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

This is the Friday news roundup, and we have this Friday, of course, a discussion of Ukraine ahead of us, and then some of California politics.

And I think Ukraine is going to take quite some time, but we we might finish up with a little bit on culture wars and whether the woke movement is actually going to go away ever.

I guess that's my question.

But first let's take a break and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, I know I always ask how you're doing.

California is, of course, still having water trouble.

And we're going to talk about some of the other things with the California state later in the show.

But you must be getting some great weather in the Central Valley right now.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, Sammy.

Great in the sense of cold and we need, you know, 500 hours of temperatures below 50 for.

almonds and deciduous fruit trees to be fertile, their blooms to be fertile.

That's, you have to have sort of, they have to go into hibernation, and that's good.

So we've had this very cold streak, but these huge storms, we only had, you know, it just bumped into us for about 12 hours.

We got about a quarter inch.

We got about eight inches of snow.

Just not going to do it.

One interesting statistic in our little morning weather roundup each week is that the last five years, the wettest month has not been December, January, February, but March.

So we in California know that as the March miracle.

And we got about a week to see, I have a, to see if that's true.

And I have a little ritual.

Every morning I get up, I get, look at the radar, I see these huge, massive storms come up from Australia or Indonesia or across in Japan.

And they going straight toward San Francisco, LA corridor, and then bam, right around Hawaii, they start to turn to the left.

They hit high pressure and they go up to Seattle, British Columbia, and Alaska.

But if one of them just breaks through, sort of like, you know, an opening in a war, they just stampede through the phalanx and they'll get in.

But we haven't had one that can do that yet.

Yeah.

Well, we'll hope for a breakthrough for the Californians.

So let's start.

I know that the Ukraine's been big in the news.

In my estimation, it looks like some good old-fashioned imperialism.

Putin's basically going to fight and take what he can.

And if he gets brought to his knees, he'll give it back.

But I'm not sure how you see that.

But I would like to talk first about the relative strengths of the Ukraine and Russia, if you don't mind speaking on that first.

Well, Ukraine is one of the largest.

It's the size of Texas.

And it's got about 45 million people.

It considers itself at least the Western parts part of Europe.

And it has enormous potential because it's got the most fertile and largest acreage in Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

It's a repository of vast amounts of natural gas.

It's got a lot of precious minerals or rare earth minerals, we should say, necessary for next generation batteries and high-tech.

That said,

it's got the lowest per capita income, I think, in all of Europe.

So what's going on?

What's going on is what we saw with Burizma.

It's an utterly corrupt society.

And part of the problem we're having is that the per capita income in Russia is higher than in Ukraine.

And so we have to be very careful, Sammy, because as conservatives, we're falling into a trap where we give all of the reasons how we got into this paradox.

And we can talk about the corruption in Ukraine and it's ample.

We can talk about the aggression of Vladimir Putin and it's substantial.

We can talk about the appeasement of Obama and the contextualization by Biden.

But that said, we have to be very careful not to excuse what Putin is doing because the left will always say, well, see, you're just an apologist.

Let's unite together.

And what the left is doing is they're trying to use Ukraine to bulk up public opinion at home.

We know what Putin is trying to do.

He's got 100 million fewer people than during the Soviet Union.

He's got 30% less territory.

He does not have the wherewithal to reclaim the borders of the former Soviet Union, and yet that territory and that population is the only mechanism he has to be a front-rank superpower in the League with China and the United States.

So we know he's an opportunistic panther that pounces at the moment he gets an opportunity.

And we've given him a lot this last year.

Yeah.

What can we expect from Europe in this?

What can we expect from Europe?

Well, there's two Europs, isn't there?

There's Romania, Romania, there's Hungary, there's the Czech Republic, there's Poland.

And they know what Russia is like from their 50-year enslavement to the Soviet Union.

And they're very skeptical of postmodern Western Europe.

And so if you look at a poll, I'll just give you one poll that I looked at the other day.

When somebody is asked at 18, would you be willing to fight for your country?

That rubric is about 20% higher in so-called Eastern Europe than Western Europe.

So they still are much more religious, they're much more patriotic, and they're much more acquainted with Russia historically.

And so they're worried.

And they want,

I don't know why we have 30,000 troops still in Germany and they should be in Poland or the Czech state, but I think that's coming.

But as far as Ukraine goes,

Again, it's a dilemma because I could sit here for the next hour and give an exegesis on the corruption of the Ukrainian government, Hunter Biden, Burizma, the checkered career of Colonel,

now Colonel, retired Venman, who basically was not voracious when he didn't disclose under oath his relationship to Adam Schiff and the so-called whistleblower, whom I think he probably

related this confidential phone call, probably against the law, to somebody who wasn't on it, which is not permissible.

And that was the instigator of the first impeachment.

And that hurt Ukraine.

Yet Ukraine apparently had offered him not once, not twice, but three times a ministry of defense.

And so then he went on a tirade about Trump appeasing Russia and hurting Ukraine when Trump had actually sold them not just weapons, but offensive weapons.

Obama had not done that.

And now Biden is finding out that the $2 billion that Ukraine has in American weapons came largely from the Trump administration.

So I could do all of that, but the problem is right now that it doesn't matter because Putin is in Ukraine and he wants to gobble up probably Western Ukraine as well.

And from what we can tell, it's really interesting.

The plan of attack looks a lot like Hitler's September 1st, 1939 absorption of Poland, except, of course, the Soviet Union helped him carve up Eastern Poland.

But what I mean by that, if you look at the Wehrmacht, they had three army groups, as they always did when they went into the Soviet Union.

When they went in to France, they have Army Group 1, 2, or 3, North, Center, South, A, B, C.

But they had an army group up in East Prussia.

now part of Eastern Poland.

They had one in Germany, and they had one and they're recently absorbed Czechoslovakia coming from the south.

And you look at that map of Belarus, and then you start to look at the Black Sea, and then you look at the Russian border, and you can see that from preliminary information, they may be able to invade Ukraine at a lot of different nexuses, and that's going to be very hard to stop.

And I think that that's where my first question was going.

What do you think are the relative military strengths?

I mean, in the sense that it would seem to me that once the invasion begins, Russia would be so much stronger and the Ukraine would just fall flat in front of it.

But maybe not.

Maybe the Ukraine has more strength than somebody like I expect.

Well, they say they do, and they're going to fight in the streets and their wounds will be taken in the front and not the back.

Let's hope so.

But I think they've had about 7 million people leave the country before this crisis.

In other words, they felt that it was so corrupt.

or that there was opportunity elsewhere.

So there are problems within Ukraine that Putin understood and he's trying to exploit.

And there's historical grievances both sides have against each other.

But what the West is trying to do is to turn Ukraine into Afghanistan in 1980.

In other words, make it the graveyard of the Russians.

And to do that, they would have to have street fighting and rural fighting and insurgencies.

But notice what Putin, again, this is from preliminary information.

We've only, it's only been about 12 hours.

But I think what he's going to do is try to decapitate in a shock and awe fashion, hit Kiev, hit Edessa, hit the cities, shock the people into a stasis or just to stun in action.

And maybe his playbook might even be what the United States did so brilliantly in Iraq in March of 2003

when they took out Saddam in three weeks.

But Putin looks at what followed was a quagmire for seven years.

So, and that was the nation-building aspect before we had secured the country.

So I think what he's probably saying is, I'm going to decapitate the apparat or the leadership of Ukraine, and then I'm going to turn it over to the 40% of the population in eastern Ukraine as Russia and let them run it as a puppet state or puppet province before I absorb it.

Wow.

That sounds grim, but we'll still have to wait for it to unfold and see just how strongly the Ukrainians are going to defend themselves.

But I would like to then turn to the Democrats who seem all out on the forefront to support fighting.

They almost seem to be anxious for war.

And as many commentators are saying, that the Democrats are doing this because the elections are coming up.

So what I'd like to ask is, will this really help Democrats in the coming election?

Do you think, given, let's just say it's a war war that goes on for some time.

Is that going to be helpful to them?

Put this in context.

If you look at Biden poll numbers from January 21st to now, there's a pattern there.

And that is whatever the particular issue is in the news, it's been bad.

And it's been a self-created mess.

The border, Afghanistan, inflation, the oil disaster, critical race theory.

And he goes down by three or four points and then he goes back up a point or two and then the next one comes and he goes down five or six points and he goes up one or two but it's been downward but he does recover each one so they look at that and they say wait a minute he's not done yet because people have a natural propensity to want to help the president.

He's an incumbent now.

And more importantly, we have the media, we have social media, we have all the rules and levers of communication, and we can fabricate a successful president of Biden if we don't have a continually bad optics every week.

So they look at this and they said, and you can see them.

I mean, it's kind of ridiculous.

They're tweeting today that this guy is sort of like, you know, Churchill.

Biden stands down, Biden does this, Biden does this, Biden saves his president.

It's a joke.

But they are trying to use this as the first good news because they think it will go back up and set a pattern.

The problem they're having is they have two existential problems.

The first is they are trying to blame inflation, supply chain shortages, gas prices, all of the things that make people despise this administration onto Ukraine.

But that's hard because Ukraine is recent and that started on day one of the Biden administration.

So they really have a bridge too far.

They're trying to bridge it, but it's ridiculous that Ukraine explains all the bad things.

So when I go down to, you know, Fresno Rural Service Station, I fill up at $5.15 for diesel fuel.

They're saying, see, Ukraine did that.

Well, I was doing that three months ago, four months ago, and I was paying $4.50 six months ago.

So that's the one thing they're doing.

The other thing is even more, I think, atrocious.

What they're trying to do is they've got a problem.

So they look at Putin and they see, ah, he went into eastern Ukraine in 2014 after he went into Crimea.

And then he waited in 2022.

He's back in looking at Western Ukraine.

And they're saying, uh-uh, he didn't do anything from 2017 to 2020.

But we can't let the right say, well, that was because Trump deterred him.

Because we tried Russian collusion.

We tried Alpha Bank.

We said he was a Russian asset.

We said he was a traitor.

But yes.

He didn't go in to Ukraine when Trump was president.

So what are they doing?

You read today.

I'm just flabbergasted.

I'm mit to my listeners.

I've never taken a psychedelic drug, but I feel I have after reading the papers today, one of the columnists says he didn't go into Ukraine from 2017 to 2020 because he got everything he wanted from Trump and he wanted Trump to get re-elected.

So I start thinking, okay,

let's use this exegesis in the real world of data and empiricism.

He got everything he wanted.

He got his mercenaries killed in Syria by Trump.

He was delighted.

He got Trump pumping 13 million barrels of oil, though the price was low.

He had very little revenue.

Europe and the mine states were getting.

He loved that too.

Oh, he had that unfair missile agreement with us, and Trump got out of it.

He loved that.

And then he said, you know, Donald Trump, I want you to get elected again because you are selling offensive weapons to Ukraine.

That is wonderful.

We want to see how they work when we invade.

So, you know, keep selling sam missiles and anti-tank weapons and it's just a delightful and then he's thinking we love these sanctions on our oligarchs that's wonderful too and then when we look around the world we want you back because you increase by a hundred million dollars the nato investments in military readiness that helps us too oh by the way we want to praise you we want you back again donald because you upped the defense budget you upped the defense budget and we really like the idea that when somebody opposes the united states you don't go in on the ground you just take them out like you did solemany and baghdadi and isis and all of that means that you're our buddy and we want you back that's what they want us to believe that is so absurd and then contrast that

it doesn't have to be logical victor it just has to be said loud okay but then there's a corollary so then according to this new propaganda that we're supposed to believe that is so outrageous, we're supposed to think into the mind of Putin, remember.

So Putin is saying, oh, wow,

I don't want Joe Biden.

That Joe Biden told me that if I have to hack Americans, it's okay, but I have to at least keep my hands off 16 entities I can't hack.

That's terrible.

And then Joe Biden, I don't want this guy coming around.

I got to get rid of him.

He came to me and he begged me to pump oil.

He put me in a spot.

I have to pump oil for the United States now.

Oh my God, he embarrassed me.

And wow,

he called me a killer and he didn't do anything.

And every time somebody calls me a name, I just, I just wilt like a violet.

I don't know.

It's just, this guy is too much.

And that's what they want us to believe.

It's just absolutely opposite.

These are people who have no shame.

And Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, all these people get on.

They have no historical knowledge.

They have no integrity.

And they try to tell us that he didn't go into Ukraine because Donald Trump was an asset.

I'm using James Clapper's words, or I could use John Brennan's, that he was treasonous and therefore he wanted him in there.

And he didn't want him in there.

He was terrified of Trump.

Everybody was terrified of Trump.

Yeah.

Well, you say they have.

Well, no, they were.

And I think Trump is making a mistake.

I think our readers understand that when he weighs in, it's okay for him to take credit.

But when he says it, he's said on three or four occasions the last 24 hours that Putin is a genius for the way he manipulated Biden.

True, but he has to put an adjective in front of that, a evil genius, a dangerous genius, because if he doesn't, then the left has a headline that says, Trump loves Putin.

Trump praises.

Putin.

Trump thinks Putin's better than we are.

That kind of stuff.

So when you're criticizing the appeasement of Biden and you acknowledge that the Machiavellian Putin has taken us to the cleaners, you still have to, in that moral environment, say that we are a democracy and Putin is a thug.

If you don't do that, then you're playing into the hands of the left.

The second thing we're doing as we're talking right now,

Sammy, what are we not talking about?

We're not talking about high gas.

We're not talking about the border where 2 million people came across in a fiscal year.

We're not talking about critical race whackery.

We're not talking about 7.5 inflation.

We're not talking about the disaster in Afghanistan.

We're talking about Ukraine.

And we're talking in the context of Abraham Lincoln Biden.

And what we should be talking about is something along the following.

If we're going to talk about Ukraine, it should be

one,

tell Vladimir, if you'll give me space, I'll be flexible after the election, Barack Obama, or

we should be talking about reset Hillary Clinton, or we should be talking about, I don't know why we're mad at Putin.

He's one of us.

He's going Western, Joe Biden, as Joe Biden used to lecture everybody.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and we'll be right back to talk about, I wanted to ask you if you feel like we're entering a new age beyond a post-cold war order that we have seen for the last 30 years that has maintained some stability i say that with hesitation but let's first go to these messages

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Welcome back.

And before Victor, you start, I would like to remind everybody that you are the Martin and Eileen Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And that you can be found at your website, victorhanson.com.

That's victorhanson, H-A-N-S-O-N.com.

And now to the big question, are we entering a new age with Joe Biden's approach?

I shouldn't say Joe Biden's approach, although I think the United States approach to diplomacy is always significant.

But with Putin's invasion of the Ukraine.

I think there's three or four things that are very underappreciated, Sammy.

Number one, China is on a trajectory to have a greater GDP than we are.

It doesn't mean they're more productive than we are.

After all, they have almost five times the population that we do.

So we still have a larger GDP with a much more productive workforce in producing goods and services.

But nonetheless, we're not going to be the sole superpower as we were from 1989 until now.

So that is a 30-year reality.

Number two, that is not just an artifact of the fact that China got stronger relative to us and absolutely stronger.

It's also a reflection on us.

If you look at all of our main sources of strength, higher education, it's under assault.

K through 12 is shambles.

Admissions, testing, meritocracy in the universities being undermined by wokeism.

If you look at the military, when you have the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense talking about white wage, white supremacy, climate change, and not battlefield readiness, that filters all through the ranks from captains to majors to lieutenant colonels to colonels to one star.

They all have one thing on their mind.

I do not care whether my men hit the target 99% of the time with their

millimeter guns.

I do not care whether my pilots land on the first

take on the carrier and hit the second cable.

They do care, but they don't care as much as how many women or minorities are transgendered or gay.

That's what I'm getting at.

That is being undermined.

And that's well aside from the pension and the social welfare commissar.

burden that's on the Pentagon budget.

When you look at oil and gas, tomorrow, tomorrow, all Joe Biden would have to do is wake up with a brain transplant and say, oh my God, what have I done?

Sort of like that guy in Star Trek, remember the old Star Trek?

And he's all shot up with sedatives and he's got a Nazi uniform.

Not that Biden would do that, but I'm just saying he was a puppet.

And then suddenly they slap him a couple of times and take away his sedatives and he's, oh my God, what have I done?

Or maybe Alec Guinness in the bridge of the River Kwai, when all he's right before he falls on the plunge, oh my God, what am I done?

I built a bridge for the enemy.

So maybe Biden could do that.

And if he did, he would have to say, we had 13 million.

We're capable of 16 million.

I'm going to take that son of a bitch, excuse me, that SOB Putin, and I'm going to drown him in oil and natural gas, and I'm going to ship natural gas.

Or he could say, we have another problem.

We have a big $30 trillion budget.

Starting tomorrow, we're going to have a balanced budget in three years.

We're going to pay down that damn debt.

So he could do all of these things.

And they're all symptomatic of American weakness.

I haven't even got on to this racial disharmony and tensions between ethnic tribes and genders and everything.

But we have weakened.

So China's got stronger.

We have weakened.

Russia has read the West and it understands that it can destroy NATO by focusing on individual countries in the former Soviet Union and NATO won't do anything.

thing about it.

Not that they should with Ukraine because it's not a NATO member, nor should it be, but the next one may be the Baltic states.

And the reason they won't is that the largest NATO member in terms of army and military deployed is what?

Turkey.

They poll more anti-American than they do anti-Russian.

The next largest country by population is 81 million people in Germany.

They pull, remember, this is Germany.

They pull more ready to work with Russians than they do with us.

They are dependent on 40% of their energy needs from Russia.

And I don't know, they're the ones that, when they don't pay the 2% promised percentage of their annual budgets for military readiness, other countries say, well, if Germany's not going to do it, I'm not going to do it.

You'll never get them to pay as long as Germany will not.

If you were a guy from outer space and you landed here and you explained what I just did to him, this alien would say, hmm, have they ever fought?

I said, yeah, they lost World War I and they lost World War II.

And they they said hmm were they humiliated and destroyed and utterly yes they were and who did it well the united states did help and they said well why would you expect they would like you i'm just being facetious but there's something there in germany that we haven't really talked about trump talked about it but in very bellicose terms that they were easily able to caricature but he was right germany is i don't know if it's a nato member anymore it just cut a deal with the nemesis of nato NATO.

And the left, who all of a sudden flipped and said that we're Winston Churchills who believe in deterrence, they vetoed an effort in the Senate to sanction that pipeline.

So things are changing.

NATO is not what it is.

Putin is the head of the UN Security Council, rotating chair.

The UN used to be a joke, but it wasn't a transparent joke.

It's a farce.

That is just shameless now.

It didn't even make the effort to hide what a farce it is.

China's on the move, Russia's got our number, and we're internally weaker.

So yes, the world is multipolar, to use that establishment term.

It's more dangerous.

And a lot of Americans, if you poll and ask Americans, do you want to get involved in the Ukrainian mess?

75% of them say no.

Yeah, and rightly so.

So I'm ready to move on then because I wanted to look at California.

And I read from one of your colleagues colleagues at the Hoover Institution.

And this will take me just a bit to the listeners because if anybody read this and they were from California, you would just be so enraged.

And the gist of what Lee Ohanian was getting at in his article, California on the Mind, is that Californian taxpayers are paying the politicians who are responding to the influence of trade unions for the state, and that these state workers are getting paid so much and this unions are making so much money that that's how politics turns out in California in the favor of the union and so the state workers.

And so here are some of his statistics.

On average, broadly, he says the California state worker earns $143,000.

which is twice the average of the private sector.

And he goes on to say that the local government employees earn approximately $131,000 on the average.

Again, I believe these include benefits as well.

And the private sector only earns $71,000 on the average.

The CHP on the average earns $200,000 with benefits.

Employment development department worker earns $104,000 on the average and the DMV earns 94,000 on the average.

And so you can see that compared to that 71,000 average for the private sector, they're all earning far above the ordinary, the private sector person.

And they're paying into their unions in 2020 over a trillion dollars.

And so that union influence goes into the politicians.

That's just outrageous.

I read that and I thought, wow, who would want to be in California?

You're just subject to a whole bunch of.

And so all this money going into these state workers in an inefficient state and then all the influence on the politicians of the state.

And the ordinary person, the private sector, gets left out.

And so I wanted to hear your thoughts on that, Victor.

The other night I had a dream and I dreamed I sprouted wings and was flying over the state line eastward.

But some of you, my detractors, might think I sprouted sort of reptilian vampire wings, whatever it was.

It was a way to get out of here.

And just Leo Hannah is

a professor at UCL.

He's a Hoover fellow.

He's very bright.

He's very professional.

He's very sober and judicious.

He never says anything that he can't back up.

And he's very well regarded because he looks at data.

And what the data you quoted is pretty damning.

And it reminds us of some truths that we don't often appreciate about California.

There's five or six groups that run this state.

I know it's the $5 trillion in market capitalization represented by Apple and Google and Facebook and the lesser, you know, Oracle and Twitter, all in one place.

So, yes, they run it because what they basically do to the state and says you can regulate, you can raise taxes, you can have poor service, terrible schools, terrible infrastructure, highest sales, highest income, highest gas tax, and they can leave.

And I'm quoting now, and I quote him at length in The Dying Citizen.

And I think I did again in the Trump book.

And it basically says, get out of here.

We don't want you.

We want people of color coming in from the third world because we've got all this tech money.

And we're not subject to the consequences of our own ideology, not on water, not on power, not on gas, not on schools, not on walls, nothing.

Okay, so that's pretty clear that tech people run the state.

But another one, and I think this is what he's getting at, is

the public employees, especially the California Teachers Association, but also, you know, law enforcement unions,

the SEIU.

I went to the DMV not too long ago.

Everybody had a purple t-shirt.

It says protest SEIU.

At the DMV, they were wearing them.

in Readley.

And I thought, wow.

I said to one person just jokingly, are you a DMV employee?

Are you a union member?

And she said, when do you want to get waited on?

She smiled when she said that.

But the point I'm making, and then when you look at the pension funds, it's STARS, the state teachers' retirement system, but especially PERS,

the public employees' retirement system.

You're talking about a trillion.

It's huge.

And where they put that money and how they invest changes public policy.

The only thing that can stop them is they've had their way for so so long with supermajorities of leftists in the state assembly, the state senate, all statewide offices, the ninth district, federal courts, the state courts.

They run the state.

They had their way and they got everything they wanted and they destroyed the state.

And they destroyed the state to such a degree that the people who worship them are terrified now, whether it's voting to recall people in San Francisco who wanted to change, you know, Washington's name or Dian Feinstein's name on a school, but the bathrooms were filthy or the schools were half empty or they shut them down, or whether they're driving along on the 101 outside Watsonville, or they're going down the 99 in Turlock and they stop and they look at these road conditions.

They say, my God, I'm in the third world.

But how can this be?

I pay the highest gas tax in the United States.

Or they're driving by Stonehenge over here out on the 99 near Fresno, where we spent, what, $15 billion and we haven't laid one foot of high-speed rail track.

So they see it every day.

It's in our face here.

And it's absurd.

And now we're in a drought and we're thinking, gosh, our reservoirs are empty.

And

I give it to the left.

They're saying, you don't need any more reservoirs because we let the water go out the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds anyway.

So if you built them, we just drained them too.

And they have a point in a way.

I mean, three years ago, we had a record wet year.

And if we had just had 10 million acre feet more of reservoirs, which probably would have been cheaper than the overpasses in Fresno alone for high-speed rail, we'd be in a great position.

But it's not going to change until they run it in the ground and the survivors or the remnants that are still here say, you know what, we've been nuked by these people.

It's kind of like an apocalyptic, you know, Book of Eli or one of those books.

where the remnants are kind of saying, let's dark ages.

It reminds me a lot of the dark ages, Sammy.

That,

remember the Dark Ages?

Could I just have a tangent on that for a minute?

Yeah, go ahead.

Well, Dark Ages means we use it in reference to the collapse of the Empire in the West at Rome and that period from 500 to maybe 900, or we use it in earlier terms of the collapse of Mycenaean society in Greece.

the Linear B palaces at Pylos or Mycenae, Tirins, et cetera.

And then there was a complete depopulation and collapse of civilization, as happens when you get intricate systems collapse of an intricate civilization.

And then you had basically 350, 400 years of nomadism, tribalism, depopulation,

lack of agriculture, herdsmen, et cetera.

And we don't get civilization until the Greek city-state starts to appear in the early 8th century.

Okay.

That said, what do dark age people like?

They can't build things.

So they walk around and they look at the lion gate at Mycenae and they think, man, that's 20 tons.

They don't say that, but they say, we couldn't even imagine how they lifted that up.

Or they go, they're walking around herding their goats by Tirans 200 years later and they think, well, how did they build those walls?

That one stone is bigger than my house.

I don't know how, who were these people?

So then myth takes over and bards take over and there's illiteracy.

And maybe there's a Mycenaean lord named Ajax.

Maybe there's one named Achilles.

And over the years, that name now becomes a hero.

And that's the embryo of creating mythology.

But it's basically myths are created by people of a depressed, illiterate society that try to explain two things.

The oral tradition that says at one time there was a great Trojan-Greek war, or there was a great king called Agamemnon or a great warrior, and they don't see it in their own times.

So they exaggerate and they romanticize, or they see the physical remains.

They see linear booby tablets in the ground when they're plowing or their

cow eats something and expels it in their feces.

They see this and they say, wow, they wrote, or they had funny little graphic thing.

We don't know what that is.

And they say this cyclops came down.

They were supernatural people.

They lifted the stone.

Well, that's what we are in California.

We're in a dark age now.

And we're starting to look at the California Aqueduct.

And we're starting to look at the penstocks and the grapevine.

And we're starting to look at the Great Folsom Dam.

Or we're looking at dams on the Klamath River.

Or we're looking at

the architecture at Stanford University.

Or we're looking at any of these places or San Francisco.

Or we happen to...

find an old artifact called what Vertigo and we have an ancient machine we can still see what it was like in San Francisco in the 1950s when people were well-dressed and polite and they walked the streets.

And we sort of romanticize that because we can't do it now.

We have nobody here that can do it.

I don't know whether it's a lack of scientific talent, we don't have the skilled labor, or it's just a matter of willpower that we would rather take the money that we make than divide it up and encourage pathologies, but or it's our mentality is warped or ruined, whatever it is, we are a dark age people and we have inherited an infrastructure that people greater than we were made at one time, but we don't know their names.

So

you go up to San Luis Reservoir.

What is, you know, the BF Cis,

you know, who is BF Cis?

Nobody cares.

You see those names on the freeways, the Jim Smith freeway or something like this, the John Krebs Wilderness Area.

Nobody knows who those people are.

They don't care.

They're not taught that.

They're taught to hate those people, largely on terms of their gender and race.

So we're a dark age people.

We're parasitical on the past and we have to mythologize who they were because we don't have any idea.

The only difference between us and other dark age people, they have positive mythologies of their founders and their and their betters.

We have negative ones.

Yeah, I think Lee Ohanian's article is sort of suggesting that the money is all going to this public servant class and they're very leisured and wealthy and they don't see right now anything wrong with what's going on, even though they're not very active in getting their jobs done, right?

As we all know, public service is.

It's 40%.

40% of Americans work for some sort of local, state, regional, federal government.

And we know what happens because we can see the Soviet Union or Venezuela when that happened.

I'll give you one example.

When I see a construction site by a private firm, in a city, I see orange tape around it.

I see signs warning, you know, and I see everybody busy.

When I'm driving down a California freeway and Caltrans, which is a government agency, it has a subcontractor, but it's a public agency.

And I see people working on, I'm scared to death because...

to the degree they're working and mostly they're taking a break and no offense but a lot of them are you don't see a proper safety protocol you see cones you see bumps in the road that aren't labeled you see cracks in the pavement that they don't tell you and it's too narrow the lane for trucks so when you go into a construction zone some trucker is going 70 miles an hour and you have about one inch on one side and a half an inch on the other next to the barrier or his truck pick your fate you know and so that's what happens when you have government there's no recourse you can't sue the state the state says we are postmodern we're very sophisticated about safety and environmental issues but you know what we're going to break them.

It's the same attitude that John Kerry said when caught flying to Davos and environmental conferences when he said, I need this plane.

How else can I adjudicate what you idiots need?

I got to get there quick.

I got to be able to sleep.

I got to protect myself.

But, you know, so I have to have an exemption.

Just kind of like Gavin Newsome thinking, if I'm going to get up every morning and get those masks on you stupid idiots and make sure you fools get jabbed, I've got to get good food.

And I can't get good food unless I go to the French laundry.

And I can't go to the French laundry unless I have good company.

And I can't have good company and good food unless I take off that stupid mask that was never intended for people like me.

It was intended for you, idiots.

That's the attitude.

I'm not being facetious.

I know that.

I know that.

Okay, Victor.

Well, we're getting close to the end here, and we need to take another break.

And then we'll come right back and talk a little bit about culture wars.

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Welcome back.

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and he's starting an Instagram page as well.

I didn't know any of this.

I'm entrusting you guys to do it all.

I'm in ignorama.

It's linear B to me.

It is.

It's too many.

I can read some symbols of linear B, but not many.

Yeah.

All right.

So I was just looking at the news the other day and I was noticing they can't let go of poor old J.K.

Rawlings, who only just said that what is visible to the eye that female is a biological matter and not a state of mind and at least you have to admit that there's a debate there even if you don't agree with the side she has taken but anyways they are endlessly hounding her Well, this is interesting because I read other articles on the culture wars are being lost by the Democrats, and I hope that's true.

But also, I was reminded of a quote from Kenneth Clark, who's a historian, and he wrote a survey of civilization, and he concluded in it this interesting thing, or something that I believe too.

He says, quote, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

And so, here's my question: Are we just caught in this democracy that has this not distorted, but allows for human nature to fully realize itself, especially in the form of mob rule.

And is it just going to kill our civilization, the creativity behind it?

You know, just as Rawlings is being subject to all of those, and I really think it's a part of mob rule, all of the critique by our democracy, right?

Or is it just that, you know, you get into the arena, J.K.

Rawlings, and you have to expect to take the blows?

There's a lot there.

In her case, the left has a little problem because Harry Potter is a multi-billion dollar industry, and their children were raised on it.

And they were things they liked about it.

In other words, witchcraft and sort of atheism and a whole alternate world apart from the Christian allegories and metaphors of, say, Tolkien's Lord of the Ring.

So it was preferable for them.

And then she weighed in in a very serious,

erudite, logical manner that transgenderism is always, there is such a thing as biological gender dysphoria.

And it's been known since antiquity.

And we had words for it.

I've talked about that before, transsexualism, transvestism.

Okay.

But then when she went on a little further and said that she thought that radical transgenderism, especially with competitions and biological males competing in female sports, et cetera, et cetera.

Anyway, she got on the wrong side of a very small but powerful constituency, and they decided to pull a postmodern trick on her.

And the postmodern trick, and those in the university know what it is, is this postmodern idea that the text, once it's created, exists.

And the author then becomes almost superfluous.

So when you want to read about Mark Twain or understand you can't go home again or talk about Hemingway, you don't really look at their lives or the motivations they wrote or their personal experiences that found their way into their novels.

You just say, the text just bursts out of their head, and there it is, and just as much mine as it is theirs.

And so, what we're seeing now is they love Harry Potter because they think it represents their values, but they don't like her.

They did like her.

So now they're saying it's ours.

So they don't even invite her to Harry Potter commemorations or special documentaries or the next probably

the next

versions that Hollywood makes of them, they'll make them and make them like Marvel comic books, but she won't be a part of it because she created something that now exists apart from her.

And that's what they're doing.

As far as your other worries, Sammy, you know, when you're young, you really resent, if you read Plato, this idea of an elite, a natural elite, or you read Tocqueville, and as wonderful as he is, he says things like, prolonged adolescence is dangerous.

And

most people would rather be equal and poor than have it been better off but have a few more equal than they are.

I can mention Machiavelli or Hobbes.

But my point is this, is that there's the natural instinct imprinted into our biology, our brain chemistry, that we want to be equal in the sense not of idealism, but we don't want anybody else to have more than we are.

If you don't believe that, we have four dogs and you go out and look at them.

And if you give one little biscuit to one dog, they will attack that dog, even though they don't like that biscuit.

Or you give them four different types.

I can see one dog, she will eat the biggest one, her portion.

She won't finish it, but she'll go over and take the other portions from the other dogs, even though she won't come back and finish her own.

In other words, it's the idea that I don't want anybody to have any more than I do.

It's kind of a selfish instinct under the guise of being equal, but each person then, that's the strongest human motivation.

And you try to repress that by equality of opportunity.

And then some people get wealth here, they get better off.

You encourage them, philanthropy, to give back, community.

But when you let that human urge go, then you destroy civilization.

And that's what's happening.

We have a rule of equality of result, and we've renamed it equity.

And we've added on its little flourishes and Phillips, you know, diversity and inclusion.

But that's what it is.

And so what you're worried about is that anything that's beautiful, anything that's lovely, anything that's superior to anything else is an enemy of the people.

It's very Marxist.

And that's what they're doing.

They hate great novels.

They just despise them.

They deliberately go after people like Jefferson or Washington or Lincoln, and they hate them.

They try to destroy everything they touch.

They go after movies that were classics.

They go after the best actors.

They go after the best professors.

They go after the best authors because they don't like this idea of excellence because they feel they can't achieve it and they're mad that anybody could and they don't want anybody to be recompensed better more than anybody else.

Yeah, and it seems like those traditions that have put limits on human nature so that we didn't act on those instincts, like the Christian tradition or the whole idea of living a moderate, humble life, which actually is kind of Christian as well.

But those things are are under attack by the left as bygone ideas, it seems like.

And so they're tearing down that whole tradition that would keep human nature in a more moderate form.

That's true.

But what I was describing is the condition of mankind in general.

And that desire for a quality of result and that hatred of somebody who gets more than you do is innate in all of us.

But what you're saying is there are methods of Auschwitzing it, it, lessening it, mitigating it.

One is religion.

You know, blessed are the meek, or it's easier for a camel to go through an iron needle or a rich man to go to heaven.

So, or there's going to be a hereafter where sins are dealt with.

Okay.

Or your soul, in the case of Plato or whatever, the inside of your suka can be damaged and you'll have to come back again and again to get it straightened out.

Very Eastern in some ways.

Okay.

So you either manipulate and encourage it or you suppress that pernicious trait, just like an animal that wants to bite somebody.

Okay, but our elite right now in this country are so wealthy.

We've never seen this level of leisure and affluence.

I mean, when you go and look at the staggering amounts of money, I was looking at houses just for the heck of it in Monterey.

1.5 million for 1,400 square feet of a home built in 1970.

It's obscene.

I was looking at cars the other day, a ram pickup with everything on it, $102,000.

So we have staggering amounts of money, lifestyles, and that creates among these, and who are these people?

They're people with letters after their name, PhD, MBA, JD.

And you create this aristocracy, this plutocracy, and a lot of them are guilty.

And so they're so guilty that they have a problem because they do not want to give up their home.

You can't tell a guy in Woodside or you can't tell somebody in Corinna Del Mar, you can't, I'm using California references, or you can't tell somebody in Lafayette, you got that, A, you parasite, you got that money on fairly against the people.

So give up your 9,000 square foot home in Napa or something.

No, they don't want to do that.

So they create, they project or they construct.

sort of a medieval guilt.

And that medieval guilt is,

we support woke.

We support diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We think that we all suffer from white supremacy.

Is that enough?

You leave us alone and I can still get to Silicon Valley heaven.

I don't feel too guilty now that I confessed my sins or I gave some money to Black Lives Matter.

What are the penance?

Can you give me a shirt that has, you know, wool, scratchy stuff inside so it'll hurt me?

Should I lash my back?

What do I need to do to keep all my stuff and not feel guilty and not not have people storming my front door?

Tell me what I have to do.

You know, and that's sort of, I've used that metaphor before.

But if you were a money lender and you wanted to go to heaven, then you bought a couple of blocks for the dome on St.

Peter's and you wrote out a formal contract.

The left, wealthy, white, and Asian and minority woke are writing out veritable contracts.

A, if I'm Don Lamon.

I don't know, or the Cuomo, whoever it is, leave me alone to my wealth.

I'm Leonard Caprio.

I got to have my private jet and talk about, you know, climate change.

That squares the circle.

Leave my stuff alone.

If you leave me alone, I get to enjoy it.

I can handle the personal guilt that I have far more than anybody else.

And people are going to be envious.

So I will just talk about Marxist equality, diversion, inclusion, equity.

You know, you really see it just to finish this rant, Sammy, when there's two people, two types of people in this society.

One is the university or college president, and the other is the professional sports owner.

The one, the latter, is a billionaire or a multi-billionaire to own a successful sports franchise.

And that's what it is to get into the so-called big leagues of the NBA or the NFL, Major League Baseball Association.

And to be an academic, you've had to really work hard, not as a scholar, but as an obsequious operator to get to be college president.

Okay.

And it's very funny about both those groups.

They are the most vocal, the most vocal about diversity, equity, inclusion, and affirmative action.

And guess what?

They're usually lily white male.

They're white males.

And if you would listen to the, if you would carry out the logic of their own philosophies, they should be fired.

They should say something like the following.

Well, I've owned the Los Angeles Rams now for 15 years.

I feel so terrible.

I'm a white male.

And you know what?

The number of owners in these sports franchises does not reflect the demography demography of the United States.

I want more inclusion.

So I'm selling everything out to a person of color at a discount.

But no, they'll never do that.

They always talk about coaches, assistant coaches, general managers.

Or if you're a college president, instead of writing one of these letters to every faculty and student, I'm shocked, not in our name, did this happen.

Usually it's some fake, I don't want to get into it, but whatever the incident is, they give this moral instruction.

We're going to make the campus look like America.

We're going going to be diversity, we're going to be inclusion, we're going to have the marginalized people.

I'm thinking, you're the least marginalized person imaginable.

You're wealthy, you're white, you're male, so everybody follows the rules.

Why don't we just have a rule that 12%,

I shouldn't say proportional representation, given we're in the age of repertory representation.

Why don't we say 20% of all Ivy League presidents and UC campuses cannot be white male?

See what happens.

Yeah, it would be be interesting.

What you're telling me.

Oh, go ahead.

Well, just, no, you go ahead because I didn't mind.

Well,

I was going to say what you're telling me then is these wealthy people are creating a culture, you know, as penance, they're creating a culture that is criticizing and taking down these people of genius for small infraction.

And they're really creating a culture that's ultimately going to undermine even their own wealth, it seems to me, maybe not for years to come, but nonetheless.

Absolutely.

And it's destroying meritocracy.

And I have a general will when I'm writing a book on the ancient world now.

And when I look at scholarship in the United States and in Britain, maybe not so much in Germany and France and Italy, but mostly in the United States, when I see someone who's an author, I look them up because the article seems silly.

And if they have had a PhD after 2010, maybe 2000, I don't,

you can see the decline in scholarship.

They don't know the languages.

They don't have a rational, they're not aware of the sources, and it's always on a politicized, weaponized topic.

And that's true in medicine.

That's true in everything, that we're dumbing down everything or politicizing it.

I think yesterday's FBI agent is much more skilled than today's.

I think yesterday's...

third grade teacher knew a lot more than today's third grade teacher.

And so it's crossed the spectrum.

You know, one of the most embarrassing or traumatic things I've ever done was I had been farming after I got my PhD and I was farming 180 acres on my brother.

And, you know, I was filthy, dirty.

I had a shotgun in the car, which you're not supposed to take to campus.

And I got a part-time job for $400

to teach two Latin classes at Cal State Fresno.

I'd never really been there before.

It was 30 miles away.

I felt like I, I use that metaphor, I grew wings and went to heaven suddenly i had an income and i was not going to make just six thousand dollars a year i was going to make ten so i went up there and immediately i met this guy he was a white male and he'd been a part-time teacher for 10 years and he came over to me and said this is a dead end

you have to teach by the hour you get no money the guy who's a full professor top step gets 10 times or eight times more per class than you do.

You have no benefits.

I said, yeah, but I got some money that's not predicated on Sunmate.

And so what I'm getting at is this guy poured his heart out.

So I, like an idiot, you know, who's on the lowest rung of the totem pole is a part-time teacher at a California state campus like Fresno.

So I go to this very tenured senior philosophy professor on behalf of this other part-time teacher and say, you know, I'm very upset.

This guy has told me he's been there 10 years.

And you guys wait till the last moment.

And then you hire him and humiliate him.

And then he kind of drives all over the san joaquin valley at jcs and state colleges to piecemeal together 25 000 and i was looking at my future i thought as well so it wasn't entirely not self-interested yes unselfish not self-interested or whatever but so anyway i said to this guy why are you doing this to him and you know what he said to me that he was in a department at that time of eight white males and one woman, eight, all of whom were hired in the 60s without dissertations being completed when they hired anybody off the street with an ABD in the California.

And he said, well, I'm devoted to affirmative, they didn't call it diversity.

I'm devoted to affirmative action, and we've decided to make a statement.

So we're not going to hire him.

He's a white male and he's mediocre and like an idiot.

I said, well, what are you?

And he said, I'm a white male, of course, but I'm doing some serious.

research and Spinoza.

I said, oh, so you're exempt from the ramifications of your.

And he said, aren't you a part-time teacher?

I said, I am, but I just want to know why you don't resign your job.

You've been here how many years?

20 years?

You're making 55,000.

Why don't you just quit?

Step aside and let somebody that's marginalized have your position.

That's destructive.

That's nihilistic.

That's anarchistic.

And you know what?

Why don't you step aside?

Next thing I knew, this person had gone to the chairman of this thing and he called me in and said, I don't think that you should come back next semester.

And all all of a sudden i had all this image you know of three children no health plan and crooked teeth and all this stuff and i and yet i somehow got hired the next year but for the next 25 years that guy would just i would walk down a corridor and he would see me and it was like a billiard ball he just you know bounced the opposite way but that told me something that all of these white privileged males that are woke and you can see them in the military and they lecture people that are you're a franchise owner or you're a college president they never ever make a statement and they could have a lot of effect if they said you know what i will not order other people who don't make as much as i do and do not have my privilege and are younger and starting out in their careers i'm not going to judge them by their race and curtail their careers so i am going to resign and hire somebody unlike my gender and race as a statement If that happened, that would be very nice to see.

It would be nice to see, but I don't see it coming.

And I'm surprised that you got hired on at all after saying that.

That's a long story that sometimes if I have a gin and tonic, Sammy, you can get it out of me.

Okay, that sounds like something for a future episode.

So we're at the end here.

All I have to say is I wish people would.

Can I say one thing, Sammy, before we go?

Go ahead, yeah.

Okay, I have one last memory.

A good friend of mine who was on the faculty, who was an advocate.

And he came up and put his arm around me when he heard that the chairman had heard this from this other professor.

And as a part-time teacher, I mouthed off to a full professor and said, resign.

He said to me, he said, and I was really dirty.

I mean, I was literally irrigating 180 acres and watching them pick grapes and running up there in old clothes and teaching, you know, Latin.

And he said to me, put his arm around me, said, Victor, I want to help you, but you are utterly unsuitable for this job in every aspect of the work.

So I want to warn you that if you want my support, you're going to have to shape up

and dress better, best better, talk better, defer to my betters.

Yeah,

I tried my best, but it didn't quite work.

Okay, so okay.

What I want to say is just leave JK Rawling alone with her.

I agree.

I like her.

I like her.

All right.

Thank you, Victor Davis Hansen.

Okay.

Thank everybody for listening and much appreciate it.

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