was kind of written as the unspoken farmers and the shadows created the Greek city-state.

And they made Pericles responsible.

And

they were responsible for Pericles, they, excuse me, and Euripides.

But

there's something to it.

There really is.

These individuals, you have good men and you.

take away George Patton and the third army is like Courtney Hodges' first army.

I'm not taking away from the first army.

You take away Billy Sherman and the Army of the West is not going to take Atlanta, and it's not going to go in the Carolinas, and Lincoln's not going to get elected if they don't take Atlanta.

And anybody, you know,

when U.S.

Grant says, get him tomorrow at Shiloh, or he's at

Cold Harbor, the wilderness, said, I'm so tired of hearing what Bobby Lee is going to do to us.

You worry about what we're going to do to him.

Nobody would have done that.

After Antietam, you know, McClellan betreated, Grant, after he took comparable losses in 1864, he attacked.

They couldn't believe it.

Yeah, people do matter.

Without Lincoln, I think we would have had two Americas, two separate countries.

Yeah, that's probably true.

Yeah, so

one person, without Hitler, without Mao, without Stalin, you have 100 million people, maybe alive.

Yeah, absolutely.

But back to the

back to the music.

You forgot one person I thought you were going to mention because I was kind of anticipating you.

But Neil Young, speaking of bad politics, but great.

I have a twin brother, idolized him,

and my other two did as well.

So I grew up with Cowgirl in the Sand and the first album, you know, Cinnamon Girl, and

Heart of Gold.

But then they got, you know, Southern Man, Southern Man,

Ohio, and Four Dead, and Ohio.

Yeah, what was that?

I don't know if it was a conflict, but the exchange between Neil Young with that southern man and no, it was Leonard Skinner wrote the song.

Alabama or something.

Yeah.

Yeah, they mentioned him by name.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Go back or take your, go back.

I don't know, Yankee.

Go back to Canada or something.

Yeah,

I think they made up, though, as I remember.

I used to know the psychodramas of 60s people, but

Neil Young was weird, weird though, because during the Reagan era, he kind of made a momentary flip and he started to support Reagan's idea.

Remember, Reagan ran on not giving back the Panama Canal?

And you had this ridiculous situation where John Wayne, who had been married to three Panamanians, I think, or Central American, was

doing these commercials.

to give back the Panama Canal.

And then you had Neil Young, a Canadian, he mouthed off and said, why give it back?

They stole it for, you know, that kind of stole it fair and square joke.

And then he just went back.

He took a big hit and he went back.

And

he suffered from Trump derangement syndrome.

He had

drug addicts.

I wasn't fond of him, to be candid, because one of my favorite actresses was a minor actress that had a moment of brilliance was Carrie Snoggrass.

Remember her?

Yes.

She wasn't beautiful, but she had a certain charm about her on screen.

He married her, and I think contributed to her drug demise.

And I'm not that you can blame anybody for a person who self-destructs with drug because it is a personal choice, but he wasn't helpful is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah.

And so I like, you know, another person.

Roy Orbitson, he had the same, we mentioned that before.

He had a strange fixation with

singing beautiful songs about being rejected by women that didn't reciprocate his loyalty or affection.

Yeah, that's true.

And

sad though, you know, it's sad that generation of brilliant actors and actresses is completely unknown to youth today.

And there's been such a decline.

I mean,

if you take actors that have stage presence, but they're not great actors themselves, and you compare that generation's version and this generation.

Say, take Gary Cooper.

He could sound wooden, but you know what I mean?

When the dialogue and Sergeant York or something, but man, when you have his presence on the screen on high noon,

or Mr.

Deeds goes to town, or Mr.

Smith goes, oh, not with Jimmy Stewart, excuse me.

It's Mr.

Deeds goes down.

But anyway, what I'm getting at is that you compare him to Brad Pitt, who's not a good actor, but has stage presence.

right yeah but brad pitt is no gary cooper

no no another actor we didn't mention that had moments of brilliance.

I like him too.

And I should have mentioned him.

I just thought of him.

You know, we were talking about one of the ingredients of a great actor is that he's a tragic hero or almost a nihilist or an anti-hero in certain roles, like John Wayne, as we mentioned in Diselle Washington and Bill Holden.

But Clint Eastwood was that way.

And his greatest movies were not when he was the hero.

His greatest movies were good, bad, and the ugly.

He's just cruel to Tucco, you know, Eli Wally.

It's just absolutely gratuitous to kill.

And then the unforgiven, where he's kind of a pathological murderer.

And he makes that amazing transformation.

The only problem I have that movie, he's incompetent.

He can't shoot.

He's tentative.

And then he gets drunk and goes full ballistic murder at the end.

And he says, I'm going to burn down your town.

And he executes Gene Hackman.

And

he just

transforms himself from an incompetent to a skilled marksman and killer.

Don't worry, burn down your city.

And that side of Clint Eastwood, when he reveals it, it's just, he has a way of, he's really.

I liked some of the movies that he directed that Gran Torino was really.

That was one of his best movies.

Yeah.

Yeah, he got criticized for that because of the anti-Asian remarks.

We're in this age, if you play something and you say something, you can't separate fiction from reality, supposedly.

I don't know what it was, but it was,

I don't know, another actor who had an elements.

He played the nice guy all the time, Sidney Poitier, you know, Lilies of the Field.

And, but when he had some of those in the heat of the night, and

he had a weird,

what was it?

It was a John Newson movie with Tony Curtis and their escaped convicts, and they're chained together.

And they're both racist, but he had a wild, tough streak.

Everybody, you know, Sidney Poitier did.

That's why he was a great actor.

Yeah.

But in the heat of the night, didn't he, that guy that played his opposite?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

He was really incredible.

He was, yeah, that guy was a great job.

He was very underrated in Waterloo.

He played, he, you know, he was just brilliant in Waterloo as Napoleon, kind of a corpulent Napoleon.

And he was, yeah, he was, he wasn't actually a flaming liberal.

He was ambiguous politically.

He was, he was,

I don't know.

He was, I don't know what's going to happen to American film because it's got, you know, the streaming and television is not television and all of these,

the media and Hollywood has become so politicized now not that it always wasn't but when you had say the 50s and you had Ely Kazan on one side and John Wayne and Ward Bond on one side and then there was the other guys on the left and there was at least a difference of opinion you know what I mean yeah and now there isn't it's just it's just a chorus of yes men and women Same thing with academia.

There used to, when I was, even when I was at UC Santa Cruz, there were a few, I had a brilliant French professor, John Homan, and a brilliant political science professor named Carl Lamb, and they were conservative.

Yeah.

I think you said you don't know what's going to happen to cinema.

I think big cinema is on its way out.

I mean, even the theaters like Regal Cinema, I just noticed the other day, is filing for bankruptcy.

People are just not going to the big screen anymore.

No, yeah.

i think part of it is that

they're they're they're incapable of making a film experience an epic or anything that's positive or moving everything is a psychomella microdrama and it's always about a transgendered ambiguity or a gay person or it's some very good-looking young person that's an empty airhead and they're a superhero and we're supposed to think i want to watch this computer animation this model not get dirt on her face, or this guy, you know, blow up stuff without getting soot anywhere on him.

And he's super, but he can't speak.

He has no character.

He has no nuance.

And who wants to watch that?

And who wants to watch, you know,

either Joe perfect minority or perfect gay guy or perfect feminist or bicosto elite who uncovers a corporate plot to poison the well or to push cigarettes down people's mouths or something.

And then they expose, and these are people who are playing it, people who are funding it, and people who are making the movie are all corporate people.

And we're supposed to think, wow, thank you for that crusading movie.

But it's all about politicizing the genre.

It's not arts for art's sake.

And nobody wants to watch it.

And I think it streams into a larger phenomenon in our culture where

the so-called chumps and deplorables and irredeemables and clingers have,

I talk about that abnauseum, but they have consciously dropped out and they don't participate they say you know what i'm not going to go to a hollywood movie i'm not going to i am not going to the movies i am not going to watch the nba i'm not going to watch the super bowl and maybe not especially not the halftime show

and i am not i'm going to i'm going to play my electronic games no i think they just think these people hate us they hate us in hollywood i'm not going to read the New York Times.

I'm not going to read the Washington Post.

I'm not going to turn on the network news.

I just had it with these people.

They hate us.

They make fun of us.

They're stupid.

They're unimaginative.

And they get their moment when they have the Senate, the House, and the Biden administration, the so-called best and brightest, and they're the stupidest and the worst.

And everybody said, you know what?

I'm going to stay home and

make my house a fortress or a castle so I can do anything I want right at home.

And I'm going to, if they want to self-segregate from me, I will not patronize them.

They boycott, boycott, boycott, boycott, boycott.

Well, maybe I'm going to boycott.

And that's an anger that hasn't been tapped.

Yeah.

And I think part of it is, to be fair, part of it is that the splintering of all of these genres.

So,

you know, three network channels become 700, right?

And the

network news becomes 50 cable news.

So it's hard to get a collective uniform genre anymore because there's so much choice and

selections.

Which is probably good, right?

It can be, but there was something to say, you know, in the Saturday night, the movies when everybody got around the television or you watched Gunsmoke or.

even Lawrence Welk or something, there was a familial community experience.

And I remember when I was at,

I know nobody would believe this because,

no, but you'd go to school on a Monday morning and you'd talk about the Smothers Brothers hour, or you talk about Bonanza.

Would you watch Bonanza or Smothers Brothers?

And people talked about that common experience.

And, or they would talk about a particular movie that they went to see.

Everybody was talking about the Godfather.

Everybody saw it.

Everybody saw it, the movies.

Everybody, you know, horror movie.

They did this.

And now it's all, I don't know what it is.

It's

something

happened, oh, about 2008.

I think that's something with the Obama administration.

It was hyped up.

It was like Biden's hype.

It was going to be a unifying economical experience.

And it really got Michelle Obama, who was a bitter, angry person, and she'll resent that, that that's what she was and is.

And the more that she's successful, the more money, prestige, power, privilege that she accrues, the more that she thinks it's unfair that somebody has some more than she does.

And then Barack Obama,

he created this term diversity.

I think I keep pounding that term.

Before it was a historical binary between African Americans and the so-called white majority, and it had been worked through with slavery and then a century of Jim Crow and 50 years of affirmative action, but everybody understood what was at stake and what was happening.

And he came came in and he racialized that.

And he said, no,

there are white people and white people are Italians, are dark complexed Arabs or

they're Armenian, but they're white.

And you can be a multi-millionaire Sikh, you can be a Korean dentist, you can be an African-American movie star, but you're all oppressed by them.

And diversity is now the main thing.

So even though you don't qualify for 1990s affirmative action, you can get preference because you're

from India or you're from Argentina or you're a very wealthy fourth generation Japanese American and you're going to be the 30% versus, and then that was almost this, you know, they keep talking about the great replacement conservatives, keep talking about the, oh, the conservatives are worried about the white race, the great, no, no, that's that's what they called,

they came up with

the new demography or demography as destiny.

They were the ones under Obama saying, you know what, we're going to open the borders, going to get rid of this toxic whiteness, Joy Reed.

So, oh my gosh, today is the day when

California is no longer a white majority state.

And so they pounded that.

And that polarized the country.

And the idea that I, Victor Hansen, or you, Sammy Wing, because of the color of your skin, has one iota of common political allegiance with a Nancy Pelosi or Gavin Newsom.

It's absurd.

Absurd.

I would tell you that

my three closest friends at the Hoover Institution were Tom Soule, Shelby Steele, and Kyrbon Skinner.

And I have a lot more allegiance to them.

than I would say, you know, 120 million white people who are bicultural elites.

can we hold that right there, Victor, and take a break and then come back?

And I had actually a question on the topic of

the black crime rate.

So let's come back and

after these messages.

I got to be careful on that.

Okay, we'll be right back.

We're back, and I'd like to invite everybody to join us on your favorite social social media.

We are at Victor V D Hansen on Facebook and V D Hansen on

Twitter.

We also are V D Hansen on Getter and I think we're Victor Hansen on MeWe.

So come join us.

Parlor, we're Victor Davis Hansen.

And I'm sorry, on Facebook, we have the Morning Cup at Victor V D V D H's Morning Cup.

So please join us at whatever your favorite social media is so that you can get announcements for when we have new articles on the website.

Victor, so I was going to ask you as the last thing here on our show,

I know that we've talked about the crime rate among blacks is just skyrocketing and I feel sorry for their communities.

But no, it's something that we can't talk about.

I know every time and you just said it before the advertisement that, you know uh oh i got to be careful and and that may or may not be true but what what damages the fact that people feel like they can't talk about it doing well we don't analyze it so 50 or more of the black community is doing fine if you look at that that percentage

and they're middle and upper middle class.

And aggregate Black wealth in America, if you were to use such a term, is larger than any country in Africa, GDP, accumulated wealth.

So start with that.

But

if you look at the number of people in the Black community that are between 14 and 30 years of age, and you look at that demographic, and then you look at the FBI crime statistics on violent assault, murder, rape,

you get into about 50 to 55%, depending on the violent crime, committed by about 5% of the population, okay?

So they're 10 times overrepresented.

It's not Black men, you know, 50, 60.

It's not Black women, 38.

It's Black males between 14 or 12 and 30.

It's a very small percentage of the U.S.

population, and they commit the majority of violent assaults.

Okay, so that would be something that you think that could be addressed.

And we know why that happens.

We know it's because 75% of Black children are born out of wedlock, that about 70%

of

Black fathers

are not married to the mothers of their children.

So you have a large group of people, Black males, that are not being raised by fathers, and they don't have a dual income, steady, familial situation.

Then you add in the force multiplier in this perfect storm that a large number are in urban areas, the Baltimores, the St.

Louis, the New Orleans, New York, so Washington, LA, Detroit, Chicago, etc.

Okay.

And then

you add into the matrix that the schools are awful.

They're run by political hacks of these big city machines.

They're unionized teaching faculty.

They're incompetent and they're politicized.

So you can't criticize them because when Ram Emanuel tried to shut them down, they said this left-wing guy was a racist.

So you're not going to be able to do that.

And the white community that

tolerated this segregation has fled.

They won't put their kids in those schools, but they won't allow them to have academies and charter schools either.

And they're big pro teaching.

And so, you add all of that up, and then you have this cultural matrix.

So, is a LeBron James, is an Oprah, or any of them saying,

Look, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Abadget, Louis Farrakhan, we have a problem.

Now, I say we, I'm very careful when I say we, because they say they.

You turn on Joy Reed,

or you listen to Don Lamon, or you listen to any of these Black Lee, Tanahisi, they talk about white, white, white, white, white, white, white,

as if 220 million white people in the United States have identical views, as I said earlier, as if Victor Hansen and Gavin Newsome are bros.

No, that's what they think.

And so, if you want to go down that collective stereotypical role, then you can say they, as well, the Black community has a problem that 5% of that, the U.S.

population, is committing 50 to 55% of these crimes.

Okay.

And there,

and we said that it was because of the breakup of the Black family, probably caused by white liberals, as Tom Sowell

has pointed out eloquently in the 1950s, of the whole

idea of the hyper-masculine Black, heroic male who doesn't have to marry the mother of his children, whatever that is, or the entitlement, the toxic role of entitlements of empowering illegitimacy and single family households, whatever.

But you also have this cultural message.

And what you get from rap music and hip-hop, and I've listened to the lyrics, I've looked at it, is misogynist,

it is anti-police, it is kill the pig, blank, blank the whole, this stuff.

And then you look at the athletes or the celebrities, and none of them are saying our community has to self-police itself because we are looking at ourselves as a community.

And we talk about white, white, white being responsible, but right now

racism is not the problem.

The problem is the inner city schools and the breakup of the black family and the glorification of hyper masculinity that results in promiscuity, illegitimacy, lack of marriage, and violence.

And we glorify violence.

And you put all of that together, the schools, the family problems and the popular culture.

And no one, I mean, you don't have a Barbara Jordan or you don't have a Bayard Rustin or you,

you know, you don't have people in the Black and the Tom Soul like you used to that were, I mean, Jackie Robins, compare Jackie Robinson to LeBron James.

I mean, he was an ultimate sportsman.

He was an integration, not that he wasn't tough and he spoke out against racism, but he wasn't a pampered creation of white liberalism like Colin Kaepernick.

He wasn't a victim, even though he was a victim because he was treated terribly.

And so my point is that,

so you have this phenomenon now, and nobody will talk about it because to talk about it is racist.

I think not to talk about it is racist, because basically the upper black

middle class and the wealthy black class, and they are in the million, along with our bicostal white liberal elite, don't want any part of it.

So they move away.

They say, Don't you dare criticize Lori Lightfoot, or you don't say anything about Karen Bass, or you don't talk about the mayor of New Orleans, or you don't criticize this Synic candidate in South Carolina that said she's sick of white folks, or the Pentagon Diversity Officer.

So, what I'm getting at is

there's no criticism of an inordinate black crime rate among this demographic.

Okay.

And

if you are Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley, and you talk about white rage, white rage, white rage, white rage in the military, and every night you're Joy Reed and Don Lamond, you're talking about white rage, white privilege, and then you're in the view and you're saying, you know, if you have a nickname or this, you attack, and they're just hyper-racializing everything.

Are you Michelle Obama?

And every six weeks you wander off out of your mansion portico and you start mouthing off about racism, racism, or your Megan Markle, all these very affluent, privileged hothouse plants.

That filters down, especially after George Floyd said, that filters down.

And there is this, and then you add the final Tessera in the sick mosaic, and that is what, that is the George Soros state, city, regional attorneys that...

follow critical race theory and critical legal theory that say that all laws are a construct and they are created by wealthy privileged white people, and they have no natural correspondence with human nature.

And you put all that toxic mixture and you get this sense on the street that if I can commit a crime, I'm not going to be arrested.

If rarely I'm arrested, I'm not going to be indicted.

If even very rarely I'm indicted, I'm not going to be convicted.

If rarely, rarely, rarely, rarely I'm convicted, I'm not going to be incarcerated.

If rarely, rarely, rarely, rarely incarcerated, I'm not going to be in jail very long.

long.

And that has destroyed deterrence.

There is no deterrence.

So we have a guy with an axe that goes and terrorizes people.

He's out.

We have a guy who

almost kicks an Asian woman to death.

We have a guy in San Francisco that runs across the street and tackles an Asian man almost and kills him.

We have people that push them in the subways.

We have a jogger in Memphis, a young woman who's raped and murdered.

We have a woman at a crossroads, at a rail crossing that is murdered, just shot.

We had a young white guy walking, I think he was in Temple in Philadelphia, and guess what?

A guy just executed him on the street.

And we had a woman and her teenage daughter who were carjacked.

We had an Asian woman that was run over by a carjacker.

We have the Wawa, you know, think of that scene of civilization.

where you have all of these African-American teens that go in and they're all,

they're not starving and they're stealing things.

That if you look at the parking lot, they're littered on the street, and you have a trifecta.

You have civilization crumbling as they destroy this store out of just nihilism.

Then you have this sincere young woman who goes, Well, I want my sandwich as if I'm going to be right there with the Goths and the vandals in Rome.

And I want to make sure that I'm in the form and everything's working as everybody's stealing.

And she wants her sandwich.

And then the third element is a woman doing the sexual simulation, twerking on top of a cabinet in front of everything.

It's civilization.

It's Lord of the Place.

It's in ruins.

It's very sad.

Yeah.

And so what's going to happen is this, that it's already happening.

So

I know a lot of left-wing people.

I kid them all the time, and they are worried.

because when they look at the Memphis jogger or they look at the man that was executed in Philadelphia or the woman and her kid that were

carjacked or the the woman that was kidnapped, or

the guy in San Francisco that was walking down in Berkeley, and they just executed, they were all African-American versus white.

And they understand that while that was a very rare phenomenon, in which African-Americans five times were more likely to attack and kill white people than white people were African-Americans, that still comprised only about 7% or 8% of violent crime.

That is interracial crime.

So their attitude was, well, it's rare and it gets hyped up by racist and i'm just going to discount but now they're starting to see that this crime is starting to be weaponized and politicized because as i said it's filtering down to the street and it's almost like it's a repertory act so when an african-american young man walks down the street and a white man a white student is walking by and filled and he turns around shoots him and blows his brains out

or

a woman's sitting at a crossroads, I mean, at a crossing, rail crossing, and somebody walks up and blows her brains out.

Or a young woman's not harming anybody and he waits for her like a predator and rapes her and kills her.

Or I can go on with the knockout game or the attacks on Hasidic Jews or the kicking and stomping of

Asians.

It's inordinately black.

And nobody will talk about it.

But people are starting to say, you know what?

This is now outside the inner city.

And it's outside the inner city because the left

has

legitimized it and they have contextualized it and they see it as repertory.

And it's a result of white privilege.

And it doesn't address the fact that it's interracial hatred.

It's hatred of people on the basis of their race.

And when you have the

diversity czar for education in the Pentagon, in the Pentagon, say that she doesn't like white people and she's sick of listening to white people.

And you have the African-American Secretary of Defense and the so-called white chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and they're telling us that white rage, and they're going to go through the ranks when there is no data that there's this epidemic of white rage, but there is data right in their face that this person who's supposed to be the police needs policing.

Their own diversity person is an abject racist, or the candidate for South Carolina Democratic senator.

What does she say?

She's not right.

She just spurts out this white venom.

And so the elite, the elite, it's coming from the elite

African-American community keeps doing this, keeps doing this.

It's white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, when the largest number of people below the poverty line, not by percentage, but in actual numbers, are white.

And the African-American elite hang with the white elite.

They don't see the very poor white population.

And you keep telling that white population, you tell the guy that served three terms in Afghanistan, whose dad was wounded in the first Gulf War, whose grandfather lost a leg in Vietnam, that he's a racist.

I keep saying he dies at double his numbers in Afghanistan.

You just keep saying it.

Well, there's going to be a reaction.

And the reaction, I think, is coming in November.

And it's not just going to be among white liberals who are afraid that

the consequences of their own ideology, they're no longer exempt.

They don't have the money.

They're not, you know, they're not Mark Zuckerberg or his sister or

they're not the Google bunch.

And they created this.

And the middle class, the upper white middle class lives in these cities.

And this crime is starting to go into the suburbs.

The carjackings, the smashing grabs.

They're starting to go into a little nicer neighborhood than San Francisco, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Malibu,

robberies, following people home, stealing, and they're attacking white liberals.

And they don't have the ability to shield themselves.

And they created this by contextualizing it and excusing it and apologizing for it with these weird theories, you know, critical legal theory.

And it's coming to a head because a society is sustained

by only four or five things.

You have to have fuel to move, whether it's a horse or what.

We don't have fuel.

It's too expensive.

You can't pay $200 to fill up your diesel truck and go anywhere, or $150 for gas.

You got to have cheap food.

You can't have cheap food if you keep demonizing farmers, canceling water projects, saying pesticides are going to be banned.

No more organophosphites, no more nitrogen, you know, artificial chemical fertilizers.

You need food.

you need you need police and security or you're a tribe you're living on the danube about 500 ad right and you don't have safety here i'm not sure you have uh deterrence abroad after afghanistan and the russian invasion and what china is talking about taiwan and what iran is talking about a bomb

And if you don't have security and you don't have fuel and you don't have food and you don't have shelter, and we've got almost a million or over a million homeless people and housing is going down, then you don't have civilization.

If you don't have civilization,

then you don't have art, you don't have scientific research, you don't have vaccinations, you don't have anything.

But it was the civilization is defined as the ability to live one more day.

That means you're not spending 95%

of your time worrying about food and shelter and security and

movement, fuel, you know, wood for the fire or, you know, grass for your horse.

And we solved all those problems in the West, you know, in the 19th and 20th century.

We've freed up millions, billions of hours to have so-called civilization, opera, music, et cetera, great art.

But if you destroy those elements, then you have no civilization.

And that's what's happened.

If you look at our food supply chains in danger, the fuel supplies are deterrence.

The police are non-existent many many places, the Pentagon is politicized, the FBI is turned rogue, it's an enemy of the people, and you don't have any safety.

We're in a criminal epidemic, and we're losing civilization.

At some point, somebody's going to say,

we're losing civilization.

And we've got to address this.

We've got to open up Anwar.

We've got to build pipelines.

We're not in utopia yet.

We're not going to burn wood like the Germans.

We're not going to open up heat rooms where all the old people get together and their body heat saves them from freezing today.

We're not going to do that.

We're not going to go back to a pre-modern existence.

So we're going to do this and we're going to get a military and we're going to go down the ranks of 400 generals and we're going to say, are you going to create deterrence?

Do you believe on putting artillery shells on the target?

Do you have a record that your air wing always makes the landing on the carrier?

I don't want to hear about whether you're woke.

I don't want to hear your views on transgender.

I want to know if you're going to kill the enemy and deter him.

And we'll get back to that, or we'll not succeed as a civilization.

And we'll get police.

And we're going to say, if you take an axe in your hand and you threaten people and tear people up, you throw a person in a subway and kill them.

You shoot, you rape a young jacket, you're never going to come out of prison.

And I don't care if we have to build, you know,

thousands of prison cells because civilization is at stake.

And that's what we're going to come to if this continues.

And so we need people to speak out against it.

We need to have people, I don't mean just in a punitive sense, we need LeBron James to go into the inner city because people seem to listen to him and say, please, if you're going to have sexual relations and father and child, marry the mother.

Please provide a stable environment.

We need Al Sharpton to go in there and say, you know what?

We're going to have a meritocracy.

We're going to fire any teacher that doesn't teach what they're supposed to.

We're going to get rid of all of this therapeutic curriculum and go back to language, history, philosophy, math, science.

And we're going to get policemen.

We don't care what color the policemen are, but they're going to create a tranquil environment.

So a person in the inner city has the same freedom of choices as somebody in Malibu.

And

that's what we have to do.

And I don't see any of these leaders.

capable of doing it.

Yeah, I don't see it either.

And what I just said will be taped and I'll get it as sure as the sun rises.

Because you see, the rewards are not for saying what I just said.

The rewards are for saying that what you just said is racist when it's not.

And virtue signaling.

And being,

you know, Oprah's point is not to make sure there's wonderful schools in Chicago or that somebody.

who's a lower middle class white or Asian or African-American in Oakland can walk without being killed.

It's to get, it's to stay in that Mamacito mansion.

And

keep the myth of her being a victim going.

She has to, she has to.

Absolutely.

Because that's the essential to her success.

The same thing with Megan Markle.

If she doesn't have the white queen or the white Charles or whatever it is to say she's victimized, if she takes it to the bank, what is she?

She's a person, and a person is as good or bad as their achievement.

And the sad thing about all this is

in the Black community, it shows the same rate of decline as the white community.

So when you look at the level of acting or singing, I mentioned Otis Redding versus rappers.

I mentioned Tanahisi Coates compared to Tom Soule.

But it's even worse in the white community.

We just talked about acting.

But when you look at in my little narrow, tiny field of

classical scholarship, and I look at some of the Jeffrey Dason Croix, the work of Donald Kagan or even philologists I didn't agree with,

Kenneth Dover or A.W.

Gom.

And I look at the stuff that's published now.

It's pathetic.

It's pathetic.

And same thing with almost everything.

So

it's a symptom.

Anytime you, as a society, you say, we've reached utopia.

The food, the shelter, the safety, the national security, the housing, it's our birthright.

It's automatic.

We deserve it.

We don't care who makes it.

They're the stupid Morlocks, but we have time now to criticize them.

And they don't pay attention to essentials.

You end up like,

you know, the lotus eaters in Europe.

Yeah, sure.

Wokeism is definitely regressive rather than progressive civilization.

It's the idea that...

You have to have radical egalitarianism as defined by an elite.

And if it's not radical egalitarian, then the elite, not subject to the consequences of their own ideology, has the right and needs the power to force those deemed more fortunate to give over to people less fortunate because it has to be due to culpability.

That's a sick ancient doctrine.

And every time that doctrine has put up its serpent head, it has bit and destroyed and infected and poisoned a society.

Whether it's Maoist or Stalin or Lenin or national socialist in germany or the commie socialist mussolini he was a fascist but he started out as a communist and everywhere and yeah

that's and

oh go ahead

it goes back to plato and pythagoras they they were sort of the philosophers of enforced equality with a with

albeit with a guardian or platonic guardians that would be not subject they had to get Al Gore perks and John Kerry perks to be able to talk down to people and be, you know, get their private chats and yachts and stuff.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I'm going to have to wind it up here because

we've gone a long time today.

So hopefully everybody enjoyed it.

And we thank all of our listeners for listening in.

And thank everybody for listening.

I appreciate it once more.

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