The Sovietization of American Life: A Closer Look

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Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is the weekend edition where we talk about things outside of the current news, basically, historical often.

Today, we're going to look at Victor's article in American Greatness, the Sovietization of American life, and look a little bit more deeply into some of the topics and perhaps contrast with the Soviet Union and perhaps Mao's cultural revolution and such.

But first let's take a moment for some messages and we'll be right back.

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We're back, and I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Victor, I understand that you came back.

from Israel just recently and I was wondering if you could give us some reflections on the country that built an oasis in the desert, essentially, beautiful functioning cities and

preservation of culture everywhere in Israel.

So what were your thoughts on Israel?

I hadn't been there in a long time.

In 2003, I stayed there, I think it was seven or eight days, and then I had a short stay in 2006 in transit.

But this was very different.

When you looked at the skyline of Tel Aviv, I counted when, I think there were 60 60 cranes at work they're trying to rebuild the freeway system

and it's clogged and

the sophisticated malls in jerusalem for example they look like they come out of i don't know the most tony uh neighborhoods in los angeles with one caveat they're entirely safe and they're immaculate so it's in a economic renaissance.

Partly that's due to it is energy independent.

It's got huge reserves now of natural gas.

Partly it's because the IDF is so more sophisticated comparatively to its potential adversaries that it's creating deterrence.

Partly when

I think we forget this, we don't appreciate it, but when Bibi Netanyahu was in charge of the economy under Sharon, he was kind of given a blank check, partly because Sharon, I don't think, was very well versed in economic matters.

Partly, it was a way to ensure that Bibi wouldn't challenge him for national leadership within the Likud Party.

But nevertheless, he instituted a series of free market reforms and the tax rates went down, the regulations went down, not to where they should be.

But the result is he tapped into that innate brilliance of the Jewish people and that entrepreneurial spirit, and it's transformed.

It's just incredible.

And as an American, when you look at things in American cities, and

in the last year, I think I've been to places like Williamton, Delaware.

I've been to Los Angeles too many times, to San Francisco, to Portland, to Seattle, to Detroit, you name them.

And they don't look like Israeli cities.

So I think Americans need to take a deep breath and say to ourselves, we pride ourselves as the most technologically advanced, sophisticated, successful people in the world.

But we have about 600,000 people living on the street.

It is not safe to walk in our neighborhoods.

And look at little Israel, 11 million people.

My gosh, on

the anniversary of the liberation of East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, it was a big celebration and there was nine-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds.

flying flags and chanting all by themselves unescorted by adults at 10 p.m.

You couldn't do that.

People walked anywhere.

There was not one pickpocket.

There was not one theft.

There was no

anything.

And so whatever they're doing is successful.

I'm not saying there's not existential problems.

One, of course, is Iran.

And we had as a guest, the national security advisor just stepped down, Meyer ben-Shaba.

And he gave a very chilling account of Israel's security worries about a nuclear Iran.

We had Mr.

Hinkle, a military historian, Professor Hinkle, and he gave an equally chilling account that any sense,

whether intentional or not, on the part of the IDF that they could not ensure classical deterrence was fatal.

We had Carolyn Glick, the columnist, well-known American originally, but has migrated to Israel, and she gave another chilling dissection of the over 1 million, 20% of the population, Arab Israelis, some Christian, but the majority Muslim that are living predominantly in the northern part of the Sea of Galilee area, but not exclusively so.

And in recent polls, they,

not just one, but in a series of polls, they offered some reflections that were hard for Israelis to take.

Number one, they were happier to be inside the Israeli borders than outside.

And not all of them were there before 1947.

Many have migrated, and that's a great problem with Israel.

People from the West Bank wanting to live permanently inside Israel.

But the vast majority expressed more solidarity with the country that they didn't want to go back or to migrate to.

And because of the parliamentary system and the Bennett government, then that group of Arab Muslims has great say in the in the formation of a government.

And that's why there was perceptions of Israel has lost deterrence that led to a series of violent acts right before we arrived.

We also had Ido Netanyahu, the brother of Bibi Netanyahu, give a very cogent historical lecture on sort of the history of Israel and how it survived when nobody thought it would.

We had Mr.

Netanyahu himself, Bibi, come in and give a very spirited defense of Israel, but both of them outlining the critical importance of the United States government and the American people.

Without the American people, they feel that Israel simply wouldn't have existed.

So that was reassuring.

We also had a wonderful speaker from Hillsdale College.

My colleague Bruce Thornton was not able to come.

He does a wonderful job.

He's done it for 15 years.

And Ken Calvert from Hillsdale Professor of History gave four really inspired lectures on Jewish history from pre-biblical times all the way through the Roman period, which were very good.

I gave a lecture on the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and contradictions in U.S.

foreign policy with Israel.

And then I did an interview.

I kind of conducted an interview with National Security Shabbat

advisor.

And then I went to Jerusalem one day and gave a private little talk and then a public lecture for the Tikva Foundation.

It was pretty busy.

Yeah.

We went every day.

I think maybe the average age of our group traditionally is around 74, I think.

We checked once.

We had over about 100 people.

No one, we had to be all tested for COVID upon re-entering the United States, although I was very worried that a few people were ill.

They all tested negative and were entered back in the United States, but I'm afraid that I've heard.

secondhand that some of them had COVID.

I don't know if they picked it up on the plane or they had picked it up in Israel, but had not tested positive yet.

That was unfortunate.

The weather was beautiful, a little hot, up to 102 degrees at one point.

We stayed at the Dan Carmel and Haifa, the King David in Jerusalem, the Hilton in Tel Aviv.

They were wonderful hotels.

The Israeli staff, our partners who helped us organize it.

I should say that 16 years ago, Al Phillip, the Hillsdale, he's closely connected with Hillsdale University.

His wife is the admissions officer, but he and I decided rather than me to do cruises that we could do our own self-finance tour and do it much better than major universities in the sense that we could get five-star hotels, we could get major lectures that were superior to what many universities offer.

We would be about 30% cheaper because we would spend zero on advertising and we would have zero people coming along.

Problem of all these educational tours is you get so many staffers as an entitlement or as a reward for good service, they're allowed to go on that.

That's very expensive.

So, literally, we just had Al and myself, and a wonderful person from Hillsdale, Rebecca.

I don't want to give her last name so people don't bug her, but she was wonderful.

And she's been there with us from the beginning.

And I think the only sad thing about it is because I started this when I was 52 or 53,

and And maybe it's just the depression of having COVID, getting over COVID.

And I was tested with PCRs, I think, twice, and then daily antigens before I went there, all of which were negative.

But I was getting over it and I had kind of a relapse.

And now I've had a bad relapse because it was, you know, it was 14.

We did the pre-tour too.

So it was almost, I think from the day I left Selma to the day I got back, it was 15 or 16 days of 16 hour days.

That's not a good thing if you've got something wrong with you, you can't get over COVID.

But all that aside, I think it was a great trip.

Israel was very inspirational.

It's my last trip.

I kind of retired from the tour business, but it went out with a bang.

Yeah, I heard some of your clients that went along with you said one of the things that really impressed them about the Israelis is that they all love their country.

They kept saying that.

That was very interesting.

These people love their country.

Yeah, I was just, I can't imagine 12-year-old Americans outside of rural America trying to wave flags.

And yet we've been so affluent and so free.

And

there's no appreciation, no gratitude.

They're tearing down statues.

It was very funny.

They believe they're better in the alternative.

They believe they don't have to be perfect to be good.

They kept saying to me, everywhere I went, an Israeli would come up to me.

They watched Fox News.

So to the degree that I'm on there, I haven't been on there very much because of this illness, but they would come up and they'd say, What happened to you, Americans?

What's going on to America?

Why are you doing this?

Don't you understand that everybody in the world counts on you?

Why are you cannibalizing yourself?

You're good.

Don't you know that?

It's very moving to hear that.

And I think everybody that's listening should remember that when you're in times of crisis, and we are right now with the plague and Iran and our border and hyperinflation and crime and the inability to find affordable fuels.

It's very important for reassurance to have memories of your institutions and your prior generations.

Not that you idolize them or you romanticize them, but you think, you know what?

These people got through the Civil War.

It killed 700,000 of them.

My God, they eliminated slavery.

They instituted civil rights.

They won World War I by a late entry that was critical.

They won World War II.

They stopped the Soviets and they stopped the communist Chinese.

These were amazing people.

We are living and using the bridges, the buildings that they created, and they had much harsher and poorer lives than us.

But when you sever that umbilical cord to the past, and you have no source of reassurance or guidance or gratitude for the present.

One of the things when when I'm kind of feeling bad, I have this sense of gratitude to my own parents and my grandparents and that whole network of people.

When I grew up on this farm where I'm speaking from right now, I think, wow, there was my aunt with polio and she was there talking to me all the time in her late 50s, crippled her entire life, never one word of complaint.

There were my grandparents that, you know, got married in this house in 1911.

There was my aunt who died at 49 of breast cancer, wonderful woman, went to stand.

There was my mom, my dad, my siblings, my cousins.

That was a huge huge infrastructure group and i'm so lucky to have had it all and it all was upbeat and it was kind of tragic but upbeat you know well we lost the raising crop but don't you know kind of right out of isaiah the harvest is passed we are not saved but we're going to go on and it was well

Lucy died at 49, but you know what?

We're going to come together and get over this.

And you know what?

Oh,

we had a frost and it wiped out the entire grape crop.

And we never did a frost in late April, but we did and we're going to live with it.

You guys, we're all here on the same place.

It was reassuring, but when you cut that or you blame your parents or you sever your family history, you have nothing.

So when you see all these homeless people or we see all these statue topplers and these name changers and these graffiti artists, what we're really seeing is people have divorced themselves, who truncated all connection with their families and their histories and their country and all the ordeals that went through to give them such privilege.

It's really disturbing.

And the Israelis sense that immediately.

And so their attitude is if our enemies are going to destroy us and Iran is going to try to nuke us, we won't want to tell the world there will be no second Holocaust.

We are united.

We're not arrogant, but we're not going to go to Auschwitz this time around.

And we believe in Israel.

We believe in the Jewish people.

We're confident.

We have no excuses.

We don't say we're perfect.

We're always arguing and self-critical.

We want to be improvement, but we're not going to sit here and have some insane government every other week say we're a one-bomb state.

It's not going to happen.

I think that's kind of moving for Americans to hear that.

It's right out of the 1940s and FDR speeches or Churchill's speeches during World War II.

So that's the impression, the windy explanation of the impressions I had on that trip.

From that trip.

No, those are fascinating.

But let's still turn to the Sovietization of American life.

And I thought I would start off by asking and see if you can go into a little more depth than you were able to in the article itself on, first of all, the arrests of Peter Navarro and Roger Stone and how they signaled the wrong but new path of governance.

And I should say to your readers that the broader theme of your article is that the left leadership pursues ideology and in its wake, they potentially destroy the Constitution, the state, the economy, and our very lives.

So what do Peter Navarro and Roger Stone show us about the path of governance?

Well,

you know,

Does anybody really believe that you have to shackle a 72-year-old person because he didn't comply with a congressional subpoena?

And we have to be very explicit.

Remember what the congressional subpoena was.

It was from a congressional House committee that was, it's formed like all other special committees.

That is, that the majority party has a majority.

And so they pick their members and the house minority leader picks theirs and then they form a committee.

But for one of the rare times in history, Speaker and majority leader Nancy Pelosi said to Kevin McCarthy, we're not going to put this in here.

Uh-uh.

None of your Republicans are going to be serving on this committee.

We're going to pick the people.

And the Republicans said, you can't do that.

And they said, okay,

if

you don't want to let me pick who you should pick, then I'm going to pick two Republicans of myself.

And I'm going to pick two that voted to impeach Donald Trump.

Subtext, this is about Donald Trump and make sure he's not going to be reelected.

or I should say run for a second term.

So that's where we are with it.

And so some people said, this is a farce, but why would you treat him like a common criminal?

Or Roger Stone is many things.

I don't know him.

I don't approve a lot of things he said or done.

But does anybody believe you need a SWAT team to go to his home and tip off CNN so they can film it?

Does anybody really think that because a diary is missing that Joe Biden's wayward daughter and the manner that his wayward son lost his laptop, that if it that James O'Keefe and Operation Veritas has knowledge of that, that you need to go burst into his house and drag him out in the hallway in his underwear at night

so when you see that then you say okay these are extreme but this is what the doj does but they don't they don't do it to eric holder when he's in contempt they don't go and take Andrew McCabe and put him in chains and say, you know what, you lied to a federal investigator.

They don't do that.

They don't do any of that.

And so people feel that this government, this bureaucracy, is out of control.

And it is.

And I think if you get a Republican, the first and the most important thing they have to do if they win majorities is to break up this administrative monopoly in Washington.

I mean that literally.

They need to relay cut the FBI office to the center of the state, outsource many of its divisions.

They need to take the IRS out of Washington.

They need to take a lot of the Department of Agriculture, put the Department of Energy in Texas, Department of Agriculture in Fresno.

Just do that.

Just and stop this incestuous,

oh,

my husband is undersecretary, you know, at the State Department, and I'm a senior anchor for CNN.

And, you know, then we're both going to go and be lobbying.

Just stop all that.

Permanent abuse of judge, jury, and executioner power.

Do you see this as destroying our culture, though?

It's destroying the government.

Yeah, they are.

I mean, I think when Lois Lerner took the IRS and she deliberately targeted conservative organizations seeking nonprofit status before the 2012 election for the direct benefit of the Barack Obama campaign, and then she staged a way of kind of having a question

in a public forum that she would kind of admit it because she was worried about being indicted.

Then she pled the fifth and there was never any consequences to that.

and when you see people like under biden to apparently say you know what oh by the way i forgot to report a million dollars people don't like that to give you an example about 10 years ago the irs i was speaking and a bureau handled some of it

and some of it was individual but i reported all of it of course but they felt that because I had done some of it on my own, that didn't match what the Bureau did.

So they wrote me a letter and they said, you're going to pay 1.5% per month and you owe several thousand dollars.

I was scared.

And then I went to an accountant and they said, well, this is just

a childish mistake on their part, but it took him hours to get through to somebody.

It was very expensive.

And after that, it had the effect of me spending twice his amount of time on my IRS.

And then I said myself, I'm not taking any deductions.

I'm not going to ever deduct.

I hadn't.

I said, I'm never going to deduct my home office.

I do a lot of work out here.

At this house, everybody that comes in and out is business.

Yesterday, we had people coming here, you know, to talk business.

And I'm doing a podcast right now from my home.

I don't deduct any of it as business because I'm terrified of the IRS.

And I've never been audited.

But when you get a letter like that, and so I thought to myself, these people never get letters like that.

And they send the FBI into school board meetings.

They send the the FBI everywhere.

Why don't they stop these shootings?

Why don't they undercover FBI do?

Why didn't they find the Sarnad brothers?

Why did the San Bernardino shooting go on?

Why do they go after the trivial when they can't deal with the existential?

So I think it's a corrupt organization, not the FBI people in the field.

I have the utmost admiration.

But when I look at the careers of a James Comey or an Andrew McCabe or a Lisa Page or Peter Strzok, I see James Baker.

I see a pattern there.

I see a pattern with Brennan.

I see a pattern with Clapper.

I even see a pattern with Robert Mutto.

I see a pattern with Collins.

I see an arrogance of entrenched judicial, executive, and legislative power in one hand, and that's dangerous.

We need to break these things up and decentralize them and have them audited.

Do you think that would take care of or exercise the left-wing bent of these people who are actively politically exercising their left-wing ideas?

i think it would help i mean this country this republic survived a long time without a department of education and without a department of energy didn't it yeah and it can surely survive again without them and i would like to know what pete buttigig is doing right now to make gas prices go down or the freeway safer or the trains not be looted why do we need this guy to pontificate on social issues that are not in his purview and so and i'm not just picking on the left i mean when you go to washington you see all of the lobbyists, they're not all left-wing.

They're just equally divided.

And there's something really incestuous and wrong about how that permanent state, these unelected people have so much more power than elected officers.

Their attitude is,

that congressman, he thinks he's going to investigate the EPA and we have the abuse of the Inland Waterways Act.

Hmm.

He has a staff of seven.

I've got a staff of 5,000.

He's going to be up for reelection.

I've got a permanent job.

One tweet and he's out.

I've got civil service.

That's their attitude.

Don't screw with me.

Yeah,

I think that your article is emphasizing too, that these

people are also part of the orthodox left-wing position as well.

And that that is becoming destructive.

And we talked about

in another podcast that it's sort of like Mao's

Cultural Revolution or the Soviets in the 30s, National Socialists in the 1930s, Jacobins for that terrible 1793 reign of terror year.

What I mean by that is they replace empiricism by ideology.

And so things are adjudicated on whether someone is ideologically correct.

We used to say this wouldn't happen when they got to atomic nuclear power plants or pilots.

It's now happening, pilots.

That New York Times article says that the cockpit is not white and male anymore what do we care that's like saying the nba is not black and male anymore i don't care what color people are in the nb i just want to see the best athletes perform i don't care who goes to the nba you know i don't care if asians are overrepresented at harvard if they're all 90 then maybe that sends a message if you want to go to harvard then follow if you're a wealthy white kid for example, and you want to go to Harvard, well, then you should work as hard as an Asian immigrant.

But this idea that we're going to be proportional representative

in things that are very critical, but we're not in other things.

75% of NFL, African American, no problem.

Entertainers, no problem.

Commercials, no problem.

But pilots, yes.

So this is dangerous because when you substitute considerations of merit, you substitute ideology for merit, then you bring people out of the woodwork that are professional ideologues.

That's what happened.

And all those states collapse.

That's what happened to Mao.

Every incompetent, jealous, envious, wannabe put on his little,

you know, scarf on, red scarf, and he waved his little

sayings of Mao, and he went after a professor or an engineer or a doctor and tried to destroy them.

And the result was they destroyed the country.

And

I can see it, the Sovietization, what's happening when I drive into towns that I grew up in.

They don't work.

Yes.

And but part of what your article is pointing out too is that these people in the FBI and the CIA and the DHS and IRS that are ideologically left have made it to the top of these institutions and that that's part of the sovietization meaning that those are the people that are promoted, even in the military and the Pentagon.

We can't break that.

It's chock full of left-wing ideologues, the full all of the government.

Or am I wrong?

Well, people make the, I keep using that tired phrase, people make the necessary adjustments.

So if you're a colonel, And I wrote this in the article, ask yourself about the military.

So you're at Bagram and you don't really know what's going on so you show initiative this chaos of the retreat and you get a brigade or so and you make a sanitary corridor around that and you save the base so and you try to get all the weapons inside it but you're on record that you know you say to another person take down that stupid pride flag from the embassy that's only going to aggravate local senses and don't you know what i mean don't talk about george floyd murals in a traditional society.

Now ask yourself, are you going to be rewarded for exemplary military conduct that saved thousands of dollars, billions of dollars of equipment and maybe hundreds of lives?

Or are you going to be punished for being unorthodox or politically incorrect

thought crime?

And you know what the answer is.

So people make the adjustment.

They make the adjustment.

They know that they order an artillery strike in.

Afghanistan, they may be subject to internal review and their career ruined.

And there's some general who say, you know what?

I'm not going to die for that SOB.

That was a good strike he made.

But you know what?

The New York Times ran with that story and I'm not going to be labeled a conservative right-wing ideologue by defending him.

So put him up to the internal review.

And so everybody makes those adjustments and they think to themselves in the case of generals, they think, you know what?

I go before if I'm Mark Milley and I go before there and I know from the prep that they're going to ask me about white supremacy and Professor Kendi and climate change, I'm going to say all the necessary things.

If I'm Lloyd Austin and I was at Raytheon and I want to get back to Raytheon when I'm out of here as defense secretary, do you think I'm going to question climate change or white supremacy?

No,

because they'll have some boycott of me or Raytheon will think I'm too conservative.

But I have a lot of expertise about the labyrinth of.

Pentagon procurement.

I'm not going to endanger that by speaking what I think is the truth.

So you condition that all the way down the officer ranks.

And that's the way that the Soviet system works.

It's the way the university works.

You think any professor today,

when he sees a colleague that they go after, is going to say something?

I mean, I've been in that situation and I have spoken out for professors, especially when I was at Cal State Fresno.

I got in big trouble.

And

when I look back at what happened for speaking or trying to hire people they wouldn't let me hire, I felt good what I did, but there were points where I said, you know, I got three kids and I've got a money-losing farm and I'm going to be fired because these people are nuts and you don't dare say something.

When you walk on campus and you see the voice of Otsalon newspaper and your picture's there with a crosshair and the meeting are right at your nose and you go when you write Mexifornia and you go and you tell a high administration official, these people are disseminating a picture with my face on it or they're implying that I should be shot, and nobody says anything, or they suggest that you ask for it.

That's hard to do.

Are you in a committee and somebody says, we're going to give an honorary degree to this person?

And you say, this person didn't even get a BA.

Well, we're going to get them a BA.

This is a very important alumni, alumnus, but they didn't do the work.

Well, we're going to get them the work.

We're going to do this.

And I said, you can't do that.

You get in trouble.

And so my point is that that's what a Soviet system is like.

So everybody's sort of like they're in Warsaw around 1958.

They nod and say, okay, I think one thing, I say another.

That's what's really scary about this system now.

And it started with Obama, but it really intensified during the COVID period when people went crazy.

So let's just take an arbitrary to end the discussion, Sammy.

I would say March 2020 to the midterms 2022 will be seen by historians with any sense as the most revolutionary dangerous period in the post-war era.

You're probably right there, Victor.

Let's take a moment for some messages and then come right back because I want to ask you

the question that I feel like you're begging is: do people make the adjustment back?

But let's listen to these messages first.

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Welcome back.

So, Victor, what are your thoughts on that?

I mean, you say people make the necessary adjustments into a Sovietized system, but can they make the necessary adjustment back, you know, or away from such a system?

Let's put it this way.

when you saw the berlin wall fall and you saw literally a million berliners out there right or east germans and they all had their little sledgehammers remember that yeah do you think any of them had been informers in their apartment building before that i do you think any of them were in ministries of truth i do i think many of them were censors i do so why did they go out there all of a sudden and do that did they do it because they were brave no they did it because they felt that the majority of the people had now switched and they made the necessary adjustments.

Why do you think the 49ers, when they're 0 and 10 or 1 and 9 or whatever, I don't follow it anymore, but why do you think that their stadium is empty?

And why is it full when they're 11 and all going to the Super Bowl?

And the answer is people.

People make the necessary adjustment.

They want to be identified with a successful or winning cause.

So you take these midterms and you're right, 10 seats won't do anything.

If they don't take the Senate, it won't do anything.

But they take the Senate and they take the House and they get a good glimpse of two more years of Joe Biden, then people are going to make the necessary adjustments.

And you're already starting to see it, as we've talked on earlier broadcasts, that

the system doesn't work and people are now coming out.

Why is Bill Maher?

I mean, this guy used to say that he prayed for a recession during the Trump administration.

I heard him say that.

He said, oh my God.

In other words, he was willing to have people's lives wrecked in order to make Trump

less viable.

Yes.

And now all of a sudden, why is he doing this now?

Is it because he thinks Trump is over with, that the left has got out of control, that he senses the government is changing?

Why is Dave Chappelle doing this?

I would like to say because they're brave Mavericks, but I don't think they're quite completely brave Myowicks.

They're braver than their compatriots, but they're doing it because they sense something is going on.

But before this happens, you've got to have a lot of Ilya Shapiro's and Professor Kotz.

Their heads are going to be in the guillotine.

And then they can't guillotine everybody.

And then people wake up and they get rid of the Robespierre brothers.

That's who we have running the government, the Robespierre brothers.

At some point, people are going to say,

you know, when somebody says a Professor Kendi or, you know, a Condohesi Coates or somebody like that says, oh, or Joey Reid, you're racist.

And I think you're systemically racist.

Somebody's going to say,

say what you want.

You do your worst.

I do my best.

May the best person win, but I'm not going to live in fear of you anymore.

I'm not a racist.

You're the racist.

You're the one who's obsessed by race.

You're a member of the most affluent, leisured class of Americans, this generation, is what I mean.

In history, I have no apologies.

And if you're unhappy, then that's your problem.

But don't come to a stranger and call me racist.

It has zero effect on same thing with sexists, same thing with transgenderism.

If I go into a Starbucks and it says, you know, I don't know if there's any left, but there says male.

And I see, you know, or if you go in to a female and you see a person with a penis, then don't be afraid of saying you don't belong in this particular children.

And if people hear this and they say, we're going to go after you for saying that,

you just have to say, that's my own personal opinion.

And you can bully me me all you want, but it's very dangerous for people, young children, to go in and see somebody of an opposite sex using the same bathroom.

And that is what anatomically they are.

And I understand gender dysphoria and all that, but people will start to speak up.

And you see, Des Santis is already doing it in Florida.

He doesn't miss an occasion.

He's trying to say that, you know, I'm the Trump that takes on the left without the tweets.

I don't know if that's a successful strategy, but boy, he's unafraid.

And his attitude is the next left-wing group that starts to pontificate and attack the people of Florida, if they get one dime in subsidies, they're not going to get it anymore and let them just stew in that juice.

And that's why the left hates them so much.

Yeah.

Who knows?

We might have a president someday.

What if we had a president that said,

if you're Fresno or you're San Bernardino or you're, I don't know, you're a county in Arizona or New Mexico, and you say that federal immigration law no longer applies within your jurisdiction, then you're just like South Carolina in 1832.

You're a nullification zealot, and we're going to do just what Andrew Jackson did.

We're going to cut off funds for you.

And you're not going to get any funds.

If you think you don't need the federal government's law, then

you're not going to get federal government help.

That would stop it really quick, wouldn't it?

Yeah, it sure would.

Speaking of states, your article talks a lot about California and California is often seen as the petri dish for political change.

And I was wondering if you gave us an account of what's happening there with this left ideology and will the rest of the country follow suit?

Well, to answer that, we've got to remember that California is not the state of Ronald Reagan and George Ignasian and Pete Wilson or even Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And the left bragged about this.

I'm not talking about great replacement theory.

And I quoted people chapter and verse in The Dying Citizen that were pretty racist, that they were gleeful that the so-called white middle class, entrepreneurial class left the state for no-tax states, where they got some good schools and infrastructure and less crime and less taxes to boot.

And then we had about half of the nation's illegal aliens settle in the last 30 years.

And then we had the largest infusion of capital in the history of civilization, $6 trillion of market capitalization in Silicon Valley.

And by the way, that kind of destroyed the old boy network.

Not that I like the old liberal network in San Francisco and LA, but the techies came in with huge funds and hard left, not liberal views, hard left.

And so that's what California is.

It's run by the hard left

and

there's no opposition.

It's a one-party state.

I've got an article coming out in the New Criterion soon, the neo-Confederate impulse.

If you just come from Mars and you say, oh, I'm in a time machine.

I'm going to go to 1850s Georgia or Mississippi, and then I'm going to go to 2020s, San Francisco, oh, California.

Wow, they're both one-party states.

Wow, they both talk about succeeding from the union because they're so much better than everybody else.

Wow, they're fixated on one-drop rules of race.

All they talk about is race and one's racial pedigree.

Wow, they think one person's race should give them greater advantages and hiring and things.

Wow, they have a subservient serf class that lives in shacks on the streets.

Well, they have sort of a plantations attitude.

I'm talking about El Camino Royale and the buses parked out in front of Stanford University of tech service people, you know, janitors and people like that that can't afford even to live in a house.

while they work at Apple or Google.

So that's what California is.

It's a plantationist neo-Confederate state.

And there's a lot of brilliant people writing.

This guy that's running for governor, a disaffected liberal Michael Schellenberger, he's been very old.

I don't think he's going to win.

I wish he would win.

He's been very critical.

Edward Ring is starting to write, I think he has a series commissioned, some brilliant articles on catastrophic water and energy policies.

Joel Kotkin, the urban geographer, Chapman College, gosh, he's been a voice in the wilderness for years.

And he's an old-fashioned liberal Democrat that said, this thing is catastrophic, this thing being the California value system.

Yeah, and they are destroying the state infrastructure, it seems like, as well.

And while they're implementing their left-wing or their woke

agenda.

And think what you just said, Sammy.

So we have one nuclear power plant left at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo.

And we don't have enough power.

We have 41 million people.

And hydroelectric, which is 10% of our power needs,

can't operate fully in a drought.

They've decommissioned all the oil burning.

So we have natural gas and we have wind and solar.

But we know wind and solar are not enough.

So what do they do?

They have voted to get rid of Diablo Canyon.

Never had an accident.

It's clean.

It provides, I think it's 11% of the state's.

energy.

We will have brownouts if they had done that.

And suddenly they said, oh,

wow, we can't do that.

They don't quite say it like that.

And they've spent $15 billion on high-speed rail.

They haven't laid a decade one foot of track.

And the mass transit from Bakersfield, I like Bakersfield, one of my favorite cities.

I love Merced.

But Bakersfield to Merced is the high speed to nowhere if you don't go between San Francisco

population-wise.

You know what I mean?

There's

20 million people that from LA to San Francisco, you could connect.

And right next to it, right next to it is a Santa Fe track, an Amtrak.

And it's eight miles from my home, as is the high-speed rail.

And when you see those tracks, the train just sit there on a parallel track to let the other one go by.

They don't even have two tracks.

And then right next to it is we're supposed to have had a six-lane super freeway called the 99.

all the way, you know, from the grapevine all the way up to Northern California.

and it is not six lanes in northern parts from bycellia to turlock or up south of stockton or in between sacramento it's a death trap of four lanes and you would think that any sane person would say before we have utopia of high-speed rail and wind and solar we're going to make sure we have affordable electricity and we're going to have safe transportation and we're going to have a railroad where you don't sit on a sidetrack and they can't do that because they're ideologues and people are saying you know what I voted for all that when we were wealthy and we were still enjoying the scent and the fumes of Dick Mason

and Pete Wilson and Reagan.

But you know what?

They've been in power now and they've ruined everything.

And the streets are filthy and the highways are clogged and the taxes are 13.3 and the kilowattage is 27 cents an hour and going, I mean, a kilowatt hour and going up.

And the schools are rated 45 or so

in high school and eighth grade test scores.

And we've got 22% people living below the poverty line.

And we've got one third of all the welfare recipients in the United States.

We've got half of the illegal aliens, 27%.

of the resident population was not born in the United States and has not been fully assimilated or we haven't even made the effort.

So yeah, that's what California is.

Yeah.

Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and come right back and then talk about the wages of this left radical ideology.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, I wanted to talk a little bit about the wages of left's radical ideology.

And when I say that, I mean things like the compromise of our First and Second Amendments or proposed compromise, dissent being squashed, people forced to conform or risk ostracism, crime thrives, anything of the economic failures.

Are all of these things the result of this left ideology that we're seeing now?

I think it is long and short term.

So So long term,

the left always believes in radical egalitarianism and

equality of result.

So anything that they feel is an obstruction to that, which is the Electoral College, Supreme Court occasion, nine person,

50 state union, filibuster they want to destroy.

So they're always trying to do that.

And then in particular, in this particular time and space, they have failed.

They were given a historic opportunity with the control of the Congress and the House, very narrow.

They didn't really have a majority of Americans that wanted this.

And they had 102 people vote outside of Election Day, and they elected somebody who ran a stealth candidacy, and he got elected.

They had all the levers of power, and they inherited an economy that was roaring to come back after the lockdowns.

They inherited a deterrent foreign policy.

They inherited a deregulated economy.

They inherited a a pretty safe trend of crime going down.

And they inherited a very affordable gas and oil that we were worried that price wasn't sufficient to support frackers.

And they took that paradise and they turned it into a desert in less than two years.

And they can't defend it.

So what they're doing now, Sammy, to answer your question directly, is they are focusing on structural things they're blaming that they don't like about the country because the country's results don't give them them what they want.

So, the First Amendment is hate speech.

We've got to curtail the First Amendment.

And the Second Amendment is death.

So, we've got to curtail the Second Amendment.

So, this week it was the Electoral College.

They're all after the Electoral College.

Yeah.

And they want to get rid of it because it's no longer the Blue Wall.

Remember the Blue Wall?

They used to brag, chapter, and views: oh, before

the elections even held,

we can never win.

We can never lose because Illinois and New York and California, they're all

blue votes in the bag.

We don't even have to campaign in those states, and they're the two most populous states, and I think the fifth most populous.

And Texas is turning blue, and Florida is almost blue.

And the Electoral College, and when they don't get their way like a teenager, they whine and they want to change the rule.

Supreme Court's wonderful at nine members, as long as Earl Warren is the Chief Justice and you've got people who are apostates like, you know, Justice Stevens or Justice Souter,

or you've got hardcore ideologues like the First Justice Brennan and things like that.

When you lose that, then all of a sudden it's got to be changed.

Same thing with a filibuster.

I'm Barack Obama.

I don't want Joe Jelito to be on that court.

I'm going to filibuster him.

I'm giving a...

eulogy for the death of a congressional colleague, John Lewis, and I'm going to take that opportunity, hijack the occasion, and say that the filibuster is a racist neo-Confederate relic.

That's what we're dealing with.

So these people think everybody,

they have no consistent ideology other than power.

And when they have the government and they can ram through things, they're fine with the system.

When the system doesn't work for them at that particular time, then they want to change it.

They have no apologies for being hypocritical.

If tomorrow...

They have no foresight to see that that might go against them in the future.

I mean I don't think they've ever read book three of Thucydides at

26 when he has that long excursus of the revolution at Corsaira, modern-day Corfu.

And he talks about these two radical factions, the left and the right, and they're killing each other.

And in the process, they destroy all custom and tradition and law, and they change it.

And he makes an editorial comment.

He says, it's the condition of man, I'm paraphrasing, but they never understand that the institutions have to be preserved because sometime they're going to find themselves in need of it.

But when they destroy them and then they're on the alice of power, there's no refuge for them.

And so when you destroy the First Amendment or you destroy the Second Amendment or you destroy

you know, the idea of a filibuster, you destroy a 50-state union or electoral college, then you're going to need it sometime.

And believe me, I've given this rant so often, I don't want to repeat it, but there are a lot of Old Testament Republicans, and they believe that if you just do what the left did,

they set a lot of precedents that are going to be very tempting when they take power.

Just think of it.

Nancy Pelosi told the nation that the Speaker of the House has a right to tear up the State of the Union address on national TV and humiliate the president.

So let's see if that happens to Joe Biden with Kevin McCarthy.

Nancy Pelosi started the precedent that the speaker does not have to put the minority leaders' selections on a committee, right?

So we'll see.

The Democrats institutionalized the idea that you can impeach a first-term president.

As soon as you seize control after the first midterms, without a special counsel investigation, without a full hearing, without cross-examination of wishes.

And if you really want to go, you can impeach the SOB if that's what you think he is after he leaves office as a private citizen.

So we'll see how that works.

But the Republicans are not only going to gain power, they're going to gain a lot of precedence for the abuse of power that the Democrats bequeathed them.

And we'll see whether they're New Testament Republicans and say, I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to turn the other cheek.

Or their Old Testament and say, you know what, eye for an eye, and they'll never learn unless they get it in return.

So it's going to be very interesting.

But they set some very terrible precedents.

Yeah, they sure did.

You know, it's like I mentioned on an earlier broadcast about Jonathan Katz.

So they set the precedent at Princeton that if you disagree with somebody, that you can go back through their entire history.

And if you find that they had had a consensual relations with an adult student

and you've already been punished for it, they can punish you again.

If we have a big landslide and Princeton starts to get attacked by its alumni and there's a change in the country and they get another president, they have some very prominent left-wing professors and somebody gets angry at what they say.

And are they going to go back and say, you know what, we're going to examine 25 years of your conduct in the classroom extracurricular?

Do they really want to do that?

But that's what happens when you destroy

custom and tradition.

and you subject something to somebody to jeopardy for short-term political advantage, like they did Mr.

Katz.

He'd already been tried, so to speak, for that crime.

I see it where I work at Stanford University all the time.

They went after Scott Atlas 100, I guess for what?

They never really said.

All of the things he suggested turned out to be right.

A, the vaccinations are not foolproof about infections.

The virus is mutable.

Get a vaccination.

It will mitigate the symptoms in most cases.

Mask wearing, if it's not an N95 mask, is of dubious value.

Social distancing can be useful at times, spikes, but otherwise, if it's permanent, it will destroy people's lives, inflict psychological turmoil on the nation, and create a medical catastrophe of misappointment, surgery, spousal abuse, alcoholism, drug use, suicide.

Everything he said was right.

And my university that I work at censored him.

And nobody said anything except a few brave people.

And

so that's what happens.

When you destroy precedence, what I was getting at is, do you think that if we have some liberal professor and we have a very conservative trend and this professor starts to disagree or somebody with a conservative establishment, medical establishment, something, are we going to have 100 professors that are conservative or people in the community demanding to fire that person?

I hope not.

But they have set the precedent and they keep setting these precedents.

And believe me, when you have affirmative action and you say that we're going to adjudicate the admissions by race,

okay, you're doing it for a liberal point of view.

It doesn't mean that somebody else in 30 years won't pick up on that and do it for purposes other than what you intended.

So it's better to leave these institutions alone that have been over time shown to be very valuable.

I got really angry.

The reason I'm on a rant is not just because my mind is out, although it is, but I was listening to all these left-wing people with this week's talking points about the Electoral College, and they never read the Federalist Papers, or the idea they did not want multi-party parliamentary hijacking by minority parties, or they didn't want a national vote that could be you know, destroyed by fraud.

They wanted each state to be in charge, or they wanted people represented by their states instead of just being Americans.

They'd also be Californians, or I shouldn't say California, at the time, a Virginian or a Vermonter.

There were reasons, and it's held up pretty well.

So anyway, it's very scary to destroy an institution.

It seems like if you look back historically, for example, let's just take the university, but also governing institutions.

You had people that would have been considered conservative that were a large part of the population of the faculty in the universities or in the government institutions.

and they did not stop the liberal opinion or liberal ideas in their underlings and then that liberalism sort of bubbled up to the top but it is not as tolerant as the old you know 50s 60s 70s

mainstream culture like the mainstream culture in the 50s, 60s seems to have tolerated radical liberal ideas a lot more agilely than the current liberal opinion.

It just doesn't tolerate others opinions.

If I was sarcastic, I'd say duh.

I know.

But I'm not sarcastic.

You make a point and it's a good one.

And let's just be honest.

The left's ideology is contrary to human nature.

and they understand that.

Most people, if you put 10 people on 10 acres after 50 years, they say sharing doesn't work because that guy's lazy or that guy works too hard.

And we're not going to split it up equally.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, but my point is.

My point is it's not natural.

Communism is not natural.

Socialism is not natural.

Racial preferences, whatever, are not natural.

They're not in spirit of what constitutional government's all about.

So they can't be tolerant.

They cannot be tolerant.

They cannot be tolerant of people because inevitably the people will vote them out.

You can't do it in Russia.

You can't do it in Mao's China.

You can't do it in North Korea.

You can't do it in Cuba.

You can't do it in Nicaragua.

You can't do it in Venezuela.

You can't do it in Iran because the government is contrary to human nature.

And that's what the left is.

So the left does not say you're going to destroy the transportation industry.

I mean, people are not going to destroy the transportation industry for climate change because some bureaucrat people are not going to open a border and say borders are passe and you know what two million people as i said earlier 100 people went to israel with me and they all were in apprehension that they might test positive and be denied entry back in the united states and tailing maybe ten thousand dollars if they were quarantined from five to ten days depending on their test results hotel living expenses change tickets and they look at that TV while they're sitting in quarantine and they see another 11,000 scheduled to go across the border no test no vaccination nothing and they're not going to put up with that so what the left's radical equality of result by government mandated coercion

that's that's kind of redundancy to say mandated coercion but nevertheless they're not going to put up with that and so if they're not going to put up for that then what does the left do?

It unleashes the media and calls them racist.

It tries to change the electoral college of their filibuster.

It makes sure 102 million people don't vote on election day that voted.

It does anything but trust the people.

Just read what the New York Times, the Washington Post, they just, every single article is ideological.

And when they see something that's, you know, inconvenient to the truth, they massage it.

If I know there's a law, and I've mentioned this before, that says you have to identify a suspect with as much detail as you can to protect students on a campus who has committed a violent act, that's a law, the Clary Act.

And I see universities that I've been associated with that deliberately do not provide a description of the suspect because they know to do so is anti-their ideology and they're willing to let people run a greater risk and violate the law.

Their attitude is, I'm in a minority.

I'm superior.

I'm a more humane, brighter people than these stupid people.

So I have the right to violate the law, but I can't quite tell people I'm doing it because most people disagree with me.

So I'm just going to do it.

And then they probably don't even know there's a law about that.

Or, you know, when there's 10 catalytic converters stolen and somebody sees the specific, we're not going to tell you because you know what?

If you lose your catalytic converter, that's your problem.

I'm just quoting directly.

from a similar comparing, you know, on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

They stopped showing videos of violent people because they thought that that would be insensitive to particular groups.

But the septect was, yeah, get robbed or raped or beaten your head in for the team.

Take one for the team because they don't have popular support.

All these blue states, what's fascinating, I'll just end our conversation.

What's fascinating today is you're watching it implode like the Berlin Wall.

So people are leaving Illinois and New York and California.

Capital is leaving.

People are not going downtown Seattle.

Chicago is shut down.

People say, I can't do it anymore.

And they're lying and lying and people are not going to

vote for them anymore.

Yeah.

So the left is contrary to nature.

Socialism is contrary to nature.

Equity by result is contrary to nature.

So they go the next step and said, give me the power, give me the media, and I will force people to do what's good for them.

And if you or Ilya Shapiro or your Jonathan Katz or your Scott Atlas, I will destroy you.

And that's what they do.

Yep.

All right, Victor.

I want want to remind people that they can find you at victorhanson.com and that they can become subscribers and five dollars for a month or fifty dollars for the entire year it's a great deal and there's lots of exclusive material to our subscribers thank you victor for talking to us about the sovietization of american life today it was absolutely fascinating to be honest.

Well, I'm very sensitive because my brain doesn't work and I'm afraid that

I let down everybody.

But it's working like a fox.

No, it isn't.

I hate this stupid long code or whatever it is.

I want to destroy it.

All right.

All right.

Well, anyway, we'll hope we'll let you go and hopefully your body will destroy that COVID.

Thank you very much.

This is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink and are signing off.

I thank everybody for listening.

I very, very much appreciate every one of you.

Thank you.