A Cultural Watershed: Digging Deep Into the Cultural Context of Left Policies

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is the weekend edition or the Saturday edition.

And on this program, we like to look at things either more in depth or historical.

Today we're going to talk about cultural watersheds in our cultural experience in the modern day.

So we're going to look at war on children, the absence of law or the undoing of law or the non-existence of law.

We'll let Victor decide which which one that is.

The hatred of

a generation that is better than us and the social media that feeds all this.

So we'll do a little critique of social media.

But first let's listen to these messages.

I knew we all had two ages, our actual age and our internal biological age.

What I didn't know is I've likely lowered my biological age without even knowing it.

Here's the thing.

Because Americans eat so many processed foods and not enough fruits and veggies, many, perhaps most, are 10 plus years older on the inside than their actual age.

They're ticking time bombs.

A major university study suggests how to slow aging and diffuse that biological time bomb.

Participants slowed their aging by drinking field of greens.

That's all.

They didn't change their eating, drinking, or exercise, just field of greens.

When I started Field of Greens to replace my multivitamin, I was amazed.

After about two weeks, my energy improved.

I've been exercising more and my overall wellness feels great.

Each fruit and vegetable in Field of Greens was doctor selected for specific health benefits.

Cell health, heart, lungs, kidney, metabolism, even healthy weight.

It's wonderful knowing Field of Greens can slow how quickly I'm aging.

And I encourage you to join me, swap your untested fruit, vegetable, or green drink for Field of Greens.

While there's time, check out the university study and get 20%

off when using promo code VICTOR.

at fieldofgreens.com.

That's fieldofgreens.com promo code Victor.

And we'd like to thank Field of Greens for continuing to sponsor the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft breathable durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, bowl and branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights.

And they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bowl and Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D

B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply, and we'd like to thank Bolin Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Welcome back, Victor.

You know, as I usually do, I ask you a little bit about, well, what are you thinking, or what are you noticing, or what's at the top of your mind for the day, just to, you know, give you a chance at something maybe you're currently speaking about.

But I have something at the the top of my mind before we get into this discussion of current cultural watersheds.

And I thought it was interesting that the remain in Mexico policy of the Trump era, that the program of that Trump era can be canceled according to the Supreme Court.

So they just had a case up, and I thought two things about it.

I thought, well, one, it seemed like not a good idea.

But two, it seemed that, okay, so now we have a case that the right probably doesn't like, but we don't see the same kind of protests and anger out in the streets.

And I think that's mostly what I noted.

But I did note that in the decision made, that Kavanaugh joined the side of those who wanted to end the Remain in Mexico program.

And the opinion written was that,

well, after all is said and done, they can't send

people back to Mexico when Mexico won't comply with it.

And that administration doesn't have the

facilities to accommodate the program itself.

So that was part of the opinion that was given to us by the Supreme Court.

And I thought that was kind of strange, right?

That law cannot be followed merely because our partners internationally are willing to comply and that the state doesn't have the facilities to comply with the law, right?

So I thought that was kind of an interesting decision myself.

And it's a very important decision because if you think about it, we're telling people, come across now and say you're a refugee.

And then we'll decide once you get here whether you are or not.

Refugee meaning if you stay in Mexico, for example, you're going to be in political danger.

So, who wouldn't say they were a refugee?

Because about 30% of the people who get across legally or otherwise don't show up for hearings.

So, everybody is going to say they're a refugee.

When they cross a border illegally and they're detained, they said, I'm a refugee.

And then we're going to say, Well, we're going to determine that your status of whether you are or not at a hearing.

So, here's your number.

Sometimes we even give them free phones.

So, no other country in the world does this except a few lunatic European countries.

And so Kavanaugh, it's hard to know about Kavanaugh because on a number of issues, he is less than conservative.

And you don't know whether he was so traumatized during that hearing that he doesn't want to go through that.

They've sent an assassin, they being not.

people, but the atmosphere of the hard left has encouraged these people to come out of the woodwork.

And somebody showed up with a gun near his home.

They've surrounded his home and yelled at him.

They do that with all of them.

And so, but it's a bad policy.

And the left, again, because they feel they're morally superior to everyone and they're intellectually superior, they think they can do things that they would be shocked the other side did.

So if you feel that immigration is one of the most important issues around, and I do, legal immigration is,

It's much to be thought about.

And if the Supreme Court was going to rule that anybody who said they was a refugee could basically come across and then we would have to adjudicate that status here in the United States rather than Mexico.

Well, then maybe somebody on the right should have leaked that memo and we would have had time to prepare and mobilize.

And then when they had the decision come down, then maybe we should have all gone to the home of Sodomair or Kagan and surrounded it.

Better yet, to do what the left does, go to the minority member, Sodomair, and the way they went to Clarence Thomas, to show how liberal they were, and then shout and yell at her.

Or maybe, I don't know, Mitch McConnell, if he could make it up to the doors of the Supreme Court, say, So to my ear,

Kagan, you've reaped the wind, you've sown the wind, you know, you're going to reap the whirlwind.

You don't know what's going to hit you.

And then we should say, well, we're going to pack the court as soon as we get control.

Is that what you want?

I mean, is that the kind of country you want?

Because that's what the left does.

And the left just says, you know what?

We're asymmetrical.

Don't ever do what we do.

But we can do it because we're better than you.

I think they think they have more important issues than we do, right?

They would say, oh, this is not important.

No, everything for them is important.

If they don't get their way, they're like, I wrote an article today.

I think it'll come out.

I guess it came out today, Crybaby, Left Wing Mine.

They always cry about when they don't get their way.

And it's pathetic, you know, and it's they're sad, angry people, these these hardcore leftists.

And I can't think of one good thing they've done to the country in the last two years.

If you can, I mean, they've ruined the border.

They've ruined the energy situation.

They have ruined the economy.

They have ruined security and spike crime.

They've ruined our foreign policy.

What good have they done?

They haven't.

And they don't seem to understand democracy, that at times you lose if you're going to participate in a viable democracy.

And you have to accept that and move on and try to convince the democracy to go the other way.

But they don't see it that way at all.

No, they don't.

And

they're infantile and

they never make common connection.

So here we're talking about whether somebody who's coming in should be coming in legally or illegally.

We never stop to think, why are all these people coming here?

Why are they coming here?

You would never get that answer if you listen to NPR or

CNN or network news.

They're coming here because they feel it's a superior system to their own.

And nobody's wanting to go to Mexico in mass.

So why are people doing that?

And do they ever reflect maybe it's the rule of law, the protection of private property, a prosperous economy, a transparent society in comparison with the alternative in their homeland?

Yeah.

And so, but it's just shocking that these issues never come up about immigration.

Why are all these people dying in an overloaded truck, the heat, tragic, because they're risking their lives to come to a country that the people who are living in it can't say a good word about it.

And this is not the old Democratic Party.

It's not the Liberal Party.

It's not Bill Clinton.

It's not JFK.

These are new people.

These are hardcore leftists that have hijacked one of the political parties and they have an agenda.

And

they

take all of their personal frustrations and they transfer them to political agendas and they get hysterical and angry.

When you listen to Elizabeth Warren's voice, she's almost about ready to cry.

She's so angry and out of control.

Or you listen to Maxine Waters or you listen to Nancy Pelosi,

all of those people.

And it's scary.

And they think that that heat is light, and we're going to listen to them or else.

And they threaten people and they tell you, we're this, and this is going to happen.

Chuck Schumer is about a scary.

I mean,

you're going to reap the whirlwind.

Okay, Chuck, what does that mean?

Tell us what that exactly means.

When you say you don't know what hit you, what is what hit you?

What is it?

Tell us what it is.

I want to know.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, you just started into our subject.

So I wanted to talk first about the war on children.

And by that, I'm thinking the Roe decision is made.

And then we have all of these representatives, some of which you just mentioned, coming out, like Elizabeth Warren saying the lives and health of women are at risk, or Waters saying bodily autonomy is a human right, or AOC.

also saying that the gutting of Roe imperils every menstruating person.

And then she goes on to say that people who aren't women can menstruate too.

And that's sort of comic.

But the general gist of what they're saying and a lot of what the people have been saying on this Roe decision doesn't seem to acknowledge the fetus or the baby inside or even the debate of the, I don't know what you want to call it, the viability of fetus or when people start to call what's inside of a pregnant woman a baby.

You know, so you've got, there's none of the debate there.

They just assume that

what is inside the woman has no rights and the woman can do anything.

And so I find that when I say a war on children, that's the biggest thing I notice, of course, with the Roe decision.

But I also think that the war on children has been accentuated by the COVID crisis, as we all well know, and the school situation at the time.

But I was wondering your thoughts on the predicament of children in this democratically dominant.

Well, in terms of abortion, the debate has changed radically since I was in high school when Roe v.

Wade came down.

And then it was, you know,

technology said that a baby probably couldn't live outside the fetus, you know, six months, had to be at least six months old, given Primi care at that time.

And we didn't have sophisticated imaging at that time.

And we didn't have sonograms and hear sounds and things like that.

So my point is this,

that

as the number of abortions initially increased and became later and later in the term, and it gave women all sorts of more choices, we were up to a million abortions a year.

And then something happened.

People started to push back.

Some doctors who were doing these assembly line abortions got angry.

Some women who had had an abortion at 18 didn't feel that way at 30 and were very remorseful.

Or technology stepped in and it kept pushing back the date at which a so-called fetus could live outside the womb.

And more importantly,

sound and

sight of a fetus as a human being was getting to the point where it was it was nearing conception and so the point we're getting to now is that even the left is saying privately that after conception very soon there is a human life but that human life even if it is viable very soon outside the womb they don't want to have any part of it because it's their body it's their choice I mean, what would be the Brave New World 1984 solution?

If a woman wanted an abortion, I suppose they would just remove the fertilized egg and the young life out of her womb and put it into an artificial womb and then raise it.

That procedure, she could go through that.

Or would she say she doesn't want that either?

And so then it's the age-old question is, does society have a right to interfere within the inner lives of people when they feel that that is an issue that transcends that person?

And we had it with the vaccinations.

If somebody says,

I don't believe that the RNA-type vaccinations are sufficiently tested, they're dangerous.

I'm not going to be vaccinated.

We started out by saying, okay, that's fine, because we're going to get vaccinated.

And when you get COVID, you can't hit us.

And then when the efficacy of the vaccinations proved to be far less than what was stated, then we turned on these people and said, no,

you have a duty to get vaccinated because you're putting people at risk.

I mean, we're going to discharge, I guess, 15,000 people from the National Guard.

So the left comes along and says, listen, you guys, if you don't get vaccinated, I don't care about your body or your health concerns or whether you get myocarditis or you get an ovarian cyst.

We don't really care.

You're affecting everybody.

Okay.

That's what they said.

And then the right comes back to them and says, we don't really care what you say because you are taking a life and that life belongs to humanity.

And you can't make a decision just because you're the most intimate with that life to take that life any more than a person in their family can make a decision about a vaccination that would affect people outside their family.

That's sort of the argument.

And the left doesn't want to hear any of these things.

You know, it's like...

As I said earlier, it's like sanctuary cities.

Oh, the states can override a federal edict.

And then Elizabeth Warden says, hmm, state says

no abortion in Mississippi.

Ah, we'll have a military base, and the federal government will override that.

So they're never consistent because they don't believe in principles or consistencies.

The other thing is that whether we like it or not, a lot of things happened with good intentions over the last 60 or 70 years that no one quite had figured out.

And that is women's liberation that made women not just equal under the law, but equal in all other aspects of their life,

regardless of biology,

and

easy abortion and easy contraception

and

affirmative action so that about 55% of all the bachelor's degrees are given to women in the United States each year.

And in some of the disciplines in graduate school, in the humanities, it's about 55 to to 60 percent of the PhDs.

So what I'm getting at is we are creating a full workforce where it's almost impossible for a family

to function in the way it did 70 years ago with one parent home and a guidance of the entire family structure of the household.

And you can't do it.

Part of it's economically.

You can't live on two incomes.

This is kind of the myth of the modern world that we're so affluent, but we're really affluent in the sense that we're not doing things that we used to do at home.

And we need two incomes to get that minimum viability, economic viability.

But what I'm getting at, it has repercussions historically.

It happened in Rome.

It's happening today in Europe.

In 2000, we were even as late as 2000, we were about 2.1.

And that's almost what you need for the replacement of a family or a nation.

Now we're down to about 1.7.

Some European countries are down to about 1.3.

Some of the ones you wouldn't think, the southern European countries that used to outlaw abortion, be much more orthodox religiously, they are down to 1.4.

I think Germany is down to 1.38 or something.

That's not sustainable.

And Japan is another one.

In South Korea, I think maybe the worst or Taiwan, they're down to 1.3.

But that affluent society

where we emphasize the individual and the satisfying of the appetites, that creates an antithetical structure to sacrificing.

If you're a young woman, you have to sacrifice your body.

You have to get pregnant two, three times to have a family that would keep your national population steady.

That's antithetical to being competitive with men in the workplace.

You'd lose time.

We put so much emphasis on physicality that makes it difficult to gain all weight, lose the weight.

And so for a lot of young women, they're just saying, I'm not going to do it.

And a lot of men then adapt to that.

And then when you get into the entire sexual sphere, it's just a revolutionary act.

And women's liberation is very fine.

We define our own sexuality.

It's what I was told in college.

And promiscuity that was once considered sinful in the sense of men.

He was a cad, he was a woof, he was a Roustabau, whatever we called him.

That trait then was applied to women.

And we weren't not supposed to say she was loose in the way that we'd said he's promiscuous or so does the wild oats.

But the point is that the worst traits of men were then adopted by women in the guise of empowerment.

And the point again I'm making is then marriage or long-term commitments were considered to be judged on their own merits and not have a sexual element necessarily that launched them.

So when I was in high school, if you wanted to

have sex on a steady basis with a young woman, then you had to give a commitment at least.

And that commitment was seen as leading to marriage.

And in some cases, still in the 70s, there were people, women, who said, I'm not going to have sex unless I'm married.

And that's gone.

That's completely out now.

And maybe it's good riddance, but my point is that all of the traditional levers and incentives that promoted family life

and having two or three children are gone.

And they're gone economically, they're gone culturally, they're gone socially, they're gone psychologically.

And this is at the expense of the children, right?

It is.

It is, because we have in a lot of communities, 70% in the African-American community of children are born out of wedlock.

And

the white, so-called white, is over.

I think it's about 30-40%.

Maybe it's higher, Latino is higher.

And then we didn't get into the federal government.

It's subsidies of out of, you know, if you're a young woman and you have a boyfriend and you get pregnant and he's a CAD, like he usually is, he's going to leave you.

But he does that because he knows that you'll be able to get federal and state support for your child.

And you can do that two or three times.

But the state then is the and local parentas.

So the whole thing all started with the idea of equality.

We're going to make everybody equal, women's liberation.

And it was a lot of good about it.

And we're going to give women choices they never had.

And we're going to get rid of shame.

But they were all so ahistorical.

They never understood why all of these.

protocols had originated in the first place because they were kind of biologically directed.

So when I was in college, I was told that dowry was some of the worst things in the world.

And then I went to Greece and I thought, wow, all these backward people have dowries.

And then I started talking to women, you know, that were 45 years old and married or 50, and they owned the house in Athens.

And their father had, that was their dowry.

And so when their husbands on a Saturday night, you know, sort of had a drinks with the guys and wanted to go out, he was a little bit worried because ultimately somebody could throw him out of the house.

And

that was very important to me because when I came of age, I thought I had two daughters and I didn't have any money.

And I said, I like that system, and I'm going to work my best to make sure that I can have a house or a farm or something for each of my daughters.

And that just sounds, I know people hear that, they think that's absurd, but it was again a cultural reaction to the biological fact that men traditionally are more promiscuous than women are and that women who have children and a family need to be protected from that biological fact and the church can do it the community can shame people i know that when i was in high school for catholic couples it was hard to get a divorce if the local attorney was going to leave his wife and two children then his clients wouldn't go with him anymore.

So there were all of these levers and incentives, some of them pretty tough and backward, but nevertheless, children grew up in two-parent families.

And I can remember going, my mother worked, but I can remember going over to other families.

And it was like, get off the bus, Victor, and go over to this wonderful family that lived next to us.

And you can stay a couple of hours.

And then we got off the bus with this person.

And my twin brother and I went in.

The first thing that met us were home-baked chocolate chip cookies, milk.

And then her mother, she was a local farm girl and she had the two of us come over to wait for my mom to get off work.

And boy, it was like, leave it to beaver.

You know what I mean?

It was, we would say to my mom, I want to go over there.

And so

modernism did a lot of damage.

And we haven't even calibrated what it has done.

You know, when my daughter was very sick down in Los Angeles for four days before she passed away, I just walked all night long in a bad area.

But I would go to these all-night coffee bars and I'd see these young women.

They were like 19 and 20, and I'd buy coffee to keep up.

I couldn't sleep.

And I'd befriend them.

I would talk to them.

I'd give them a $20 tip.

I would just talk to them.

I'd say, hi.

And I was the only one in the coffee shop.

This would be like two in the morning.

And I said, what time are you?

We're going to close.

I said, how do you walk home?

She goes, well, I just take this.

I said, well, where are your parents?

And the point, I got so paranoid because my own daughter, I realized, had been living and working alone in Los Angeles.

But there was something wrong about that.

I thought this is a very dangerous place.

I remember this young girl, I went in there about 11.

I bought coffee and she was very friendly.

She said, Oh, you're too late to have coffee.

I'll give you a decaf and all this.

I said, Do you have a security system here?

How could your boss leave you alone in this coffee shop in East Hollywood?

You know, way out there.

And but we don't think about those things.

I just think we're putting enormous pressure on young women to

go to get a BA and then get an advanced degree and then have 1.2 kids or no kids, or if they do have one kid, and then be a success and make all this money.

And I think there's an element that suggests that we're not putting an emphasis on the family or children.

And you really saw it during the abortion debate.

This is the long, roundabout way of saying when you hear people glorifying abortion, not Bill Clinton, rare,

you know, it's going to be legal and rare, but rather glorifying it or talking about how many abortions they've had.

Something, it's kind of a death cult.

I don't want to get too personal, but I will say that in families that are related to me or friends, something is also happening parallel to this, that you see young men, handsome, bright,

but they're not getting married, much less are they having children.

I don't know if it's the economic situation, they have degrees, but I know so many families when there's six, seven, or eight first cousins or children, and they're in their mid-30s or mid- and they've had girlfriends, you know, live-ins back, but that none of them are getting married, much less having children.

This is a male thing.

And part of it is, I think, that when you graduate 55%

women out of college, and the blue-collar population tends to be more male than female, maybe, and it hasn't been as remunerated as handsomely until recently.

And you talk about toxic masculinity and sexism and all this racism, you're usually targeting the male in some way.

The society has sent messages to that male that he is culpable.

And

when you say to that male, hey,

You don't have to have any commitment.

There's birth control.

There's abortion.

Just go out and hook up at night.

You get your sexual needs satisfied that way, or video games or pornography online, whatever they do.

But there's no reason to speed up your life cycle.

And when you add that it's very hard to afford a home or car.

So we're losing an entire generation of middle-class males.

And the society is not worried about it.

But we should, a lot of females tell me this.

They say, well, look who's out there.

I don't want to get engaged to Joe Jones when he's living in his mom's house and he's 37 years old and he's got a net worth of $9,000 at best.

And when I asked him what he wants to do, he said, I don't know.

And so

that's where this country is.

It reminds me a lot of Rome in the first century.

first century AD

when it had declining birth rate and kind of screeds and poems like Catullus Catullus or Horus or Capricius or Tacitus or especially the imperial family.

And you really get the impression that they were in a crisis of fertility, they were in a crisis of morality, and you had Augustus with all these right-wing series of legislation to encourage fertility, marriage, et cetera.

Right now, I could tell you, if people were getting married in their early 20s and they would stay married for at least 20 years and they had two or three children, and they were able to afford a home without going into enormous debt, this country would be a lot better off.

Yeah, it sure would.

Wow, Victor, I hope you're writing an article on that from my war on children to that vast landscape of how it's a war on children.

I'm just fascinated.

So, I hope there's an article in the making.

We're going to get on to, if it's okay with you, unless you have more to say on that subject, but on to the absence of law in our culture now after we hear a few messages.

So we'll be right back.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now and that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to hometitalock.com slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home, titlelock.com slash Victor.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the secret serum and it's vibriance super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and aged spots with Vibriance.

I just began using Super C serum last week and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com/slash Victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance, V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E,

vibrance.com/slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We're back.

You've mentioned this at times in your podcast, but I thought maybe we could talk a little bit more in depth about what we call the absence of law, by which we often mean that the law is not applied.

If the law is not applied equally and everywhere to the best of our human abilities, then there really is no law.

And we're talking about things like protesters in our quote unquote summer of love who killed cops and maimed people in the hundreds, and yet they had no treatment that was anywhere near the January 6th rioters.

That Hunter and all of his exploits, and especially the stuff that he did on his father's reputation, I guess you would say, in China and the Ukraine, where he got millions of dollars because he was the son of the vice president.

And that law is not being applied to elites, or even among elites, it's being applied differently, right?

So those are the things I can think of when we say no law, sanctuary cities, I suppose, but can you talk to us more in a cultural context?

What is the repercussions of this?

Well, who's doing it?

Is it a bunch of right-wing guys like in the 1950s that are trying to get out of taxes?

Maybe.

But basically, you're talking about a left-wing phenomenon.

And who is the left-wing in the country today?

The left-wing are the very wealthy and the very poor.

And who is not?

It's the middle class.

And who is following the law?

The middle class.

They're the ones that obey the speed limit, more or less.

They're the ones that pay their traffic tickets.

They're the ones that pay their taxes.

They're the ones that the IRS goes after and they try to tell the truth.

And if they don't, they pay dearly for it.

But if you start with the left wing is the party of the wealthy

and people who are influential now, as opposed to maybe 50 or 60 years ago when it was 50-50.

But it sends a message.

If you're in Washington right now and you're a top-level top-level bureaucrat, you better be left-wing because

you can be Seussman and lie and a jury's going to let you go.

You can be John Brennan and lie under oath.

You're never going to be charged.

You can be James Comey and feign amnesia 245 times.

You're never going to be indicted.

You're going to be James Clapper and lie and say that the NSA doesn't spy on people and you're lie under oath and nothing's going to happen.

You can be Andrew McCabe and lie three times.

Nothing's going to happen to you.

You can be Lawrence Lerner and take the, nothing's going to happen to you.

And, you know, you can be Joe Biden and say that you never talked to Hunter about his business and get caught on tape that don't worry, you're clear on the China thing

or have pictures with his, the people involved.

Or you can be Hunter Biden.

I don't know what.

And, you know, you could break every gun law, every drug law, every law there is, a tax fraud, and nobody's going to come after you.

You can turn the FBI into the family retrieval service that goes after the Biden girl's diary or Hunter's, you know, Hunter's laptop, or works for the Secret Service to find his lost revolver or automatic pistol.

So there is no law for those people.

No law for the very wealthy.

Mark Zuckerberg, nobody's ever going to go after Mark Zuckerberg and see if it was completely legal to infuse $420 million

into

a few precincts to warp the election.

And there's no law for the very poor.

You see that right now in San Francisco.

Smash and grab.

If it's under $950, nothing happens to you.

And we had in Tulare County, we have a great, I'm not too far from the county line, but we have a great sheriff, Mike Burdot.

They arrested two suspects on the 99.

They helped the Highway Patrol.

They had 150,000 fentanyl pills, almost a million dollars worth.

Think of that.

Two people were caught.

each one of those could kill somebody they arrested them and their commissioner let the person out so you really believe that

joe blow from youngstown ohio will be driving down an ohio freeway and he gets pulled over for 150 000 fentanyl pills and they just let him go that night i don't think so if he's a member of the middle class.

And, you know, you can say all you want about George Floyd, but George Floyd, he was a home assaulter.

He broke into a home and he put a gun in a pregnant woman's stomach and he had a whole history of felonies.

And each time he had gotten out with a pretty moderate sentence.

He'd been arrested just a few months before.

He was resisting arrest.

So we don't think about these things as crimes anymore.

And yet, This happened in the 70s.

The same 60s cultural revolution brought in the 70s permissiveness.

And then you had the broken windows reaction in New York.

You had the three strikes reaction, the yin and the yang in California.

And then people were incarcerated, they were punished.

You had Joe Biden.

Remember Senator Joe from Scranton?

Urban jungle.

My mother might be endangered.

Hillary Clinton, super predator, all that stuff.

Bill Clinton, we're going to get 100,000 police officers.

And

give them credit.

The left changed for a while and they had safe streets.

I remember when I was 18, I'd never been out of California.

I took a flight to Yale to take the intensive summer Greek program.

I had some money from working on the farm.

I went there and one day I went up to New York in 1971.

It was a circus, Times Square.

I thought I wasn't going to get out alive.

The subways were filthy.

The next time I came back was years later during Rudy Giuliani's tenure.

It was, I thought it was a different city.

and now when i go back it's like i did when i was 18 it's a jungle to use joe biden's words and so we go back and forth and right now we're in the cycle of left-wing dominance but the the left thinks that under their premise of critical legal theory that all laws are constructs they don't mimic nature When you see two blue jays out there and one of them has a piece of breadcrumb in its beak and the other one takes it, they fight.

And they don't think that that's that's theft.

In other words, they don't think that murder or assault or rape have natural corollaries throughout time and space and history, that you can't have societies with that happening.

And so, as I said earlier, they feel that if you go in and steal Snickers, it's only, and that's a crime, it's because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't steal Snickers.

Therefore, the society made laws against those poor people who do, rather than the idea they said, we don't really care about Snickers.

We just care that you don't take something that's not yours.

Because if you do and you get away with it, you unwind the entire chain of civility and civilization itself.

And that's what the left has done with the poor, that they have extenuating circumstances.

With the wealthy, they've done just the opposite.

They've said, well, you people are so gifted and you're so moral, you left-wingers, that you did a noble lie.

It's just, there's no consequence.

Someday, I'll give you, just finish with this observation.

Someday, I don't know when it will be, two years, six years, 20 years, somebody's going to wake up the United States and they're going to say, oh my God, Eureka, I see it all now.

The COVID-19 virus killed millions of people.

killed well over a million Americans.

It destroyed the economy for two years.

The psychological damage that it did by shutting down schools

will never be fully atoned for it gave people lifelong neurological i'm speaking to somebody with long covid symptoms just like hunter biden you think if hunter biden's name was

i don't know

just you know joe green yeah linda smith from hanford california you think that when you know i i a middle-class person i don't think so i think that person she would be in big trouble leaving a a crackpipe and, you know, with

carrying a gun or thrown into a dumpster near a school

or all the other things.

And so there's going to be an atonement.

Someday, I think somebody's going to say, oh my God,

let's have a investigation of the Biden family.

And I didn't know.

Joe Biden never paid taxes on millions of dollars of money that he skimmed from the family consortium.

Hunter didn't either.

Ban, they were giving money back and forth without gift taxes.

Wow.

They were doing quid pro quos.

Wow.

Somebody's going to do that.

And we'll see.

We'll see what happens.

Yeah.

Could we turn to the next subject, which is speaking of crimes, crimes against the past.

How about that?

Or this extensive and sort of very visible.

hatred of the generations that preceded us that were often better than us by destroying statues or taking names off of schools, colleges, buildings, roads, streets, right?

And I was wondering if you could give us a little perspective on, because we know about all of the, you know, revolt against past generations, but can you characterize those generations and what they've done for this country a little bit?

Well, I mean, what.

I'm looking out of a window right now in the high Sierra and I can barely see Huntington Lake.

And I'm thinking some ignoranus 18 is probably on that beach and saying, Wow, this is a Sierra Lake.

No, it's beautiful.

It looks like Switzerland.

It's not.

It was created by Henry Huntington and 40,000 workers in 1912, 13, and 14.

Why?

Because they needed electricity and they didn't know how to generate it.

So they dreamed up this idea of the Big Creek Water Project.

And then they created the notion of a high-voltage transmission line and they sent it 300 miles, the hydroelectric power all the way down to LA and it lit half the city for 30 or 40 years.

And in the process, they stopped flooding on the San Joaquin River.

They created recreation for poor people like today.

It's 106 in Fresno and they can come up here and get cool.

created irrigation out of the San Joaquin River.

They didn't all go down to the sea.

Well, it didn't at least used not to do that before Jerry Brown took over.

so my point is that who did that how did they do it in 1912 look at the dam that's still there the entire infrastructure is still there the roads coming up are still there the out california aqueduct i go by it on the way to work without it you wouldn't have a california have we is there two aqueducts three now no i look at diablo canyon atomic energy generation plant.

Are there 10?

No.

So what did this generation do?

Tell me.

I can't think of anything.

I don't use anything they make.

I mean, they inherited where I live, the 99, the 101, and the I-5.

They're all beautiful freeways.

All they had to do was their grandfather said, this is fine for us.

But you know, when you get bigger, you kind of update it.

They didn't even do that.

They just milked it and melked it and milked it.

And then I looked at our military.

Can I stop you before you go to the military?

Yeah.

They did make the computer that you work on and the cell phone that you use.

They did that.

They did that.

But that was

something, but that's not.

Yeah.

I mean, they did that.

And

that's not every day.

We're everyday.

But here's the difference.

Here's the difference.

A different generation than this generation 40 years ago might say what I'm saying right now.

I might say,

I don't like Bill Gates.

I'm not fond of Mark Zuckerberg.

I don't use social media, but I I do use a Mac computer.

And

I

do understand Microsoft Word.

And I used to literally write out my books and then I type them on a manual or electric typewriter.

And then when I did editing, I cut and pasted.

You know what I mean?

I mean, I literally type something out on a piece of paper, then I pasted it over.

I used this thing called whiteout.

And everybody, we had had White Out on your typewriter.

And so I appreciate what they did.

They made my life much easier.

But I'm not going to go back and say, oh, those damn people.

I'm going to appreciate what they did, but they don't do that to other people.

They never do.

That's true.

They don't appreciate the people that came before them.

But I'm talking about things that you have barometers of success or failure.

So,

you know, look at San Francisco and its Nadir and and dirty hairy movies.

It's still much cleaner looking than it is now.

Look at under Vertigo in the 50s.

It looks like Paris.

And ask yourself what New York was like in 1944, or what was Detroit like in 53.

or what the country was like, you know, crime-wise.

And everybody says, well, we were racist and we were sexist and we were horrible people.

And, you know, there were racists and sexists, just as if you go to Africa, there were racists and sexist Africans who didn't like people.

If you went to Japan and you weren't Japanese, the same thing.

Every majority culture, and this was a majority white culture, about 93%.

But what was different about this country that nobody ever gives it any credit for, the Declaration and the Constitution innately, innately, the logic of both was that all men are created equal.

And therefore, ultimately, when people who did not look like the founders wanted in on the founders' dream because it worked and it made people secure and free and prosperous, they had a claim on the foundational documents and said, we didn't make them.

You made them.

You said all men are created equal.

You didn't mention when you had that three-fifths clause about African Americans and the census and representation, we understood what it was.

It was to stop to the races so you didn't go under a civil war, but you didn't want to give them any credit for slavery.

You wanted people to be free.

They understood that, but not today, where if you're not perfect, you're not good.

But this country, when you go back and look at the past, I mean, come on, 700,000 people died over slavery.

They died.

And they died to end it.

And they were successful in ending it.

And they've spent about $20 trillion.

in federal expenditures and state expenditures on the great society.

And we are now in to nearly 60 years of affirmative action.

And I can tell you, I grew up with a lot of people in the San Joaquin Valley that were the children of Oklahoma immigrants that had nothing.

And they did not get into UC campuses with their 3.2s because of affirmative action.

And so, okay, so we've done things, and yet that's never acknowledged, this idea of self-correction or self-improvement.

Instead, we damn this entire generation.

And then we have to ask ourselves, okay,

since you're so good this generation let's take a moral check of your record let's start off with homeless people would your grandfathers have allowed 20 000 people to defecate urinate fornicate and inject drugs on market street that's what you do Oh, you gave me my Microsoft Word program.

You gave me Facebook.

Would they have all of your workers sleeping in cars all around your plant because they couldn't afford a home?

Okay.

Wow, you had air conditioning.

I remember going to people's homes in the 1960s where they just got air conditioning.

When I go to people's home, they can't turn on the air conditioning.

It's too expensive.

So what by is it safe?

I used to go up to San Francisco and walk all during the evening.

I would look for used bookstores for Greek and Latin books.

I would walk all over Berkeley.

Think you could do that now?

I doubt it very seriously.

And I used to take the BART.

I don't think you can take BART into Oakland if you're in the evening, if you're sane.

And so I don't see how this this generation, for all of its condemnation of past generations, is going to measure up through the centuries.

I don't really see it.

I don't see farewell to arms.

I don't see can't go home again.

I don't see Tender as the Night.

I don't see great opera music.

I don't see Stanford University's curriculum far more competitive and turning out far better educated people than it did in 1960.

I just don't see that.

And I look at some of the PhD programs I was acquainted with, and I can guarantee you that today's graduate student in the field that I was in would not be able to get a PhD.

Just would be too hard for them.

And I know people who went to graduate school, if they didn't study 10 to 12 hours every day, they wouldn't make it.

And so I'm puzzled when I look at crime or I look at all of these things, look at the military.

We're told, you know, we have a commercial out last week about pronouns.

And I'm I'm thinking, okay,

we can't use he or she, we use they, we get it.

And then we had one about the pregnant air suit for the flyer.

Okay, we get it.

And we had the pride flag on Kabul.

But before you do all that, can you just win a war?

Can you just not leave

$80 billion in Kabul?

Were the people who died at Sugarloaf Hill, would they have done that?

Can you imagine people fighting the Japanese in Iwo Jima and just saying about on day four, eh, I can't do it.

It's not working.

Let's just get back off the beaches and leave all this stuff for the Japanese and take off.

I don't think they'd do that.

They could have said this was an ill-thought-out campaign, and it was Iwo Jima.

They could have said, our guys on Omaha Beach, some colonel could have said, you know what?

Utah was okay.

And Sword and Juno were okay.

But this thing, Omaha, there's hedgerows on the other side of it.

We landed right where the Germans were well fortified.

The tides, it was poorly planned.

Let's just get out of here.

It's not worth it.

We didn't start the war.

Just pull back, leave all that stuff on the beach, leave our allies.

Just, that's what we did.

I don't think that generation would have done that.

I don't, I don't, you know, I remember coming home from.

Stanford University, I was 21, and my dad said, well,

it's Thanksgiving and the raisin tarps are still out there.

These are not plastic.

They were the old big, heavy cloth.

They weighed a ton and they had oil on them to make them waterproof.

I said, it's time to fold them up, Victor.

We tucked the raisins in.

He said, Dad, I just drove four hours.

I got a splitting sinus infection.

Can I just go in?

Well, I'll tell you something.

I had a sinus infection too.

I threw 30,000 feet in a B-29 that wasn't very well pressurized on like what they told us it was.

And I blew out both eardrums so that, you know, I'd get air whistling through my ears.

And I took amphetamines on the way over and I took sedatives on the way back.

That's what they issued us.

I never smoked.

And I had a sinus infection for all 40 missions.

But unlike you, I couldn't tell my commander, I think I'll just pass on this Yokohama mission.

So are you passing?

Are you passing on this?

Said, no, dad, you shame me.

So, and I went out there, and then I remember going to the doctor, and he said, wow, you've got a very serious sinus infection.

You're going to have to have 20 days of penicillin.

And my dad said, well, that's what they told me.

Only I didn't have penicillin in those days.

So what I'm getting at is that generation, whatever you want to say about them, they lived in physical circumstances that our generation could only imagine.

I don't know.

Yeah, and they did.

They never think about that.

They never read about the Civil War and they think, wow, where did they get their water When Sherman was marching through Georgia or Grant was outside of Richmond, where do they drink water?

And why do they all die of dysentery?

Or why did they all, you know, they get typhus or typhoid?

What was it like to sleep outside in the winter?

What was it like at Valley Forge?

What was it like on the Oregon Trail?

What was it like for these people?

You know, I had an uncle when he was 13, 12 to 13.

They lost their place in New Mexico, my grandmother's brother.

And they said, you come on, they all took the train and they sold their cattle, but they had some good horses.

Said, you drive the horses, three of them, and you ride by yourself.

13 years old from Las Cruces, New Mexico to Selma, California, the 13-year-old.

Come on, how did he eat?

I was thinking, how did he eat?

I used to ask him, how did you eat?

Well, I had some jerky and I had some flour and I made some biscuits and I had some money and I stopped over there.

I drank out of a trough.

So they endured a lot more and they built a lot more.

And we just expect that they were to live that and we could be

moral judges.

They live nasty, short, brutish and solitary lives.

That's what they lived, just what Hobbes said.

And they live lives of quiet desperation and they got no credit.

We don't even know who they are, but we see their footprints everywhere, don't we?

We see it when we all talk about, we won world war ii no you didn't they did

or

you know we stopped the communists at the 38th parallel no they did

and oh we

we've got the most sophisticated air system no all the airports were built by them and

what have we done you were right to bring up social media but they built the Pentagon in what three years during the war two and a half years they built the golden gate bridge look they built the oakland bay bridge

no i what i brought up was the whole electronic technology thing which actually is built on the shoulders of what the military was doing yes

program it was built on a brilliant group of engineers at stanford university yeah sure that whole silicon valley bunch do they have any understanding that their own philosophy is going to boomerang on them No, they're an entitled group.

Yeah, 30 years from now, somebody's going to say, you know what?

Those stupid people in Silicon Valley made these inane video games where you can kill people and artificial realities.

And they took a whole generation of people and they put them in their basement where they're just living vicariously or virtually on their stupid electronic machines.

They didn't give a damn about the social pathologies they created.

Or they're going to say, wow.

They're responsible for a lot of bad things.

People all of a sudden have cell phones and they're texting and they're killing people on the freeway.

And this is the generation that damned the 1950s tobacco companies and said, you're creating cigarettes and you're pushing them on the public and it's killing people in their 50s and 60s.

And the next generation will say, well, you were the ones that pushed these damn cell phones and you created a whole generation of people who were driving far more dangerously than people drunk.

Yeah, and they'll take individual characters like Bill Gates and they'll say, whatever the hell he did with Microsoft, he was on Epstein's plane.

And we know that he was with underage girls and that will be played out to the

antique.

All of them, I just don't understand this.

I was listening to these, all these people who were so self-righteous about January 6th on the television.

I'm thinking, wow, you better not apply your standards to yourself because almost every one of them.

is found wanting.

You know what I mean?

Almost every one of them.

Oh, sure.

Think of Maxine Waters.

She's only been a politician and yet you mean multi-million

money and her husband, and she's completely exempt.

And why?

Because

everybody's afraid that she'll call you a racist.

And she's completely exempt.

She's the one that said that go after them, follow them home, go to the gas station, get in their faces.

That's what she told them.

Kind of a rough version of what Obama said in his 2008 campaign.

And so all of these people, and

I don't want to go into Iran again, but I get really tired of this iconoclasm, conoclasm, statue toppling.

When they renamed Father Sarah Boulevard or Plaza, sort of where I work,

I thought to myself, would any of those 21-year-olds who were so self-righteous and so historically ignorant, could they go down to San Diego and just walk up to Santa Clara?

Maybe they would have an infected foot like Father Father Sarah did, or maybe they'd be physically ill.

Maybe they'd be misguided and they'd feel that it might be better for Native Americans to find Christ and farm rather than to be nomadic.

Maybe that would be part

that they might feel that way if they were back in that day, but could they physically do what Father Sarah did?

No.

No, none of them could.

When Donald Trump won election, you know what they did?

They had puppies and chocolate chip cookies and

sanctuary places on campus where they could cry and hold stuffed animals.

That's what that generation did.

True.

Victor, we're going to need to take a moment for some messages and come right back.

And I hope you won't be disappointed.

I think we're going to leave social media out because I wanted to ask you on July 4th what we should be celebrating.

So we'll be right back.

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z, spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK

or text Victor to 511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device device we trust by visiting zyppah.com and use the code pink or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

We're back and Victor, you know, I was thinking that's a big topic, you know, the question what we should celebrate for July 4th.

But maybe if I could hone this a little bit, I was thinking, well, the natural answer is the Constitution.

And what we see in our current culture is that both sides, left and right, yell about, you know, the Constitution being breached or being wrong or, you know, both sides tend to go both ways.

And I was wondering if you could just bring some balance to that and talk about the merits of the Constitution for this.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Both sides.

Are you a moral equivalency person?

So tell me right now, Sammy, who are the notable conservatives who are attacking the Constitution?

I'm just curious.

Okay.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

You got me.

I know.

I can't.

I don't have any current examples.

So there's two.

Are they saying let's repeal the First Amendment?

No.

Second Amendment?

No.

Third Amendment?

Fourth Amendment?

Fifth Amendment?

no are they saying get rid of the electoral college when they could not win an election because of the blue wall no when the warren court was out of control do they say let's pack it like fdr had done earlier and what they're doing now no do they say let's bring in two new states because we need immediately four conservative centers no do they try to get rid of the filibuster not until harry reed did and okay you got me but i want to just say that i would clarify my question but really what i would like you to talk on is what are the merits of the Constitution?

How are we in this current atmosphere when people are always yelling about something's not for the Constitution or it breaches the Constitution?

And people are not.

Yeah, people don't realize that the Constitution

was the founders who were very well versed.

in European literature and history, as well as being deists and Christians.

And they really did believe that there were alternate forms of government other than the usual monarchy, autocracy, oligarchy,

theocracy,

and anarchy.

And that alternative were consensual, but they were not happy with the British parliamentary system, and they didn't see it working very much else.

And they looked back at the traditions of Western constitutional government.

And they said, there's the Athenian democracy model, where basically

if you want to kill a popular court, you want to kill Socrates today, you can do it.

If you want to kill him the next day, and you can do it.

If you want to kill the Mytileneans one day, you can do it.

The next day, change your mind and don't kill them all.

So the point was they didn't want that.

They understood you have to have a majority vote.

I think it was Plato that said even thieves will vote with a majority about how to divvy up the loot.

So it was innate.

They understood that, but they did not want a Robespierre type equality of result.

They wanted freedom and liberty using democratic auspices, but with checks and balances.

And the Roman model, which came from Crete and Sparta, and what was it?

It had checks and balances.

It had an executive, it had a legislature, and they had courts.

They had two executives.

I think it was a better system than ours, two consuls or two Spartan kings, so that you wouldn't have power in one executive.

But nonetheless, then that system through,

you know, it was enhanced, modified, rejected, improved, Magna Carta, Florentine, Venetian republics, the great philosophical traditions of Montesquieu, David Hume, etc.

And then that's what they drew on.

And they created this constitution, constitutional republic, not democracy, but a representative democracy where people vote for not every single issue, but for representatives.

And they were wise enough to understand that people are evil and they would try to destroy each other.

And so they understood that the executive would try to breach his, go beyond his power.

So he would be checked.

by the Congress.

They understood that Congress would be checked by the executive.

They understood the Supreme Court would be checked by the executive and the vice versa.

So the point was to have gradual incremental change and good governance that allowed passions in the House of Representatives.

They had to be re-elected every two years.

You could be younger.

It was popularly apportioned versus sobriety and caution in the Senate that represented states, not demography.

It was a brilliant system and it was more stable than any other in the world.

It's the oldest democratic, I guess, from the Declaration, what, 246 years?

It's 233 since the Constitution was finally ratified.

So it outlasted every other system.

There was no reason why, even though North America was large, that this country would so dominate the world.

And it doesn't have the biggest area.

It's not as big as Russia.

China is even bigger territorially.

It doesn't have the population of India.

It doesn't have the natural resources of some countries in Africa or South America.

but it had a system of government that was stable and it allowed people to be incorporated in it without losing its character.

And it could be amended.

There was a process to change it.

And so when I hear people for short-term political gain saying, let's rush in a couple of states or let's just vote to change the filibuster by Kamala Harris's vote, and then let's, you know, get a national abortion rights law, then we'll go back and restore the field.

All of that stuff was not designed to happen because they did not want passions.

And that's why people hate it so much, because they really do feel, as all young people do, that equality, equality, equality of opportunity is not enough.

It's got to be equality of results.

It's got to be equity, equity.

And their prolonged adolescent professors imbue them with that.

And that's not what the Constitution is.

It puts a higher premium on liberty and personal freedom and order and property and allows people to be prosperous, but it does not guarantee anywhere in the Constitution or the Declaration that people are going to end up equal.

It says all men are born equal.

It doesn't say all men shall die equally or all men will die with equal property or worth.

And that's what the main objections to it are.

And it's usually attacked by the left.

And throughout history, it's attacked from from two different directions.

The very, very wealthy who say,

I got mine, I got so much of mine that nobody can ever take it away if they tried.

So, you know what?

I think we should have socialism.

We should all be, everybody should be equal.

Just don't take my stuff.

Take that guy in the middle class's stuff.

I don't want him coming up the attic trapdoor.

I don't like him.

He has no culture.

Slam him down.

Get him there.

And then it's the very poor who say, you know, I want stuff from the government.

And then the the traditional bulwark of constitutional government has been the middle class okay so this is what we're going to do on the fourth of july we're all everybody who listens to this podcast before the fourth of july and that may be two people but doesn't matter we're going to all get our glasses at 5 p.m 4th of July Pacific time and toast the Constitution of the United States because you just gave this great reason to and one another one other reason

if you total up the people who died in the revolutionary war the war of 1812

the civil war mexican war before spanish war world war one world war ii

korea vietnam the gulf wars and afghanistan you get to about i think about a million two hundred thousand dead Now you can argue not all of those were not necessary for the existential survival of the United States, but many of them were.

And we owe something to them because most of them were A, men, and B, young, and C, had their whole lives ahead of them and gave it up.

And D, most of us don't know any one of their names.

They don't know any one of their names.

And yet they did it for what?

They did it for this society.

I hope we're worthy of that inheritance.

Sometimes when I walk through San Francisco, or I go on a university campus and I think, wow, all these people in my family died for this.

I hope they understood that.

They had confidence in the system.

So do I.

But I just hope that everybody gives on the 4th of July some idea that this is the Second Continental Congress and this was the Declaration of Independence.

And from somewhere from July 2nd to July 4th, that process culminated on the 4th, supposedly.

And you know, that's when John Adams died and Thomas Jefferson, the old war horses that were in rivalry, they died on the same day, 4th of July.

So it was an iconic date.

And they should not have got independence in the sense that they were fighting the world's largest navy in history, the British Navy.

And they had very few resources.

And when they declared on the fourth Declaration of Independence, it meant nothing because they had to fight 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81.

And then they, at Yorktown, it still was nowhere.

They didn't even have a government.

Then they had to go back in the Articles of Confederation.

So 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87.

They didn't even get a constitution completely ratified, I think, until 88, 1788.

And so then people say, well, they had slavery.

They allowed slaves.

Well, yeah, they had southern states that what do you do with them when they wouldn't give up up slaves?

Do you go to war?

They had nothing.

They had just fought the world's greatest military power.

They had just made this nation.

And they go to these constitutional conventions and they talk about slaves.

And these guys are the wealthiest people in the world in the Carolinas and Southern Virginia.

And what do you do with them?

Well, I guess we should have said, well, Let's go have another war right now and we'll have a civil war and get it over with.

They knew that it wasn't going to be possible.

So what did they do?

They took a deep breath and they said, we have got a big problem that slavery is antithetical to the spirit of the Declaration and the Constitution, but we're not able to fight and we're going to have to fight to free the slaves right now.

But as soon as they created this country, that was one of the main issues.

And it plagued this country all the way till 1861 until the war broke out.

And as I said, 700,000 people, had they died in 1788, there would be nothing right now.

They would have destroyed the entire birth of the country by having a civil war in the first day of the independence.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Victor, we'll change that toast to a national treasure, the Constitution, and those who died for it.

Yes, that's a good.

That sounds very good, Sammy.

All right.

And thank you so much today.

I'm in awe of the landscape that you gave us: of the war on the traditional family, on law and the past generations that is plaguing us right now.

So, you know, I don't usually say things about this, but this is one of your better podcasts.

And I'm going to be surprised if we have fewer people view it than the other podcasts.

This has been awesome.

It's long.

I'm up at 7,200 feet.

And I have this kind of long COVID, and it's kind of like a high cocktail.

just no i i i'm what i meant was i'm so worried about brain fog i try to be very deliberate and then i think what word did i say wrong or something well you floored me and i forgot to remind everybody that victor is the martin and neely anderson senior fellow in military history and classics at the hoover institution and the wayne and marcia buskie distinguished fellow in history at hillsdale college thank you all for listening victor thank you thank everybody for tuning in again.

I much appreciate it.

Much appreciate it.

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

I knew we all had two ages, our actual age and our internal biological age.

What I didn't know is I've likely lowered my biological age without even knowing it.

Here's the thing: because Americans eat so many processed foods and not enough fruits and veggies, many, perhaps most, are 10 plus years older on the inside than their actual age.

They're ticking time bombs.

A major university study suggests how to slow aging and diffuse that biological time bomb.

Participants slowed their aging by drinking field of greens.

That's all.

They didn't change their eating, drinking, or exercise, just field of greens.

When I started field of greens to replace my multivitamin, I was amazed.

After about two weeks, my energy improved, I've been exercising more, and my overall wellness feels great.

Each fruit and vegetable in Field of Greens was doctor selected for specific health benefits.

Cell health, heart, lungs, kidney, metabolism, even healthy weight.

It's wonderful knowing Field of Greens can slow how quickly I'm aging.

And I encourage you to join me, swap your untested fruit, vegetable, or green drink drink for Field of Greens.

While there's time, check out the university study and get 20%

off when using promo code VICTOR at fieldofgreens.com.

That's fieldofgreens.com, promo code Victor.

And we'd like to thank Field of Greens for continuing to sponsor the Victor Davis Hansen Show.