1960s: Looking Back and Forward at Counter-Culture

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Greetings and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Saturday edition where we like to do something a little different and set a weekend tone.

It is usually a little less political and a little more historical, but nothing's perfect.

And today we have the 1960s on the docket, and

that's a little bit scary because

it tends to be a black hole that we often go down.

So I'm just warning everyone, all the listeners today, I'm not responsible.

And with that, we'll start with the Joe Rogan Neil Young, which is what brought us to the 1960s.

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Welcome back, and we're glad to have everybody here.

Victor, how are you doing today?

Is it a good good day in California?

I have mixed feelings about that.

It's a beautiful day.

It's going to be 60-something degrees.

The Sierras are going to be in the high 50s, and

it feels like late February, early March, rather than...

January, end of January, beginning of February.

So I'm worried.

I know I'm obsessing to the audience about no rain, no snow, drought,

water table dropping, et cetera, but that's what's happening.

But I always have this faith in something called the March miracle.

I've seen it about five times in my 68 years here on the farm where suddenly, you know, you get you're almost in summer and then you get a brief period from the end of February to the 10th of March where you get snow and it saves you.

And it didn't happen last year.

We had a little one in early, late February, but not enough.

But I'm hoping that will happen.

Yeah, maybe it'll happen this year.

Well, awesome.

I wanted to talk to you today about the Joe Rogan

slight apology, not exactly an apology, and Neil Young, of course, his critique of Rogan for giving misinformation on vaccinations.

And then I would like to turn and sort of really focus on Neil Young and his role in the 1960s.

Why this brought up the 1960s for me.

I thought, wow, who is Neil Young to criticize Joe Rogan when he was all part of that movement and singing songs, celebrating drug use, etc., that is responsible for killing a lot of people.

And I know that Neil Young has recently had songs that are warning about drug use with Needle and the Damage Done and the other song No More.

But a lot of his life was spent celebrating it.

So that's what brought up my idea that maybe we should talk the 1960s broadly even beyond Neil Young.

But let's hear you first on Rogan and the conflict with Neil Young.

Yeah, because of my schedule, I'm not a listener of Joe Rogan, but I read transcripts sometimes and I see clips.

And my son is an avid listener, so he fills me in.

And

his format is to bring in controversial people.

And it's not true that...

that he doesn't have both sides.

He had Sanja Gupta, who he kind of eviscerated on the air, who didn't really know much.

The CNN's quote-unquote medical expert, Dr.

MD, who at one time I think was rumored to be a pick for surgeon general, either it was in the Obama administration or the Biden administration.

So it's a no-brainer.

And as he said, almost every orthodoxy that came out of the mouth of Anthony Fauci is now not orthodox.

It's heterodox.

And by that, I mean we were told one mask, two masks, but earlier no mask.

And travel bans do no good, but do a lot of good.

And vaccinations are don't worry about anybody that hasn't been vaccinated.

You get those two RNA vaccinations.

And guess what?

You don't have to worry about the world because they cannot infect you.

So we're not going to worry about mandate.

Just do your duty.

If you want to call it patronism, fine.

You won't infect anybody else.

But if you want to be selfish, it doesn't matter either.

You're protected.

And that was not true with Delta and especially not with Omicron, although it was true that it severely cut down the lethality of the virus.

We know that.

So when people say, well, the vaccinations are a joke, they have to put a qualifier.

They're a joke if you mean you're going to be not infected or you cannot infect people.

You can.

But

here in my community, we have a lot of Mexican-American people.

who haven't been vaccinated.

It's much, much more, I can tell you, it's much more lethal if if you haven't been vaccinated and you have even the slightest comorbidities, whether that be age or obesity or diabetes or congestive heart failure.

So there's an argument to be made at least for two vaccinations.

That argument, though, as Wilban pointed out and his guest have pointed out, it diminishes a lot when you have people with naturally acquired immunities.

And if you have one or two vaccinations and then you get COVID, and you will with Omicron, apparently, but you'll probably have a more enhanced immunity profile than if you just got the booster without being naturally acquired immunity.

But that's all lost with this hysteria.

What I'm getting at, Sammy, he's on solid ground when he says things like that.

And

Neil Young, it's very funny.

Everybody says, well,

this can't be the same Neil Young.

I mean, in high school, in the 1970s, I used to listen to Cinnamon Girl and Crazy Horse.

And I kind of gravitated, you know, even before that, Buffalo Springfield was some of his later collaborators.

I don't think he was a member of Buffalo Springfield, if at all, for very long.

And then I used to listen to Heart of Gold, the whole thing.

So I liked Neil Young.

He was up, he was a Canadian who gravitated.

I think he lived out north of Stanford in the hills near Woodside and beyond.

La Honda, that area.

So he was kind of the hipster.

There were certain elements about his lifestyle to the degree they affected his art that were indicators he was an unstable person,

whether it was his personal life or his heavy drug use or doing things like putting Coke in his nose while he was performing that weren't, I mean, if he's going to talk about models in Joe Rogan's responsibility to be an exemplar of proper health, then he's a total hypocrite because he made his career as being a renegade who defied society's norms and was quite indulgent with his own drug use to the point that it might have had an advocacy role for young, impressionable fans of his.

So that's just typical hypocritical.

Here's my point, though.

I don't think there's a contradiction in Neil Young, and now we hear Crosby, Steels, and Nash have joined in, or Joni Mitchell, or all these hipsters, revolutionaries, counterculture people from the 60s that, you know, people my age, 68 and above, knew as rebels.

Now they're mouthing the anti-Fauci doctrine.

Okay.

But when you start to look at this phenomenon of the woke movement as it applies to COVID and the Karen, quote unquote, hectoring, you start to see a pattern.

And that is

these people, and I'm talking now mostly about

white elites, bicoastal white elites from the ages of maybe 60 to 80.

And they are hectoring.

I've met them before because I work on the coast and I see them and I speak a lot in California.

And they're they show no mercy.

I mean, I've seen people go up in a store in Palo Alto and say to somebody, you get that mask on.

Or as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, in Santa Cruz, they pulled over my daughter when she was walking and pulled their car over and said, get that kid's mask outside, none of their business.

Or my son-in-law had his disabled daughter or my granddaughter out.

in a parking lot.

I think it was at Costco and a woman came up to him.

So they take it upon themselves to police people.

And we say, well, how can these this generation that tried to overturn customs and norms as far as drug use and sexuality and grooming and decorum and language, everything

as part of their, you know, their reform movement about Vietnam and feminism and civil rights, all that.

How can they be such patsies now?

Well, they're not because Take the government out of it for a little bit.

What they're really centered on is themselves.

Most of these people people are very wealthy.

They're now in their mid-70s or 80s.

They feel that they're coming to the end of their lives, but they've got a lot of opportunities for indulgence still, just like they did when they were young.

So Leal Young's a multi-multi-millionaire, Joni.

They all are.

And so in their way of thinking, I'm not going to let some deplorable out there in southern Ohio

even slightly endanger my appetite.

Just like in the 60s, I'm not going to let the man tell me that I can't have long hair, hair, I can't be promiscuous, I can't snort, I can't smoke, I can't talk, I can't say F and shit, all that crap.

So I'm going to be a renegade.

But now that renegade has collapsed in their old age into a self-indulgent narcissist, which was what they were anyway, without the veneer of public caring.

Now they're just sort of collapsed down to their immediate space and they're saying, you know what?

I still want to think about myself.

And now it's not my drugs necessarily, although I still take drugs probably, but it's my health.

I have to be perfectly fine.

I have to have perfect opportunities for myself.

I don't really care about a five-year-old disabled person who's wearing a mask, who's in, doesn't know how, you know, who doesn't know what is going on.

Or I don't care about those Hispanic kids out in Mendota that can't go to school.

So they're on Zoom and their family doesn't have one room and they're all there and their mother can't go to work.

I don't care about those people.

Just like I didn't care about when I was, you know, on stage snorting Coke, if a 17-year-old guy saw me and said, gee, Neil's neat.

I'm going to snort Coke just like he does.

I don't, he didn't care about that.

And now he doesn't care about anything other than himself.

So there is a complete consistency in all of these 60 renegades who everybody's shocked now that they're mouthing the Orwellian dictates of, you know, Oceania dot-dash Biden administration.

I think they're just completely predictable.

Yeah.

Well, I would like to remind the audience before we go on that Victor is the Martin Anely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And you can find him at victorhanson.com on his website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus and we welcome everybody to come to the website.

Victor, I wanted to then look a little bit closer at that drug culture as it was, or counterculture that started to celebrate the use of drugs.

I mean, drugs are kind of an interesting topic historically, I think, because it's not that they weren't used, for example, in the 19th century or even in the classical period.

There's some indications that cultures indulged in drugs.

But the 1960s was a real turn from other drug practices.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

I'm particularly curious about the Ken Kesey and if you're not on the bus, you're off the bus, because I've always felt that if Ken Kesey was on the bus, you were better off being off the bus myself.

I mean, it's that remember Timothy Leary, turn on, tune in, drop out, or drop out, turn on, tune in.

So he was a Harvard professor.

So the academic world, the legal world, the corporate world, the establishment in the 60s began to become hippified.

I don't think hippified, the yuppified.

In other words, they had their same narcissistic, self-centered idea of getting as much money and power and influence for themselves, but that was going to be expressed in non-traditional ways in their private life, long hair, wire-rimmed glasses.

casual drug use, casual sex.

So that's what the 60s were about.

It was sort of a return to nature, and they defined that as a Rousseauian, I'm going to drop all phony conventions.

And how did that translate?

I came from a farm.

I turned 18 the first week I was at UC Santa Cruz.

I was in a classroom and I could not believe it.

The teacher was wonderful, the late John Lynch.

But everybody in there.

had long hair, the boys, the women have, they had petouli oil.

None of their legs were shaved.

Nobody's underarms, women's underarms were shaved.

A big, heavyset woman right next to me, I remember the first day of class, passed wind right in front of me.

And I thought everybody was going to laugh or something, but

she looked at me like, you have a problem with that?

And people use drugs.

You could smell marijuana, but these were all the children of Hollywood producers, or

they were the corporate elite's offspring, but they went through this rite of passage.

And it was supposedly a cultural revolution of phony.

I'd always shake hands with people.

Oh, we don't shake hands.

That's a form.

Or thank you.

What do you say thank you for?

And they even got to the point, you know, in that late, that last gasp of the 60s, and this was in 71, we're calling people comrade.

I used to have a guy in my class, and he had a little Mao hat on with a little bill with a red star on, and then he had a beard that looked like Shea Govera.

And he'd always say, hey, comrade.

And finally, I said, you know, that guy is really obnoxious.

And a person whispered to me, he is the heir to one of the largest pharmaceutical fortunes in the United States.

So be careful about him.

And I said, well, I saw him hitchhiking up to UC Santa Cruz.

He doesn't even, I had an old 25-year-old Volvo that I shared with my two brothers and he said that broke down about every 500 miles.

And he said, oh, no, no, no.

He has a garage downtown and he's got a brand new Mercedes.

And the Mercedes were rare in those times.

He has a brand new Mercedes and he hitchhiked from his garage up here so nobody would see him.

So I had a, I had a very cynical idea of these people.

The second thing very quickly is you talk about drugs,

I can tell you the 60s didn't hit Selma, California in the middle of nowhere until about 1969.

And then it hit with a wave.

And it was mostly the lower middle classes

were

into not just heavy drinking, of course.

They'd always done that,

but and not just heavy marijuana usage, but things like amphetamine speed

and half.

Didn't they use mescaline as

magic mushrooms?

Yeah, they did.

And I watched the class ahead of me completely get wiped out.

And I mean,

10, 12, 15 of those people got killed in auto accidents or drug ODs or

a couple of them were found OD'd in a bathroom where they bought drugs, some gang people who killed them.

And then in my class, I can think of, and there was a reaction against that, but I can think of 10 or 12 or 15 people I knew very well from very conservative, hardworking that completely were,

their minds exploded.

That is, today, they either homeless or they're dead.

And then the other thing I saw was very, very talented, very, very driven, very, very successful people in high school.

I'm talking about straight A students and maybe 10 to 20% of them when they went to college and encountered that culture from a small town, they surrendered entirely to it.

And they were told that the quote-unquote establishment has martinis.

They smoke Winston's.

There's no different in marijuana.

I beg to differ because I saw people smoke a joint every three or four hours.

And although they don't know, I mean, CBD is a natural antioxidant and anti-inflammatory.

So I'm not going to defy medical, you know, facts and say it's not necessarily in some cases for glaucoma.

It can have some medicinal purposes.

But these people, it was like dropping melatonin every five minutes.

You know what I mean?

Nobody would do that, or GABA, or one of these sleep over-the-counter Benadryl.

And what they were, they would just, hey, man, what are you doing, man?

He, hey, man, hey,

and they just were listless.

And it really struck the middle and lower classes.

This was a rite of passage, as I said, for the wealthy people who had the resources, family and otherwise, in many cases, not all, to get back on track.

But I saw people, my extended family and friends, that they had no ambition.

And that was part of the drug culture.

And he was getting back to all this, these people were avatars of this culture, avatars, and they're now multi-millionaires from their music or their positions of influence and for them to go after joe rogan or go after people who are not advocating doing things that are deleterious to your body but opening the debate in controversial ways and it's been valuable i don't really agree with all of the criticisms of the vaccination, although I got vaccinated twice.

I've had a bad case of Delta.

Okay, but I do understand that almost every single thing that the who or the cdc or the nih or dr fauci has told us has been wrong and wrong to the degree that they demonized and they

deprecated anybody who said the following.

I think that there might be a solid case to be made that the origins of COVID can be found in the Wuhan Biology Lab as an engineered product gone astray or released or something.

No, you cannot say that.

I think there may be a case that if you're going to wear a mask, it has to be one of those N95.

The rest of the stuff is just virtues.

No, you can't, that's not true.

Masks, all masks are better than the other.

I think there might be a case that I know of some people who are starting to get Delta that can vaccinate.

Oh, don't worry, it's not going to happen.

And so they don't have any credibility.

And one of the big tragedies, just final statement about this as it pertains to Joe Rogan and his critics, We, the United States government, and especially the Biden administration, for whatever Trump's weaknesses were on this issue, when that guy got COVID, all he did was talk about antibodies, you got to get the antibodies.

Just amazing, the antibodies.

And, you know, that zinc and vitamin D, and he just rattled it off.

He said, I went in there almost dead, and then I came out.

I feel powerful.

Well, what he was trying to say in so many terms were that there were therapies that could prevent somebody from dying who had not been vaccinated.

He was right.

But we just focused so much on the magic vaccination bullet that we ignored everything.

And now, here we are, two years plus into the pandemic, and we still can't go onto the internet and get an official CDC thing that says the following.

And what I'm trying to say, I'm not doing a very good job of it, but if you look at vitamin D

and go forget what the CDC is and maybe it has some efficacy, be careful.

I know they have to do that, but go look at scientific double-blind studies or zinc double-blind studies or some of the flavonoid double-blind studies, things like quercetin, or double-blind studies on antihistamines, or double, even things like Azeselstein nasals pry,

or doing Nedipot and nasal washes, all to get when you're sick, to get some of the viral load out of your upper respiratory tract.

There's scientific evidence there from university studies that are very professionally conducted.

And they're not definitive, but there's something to consider.

And they don't do any of that.

They deprecate it, they make fun of it.

And the subtext of all of this is: when you listen to the CNN or the MSNBC people or the Biden administration lackeys or these government bureaucrats, this is

the subtext.

There are about 90 million white working class rubes that are deplorable, they're clingers, they're irredeemable.

The guys are just stupid.

They're fat, they don't know what they're doing.

And, you know, you can't work with them and they're going to spread it and get me, the exalted one, infected.

And I hate those people.

That's what it is.

And it defies logic because until recently, when the levels of vaccination by race are leveling out, it was primarily the Latino community and the African-American community, despite enormous outreach, that was not getting vaccinated per capita as the white community was.

And yet that didn't matter.

Or they were giving exemptions to huge numbers of people to go out and protest in a phalanx of demonstrators predicated on their race and their racial agendas.

But nevertheless, that's what the subtext is behind all of this.

It's kind of a class and it's a class hatred for the lower and mostly white middle class.

And the odd thing is, they've been so obnoxious about it that is filtered into the Latino and the black community that don't like it because they have more solidarity by class, they're beginning to than race in some cases.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's a certain profile, and we've talked about this so much: this bicoastal Gen Saki,

you know, Jeff Zucker, C and N,

University Droning, nasal 20, those people that just rub everybody the wrong way.

Yeah, and it's an elite culture.

And, you know, that elite culture, which you've rightly, many of them were part of the 60s.

I wanted to go back to something you said, the idolizing of Che Guevara, which is what you know you see that in the 60s all the way up to today.

And I always find that very interesting because what I know about Che is that he was an Argentinian revolutionary.

He looks very ethnically German, by the way.

It obviously shows up in Cuba at one point, and he even tried to go to the Congo and incite revolution.

Bolivia.

They killed him in Bolivia.

Yeah, they killed him, but

he was born, I believe, in Argentina.

Yeah, he was.

He's an Argentinian.

You're right.

He had a lot of European, and he was a member of the upper middle classes, I could recall.

And he was a psychopath.

He loved to execute people with his own handgun.

And they made, you know, they made, they've made all sorts of romantic movies about him.

But he was, you know, he was an upper class family in Argentina, and he bragged about his family was bragging about, you know, they always do about their European, Spanish, I think in his case, even Irish ancestry.

And so when you look at pictures of him in his 20s or teenagers, I mean, he looks like a little yuppie.

He was the perfect model for the 60s dorm rat in college because he mirror imaged their values and their own trajectories.

He was an upper, upper middle class, spoiled brat from an Argentine family, largely of European descent.

And then he play acted that he was going to be one with the people, probably, I guess, on that motorcycle trip.

But the point I'm making is then he became a die-hard revolutionary that had no residence.

When he went into Bolivia, nobody wanted to join him, but he liked to inflict pain on people.

And he took it to the extreme where he actually, you know, I think the CIA had a big role in getting him killed.

But

wasn't he trained as a doctor?

Yeah.

Fidel Castro was.

Oh, okay.

I thought Che was as well.

But anyway, okay.

Well, our listeners can let us know whether Che was trained as a doctor.

I thought he was.

But anyways, that would tell you, that would indicate why he would know how to inflict a lot of pain on people.

He was,

I'm trying to remember, there was a, I think he, I don't know if he was a doctor, but he said that he, the only reason I know this because I took a class in revolutions when I was 18 and the professor, I won't mention his name, idolized Shay almost as much as he loved Mao.

And he was always talking about Shay's, he felt so bad that Shay had asthma and he was sickly and how courageous he was to

overcome his health.

Yeah.

Well, I find it strange.

His image has lasted so long all the way up to today.

And yet you don't see people with Fidel Castro faces on their shirts.

You know what I mean?

It seems to me, Fidel Castro, if you want to be a socialist or a communist, you'd be wearing a Castro.

Oh, but

there's a reason why that, Sammy.

And he died at the pinnacle of his youth.

So he's marbleized forever as the guy who died fighting the CIA and the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America.

And he'll never age and he'll never have the responsibility of governing.

Problem with Castro was, as all Stalinists, that when they take power, they are bureaucrats and they are infatuated with power.

So Castro then created a Stalinist state.

He wrecked the economy of Cuba.

He became a billionaire in his family.

The elite nomenclature of Cuba followed the Soviet model, and everybody hated him.

And Shea would have done the same thing had he had the opportunity, but he died.

And so he was, you know.

So if you're a leftist, you don't want to live too long.

Or you don't want to have any responsibility to translate your revolutionary fervor into bureaucratic, you know, day-by-day monotonous orthodoxy.

Yeah.

Can we turn to another subject?

I would like to talk about the civil rights movement and the icons.

I know we had lots of assassinations in the 1960s too, the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr.

And I wanted to just ask you or reflect on the significance of that movement to the 1960s and really to today.

How did it change the world?

that the civil rights movement in particular.

Yeah, yeah.

And the works of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Well, when the civil rights movement began in the late 50s, if you look at the people that were around Martin Luther King or Martin Luther King himself, it was more Booker T.

Washington than Malcolm X.

By that I mean it stressed self-help.

It demanded that the so-called white community follow or at least adhere to their own promises.

They were the people, after all, as King said, that created the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that enshrined the equality innately and fairness to people.

So that civil rights movement was saying, we're going to sit down, we're going to be nonviolent, we're going to follow the Gandhi trajectory, and we're going to shame America.

And it had two agendas.

One was in the south to end Jim Crow, and it did that.

And then one in the north, to the degree there were a lot of northerners who practiced de facto discrimination or bias in their own daily lives, even though it might be not as prevalent in the North or not at all in the North.

I grew up in California.

I can tell you that in the pre-civil rights movement, I had African-American, Latino, everybody in my classes, and there was no prejudice and there was no inward use.

So it wasn't just as the today's extremists say, oh, the whole country was war.

It wasn't that way.

But there were people in the North that were just.

And so the second leg of that agenda was: let's change the hearts and minds by emulation.

So King was saying, we can be all we can be.

We're going to be the best carpenter.

And everybody reacted to that in the popular culture.

So you can see now it's kind of funny, but you look at the early films of Sydney Poitier, you know, Patch of Blue,

or Lilies of the Field, or Guess Who's Coming to dinner it was assimilation integration intermarriage the whole thing it was the immigrant experience and then two things happened of course one was jfk

was assassinated and that brought in the johnson administration and the johnson lbj was not that jfk and the kindies weren't corrupt but he was a total corrupt person who knew inside and out how to work the government.

And the guilt that followed and the compassion and the upheaval, he created this huge great society program.

And the government began to be at odds with the earlier civil rights movement.

It said, we will give you money.

You don't have to get married.

We will give mothers with illegitimate money and we will subsidize this and we'll change the whole narrative.

Well, once that happened, they undercut the legs of the traditional civil rights movement, A.

And then the second thing that happened was this cultural revolution that we're talking about, primarily about Vietnam.

And that dovetailed it.

And so the wealthy white hippie said to the inner city African American, you know, don't cut your hair and wear a suit and try to make it with a man.

They're corrupt.

You've got to be free.

And that created, helped create the Black Panthers and Black is Beautiful and the precursors of BLM.

And so King, when he died, we forget that people were very critical of him.

I was a student, I want to get back to UC Santa Cruz, but they were, when I was there in the

early 70s, they wanted, remember, to name College 5.

I think everybody remembers that, Malcolm X College.

Nobody said Martin Luther King College.

They thought he was a sellout.

Only after his death was he reappraised by the country.

But until then, it was, you know, Muhammad Ali and and Malcolm X and Soki Cormile and Eldridge Cleaver and Solon Ice and Ewie Newton.

That very radical, it came very quickly.

You know, it came almost overnight from 63, where you had the civil rights movement still pretty much trying to force America to live up to its ideals and stressing integration and superior education opportunities offered to the inner city.

The idea was: you give us the tools, and we're going to produce young African-American men and women.

We don't care about past racism right now.

Just give us the tools, and you will be shocked at how well our students do.

We are going to be exemplary citizens, and we're going to beat you at your own game.

It was a very self-confident, independent ideal.

And then the combination of the hippie 60s movement, drug culture, all that, and this huge war on poverty by the Johnson administration really destroyed that ideal.

And I could see it happen with a lot of people I knew.

I mean, I've written about it, but my gosh, from where I'm speaking, just two miles away, there was an African-American family.

And

I think they had nine children.

And of that nine, this is the pre-civil rights, or right during the civil rights.

I think four of them were straight A students.

They all went to good colleges.

This is, you know, they had, they were very poor.

And the father was a master mechanic for the Ford dealership.

And they were very confident.

They were fully integrated in school.

They experienced as one of the only black families in a city that was predominantly Mexican-American and probably 40% white at that time, prejudices, no doubt, but

they were integrating and they dated people that were not black.

And that was sort of the model.

there were members of that family that people kind of thought were super men and women.

And there was that, that could be replicated all over.

And so the left has done enormous damage to the civil rights movement.

And I don't know why they did it, but I have a kind of a Freudian suggestion that a lot of very sheltered, wealthy people who go to prep school or they don't do physical tasks, they don't come in contact with the muscular classes, they feel they're wimps or they're, you know, they're not inured to a rough life, whatever it is, they compensate psychologically by performing arts and the performance art or the virtue signal or the tokenism or whatever, but they feel guilty because they know deep down inside they're privileged and they don't want to be not privileged.

Nobody does, but they love their privilege and they love going to Europe and they love having granite counters and they love living in a good zip code, but they feel that not everybody can do that.

So they're going to make ostentatious displays of caring at other people's expense, usually the people they despise, like conservative blacks or traditional Mexican Americans or working class whites.

They hate those people because they don't appreciate the magnanimity of this privileged class.

So I know that I keep sounding like a broken record, but if you want to locate the origins of a number of pathologies that have undermined this country, if you want to look at postmodernism, post-structuralism, Black Lives Matter,

the hippie movement, the radical abortion movement, you want to look at the radical, radical feminist movement, this crazy idea that transgenderism allows biological males to compete.

If you can look at all that, ultimately, you find it in the university lounge and you find it advanced by wealthy, privileged, bicostal white people.

And would you say a lot of the roots of it are in the 1960s in some moment of change, like 1964 or 1968?

Yeah, I think it started in 64, 5 or 6.

I'll put it this way.

My father was a B-29 crewman, and I would say my first memories of his crewmen visiting us were in the 50s and 60s.

And for a while, I know that my mom was shocked.

I was too young to remember, I think I was three, that my dad grew a mustache and had a leather jacket and had a motorcycle as if he was a beatnik.

But he was in a very small town.

But it was at World War II.

A lot of people came out and had their bomber jackets.

And I can see pictures where he was wearing his bomber jacket, kind of tough guy.

And that was sort of the Jack Kerouac, we're going to be beatniks or they were different.

They were different than hippies.

And they were just oddballs, but they weren't operating, you know,

in terms of a total rejection of society.

They just wanted to be free.

And a lot of them were kind of crazy, but they didn't want to, you know, destroy the Alan Ginsburg destruction of society or,

you know, that hatred of conformity and the establishment.

That came later in the mass appeal of the 60s and drew so many people in because it wrapped around or enveloped all of these appetites.

If you wanted to take drugs, you were no longer a loser or an addict.

You could, you know, you were part of the enlightened people that were opening, you know, the Huxley doors of perception.

If you were a sex monger,

I guess I could say a horn dog or whatever colloquialism I'd use, then you could find multiple partners and that would be okay because you were opening, you know,

you were defining your own sexuality according to your own rules.

And not, that really struck me because I think it was in 71,

we were on the dorm and a knock came on my door.

And there was a guy in a white coat from the Santa Cruz County Medical Office.

He said, said, you know, Mr.

Hansen, I have your name here and you have a roommate.

And we're going down every single person in this dorm and all of the dorms because we're looking for the origins of this mysterious thing.

It's kind of a virus.

It's sexually transmitted.

And they were talking about herpes.

They had never seen it before.

And they thought that it had originated in its epidemic state in Northern California.

And there were three or four people that had it at the UC Med Center.

And so they were asking pretty personal questions.

Have you had sexual relations with anybody without a prophylactic?

If so, who?

And they asked everybody that.

They were trying to trace it down.

And

people were laughing because some of these people were giving answers, not one, but you know, 20, 30, 40 people.

And I'm serious.

And so

did people feel like they had to answer?

I think if somebody did that today, we would all just say,

I think then they were bragging about it.

They They thought it was funny.

I can remember talking to a guy, and I said, Well,

you know, I was some salma in those days.

You didn't have promiscuous sex.

And I said, Well, I kind of felt like a nerd.

I said, No.

And he said, Oh, man, you should have seen that sucker's eye when I said, 40 people, I had 40 chicks, man, and that was so neat.

And my girlfriend had 20.

That kind of stuff.

It was just

accepted.

That was before the re-emergence of gonorrhea and syphilis and herpes and all these other things, all AIDS, everything.

And so I'm trying to think if there was one positive thing that came out of the 60s.

I mean, the civil rights obviously, but I think, as I said, it was warped.

I think one thing is I did like some of the music.

I still listen to 60s music, you know, whether it's Buffalo Springfield or the band or Jackson Brown.

I still listen to it, even though I don't agree with the lyrics, but that was one good thing.

There was much better music, I think, than now.

The other thing.

You know, you just went on to a subject I was going to ask you about.

If one, the good things about the 60s, but Woodstock and the production of music, et cetera, in the 60s.

How do you see Woodstock playing into that picture?

Was it some sort of culmination?

Wasn't it?

The thing about that music was...

There were people who were musicians.

And you look at the ability of, for example, members of the band.

Some of them were classically trained and they could play a variety of instruments.

Or you look at people who came out of the folk movement.

So a Joni Mitchell, a Judy Collins, Joan Baez, they had beautiful voices.

They could have sung anything.

Or you look at some of the guitar skills of certain people.

They were very skilled.

They weren't just, I mean, later it was just anybody with long hair would get up there and pound.

But that that was one thing.

There were some very good musicians, and there were Bob Dylan, whatever one thinks about him, was a very talented poet.

So there were good lyrics, and there was good, there was a fine quality of music.

The other thing that I admired was it was a distrust of authority, and it could be taken to the extreme, but it was an individualism that was innately American.

This is before they took over.

So you would have people in class, and I remember a professor would would say in a class, say it was, and I can remember this, it was history of Roman literature.

They would say, well, why are we reading this crazy Livy?

I find it boring.

Can you please explain why we're reading Livy?

Because I don't want to do it.

Well, I never would ask that question.

I thought if I don't know something, I want to have information.

And maybe later on, when I have enough information, I can adjudicate which authors would be valuable and which weren't.

But they just questioned everything.

And there was some value to it.

Taught me to be very suspicious.

And I know that people are disagreeing with me now will ask themselves, why do they have an innate distrust of the CDC or the CIA or James Clapper and the NSA?

And part of that tradition is innately American.

It goes back to the Revolution, but part of it was enhanced in the 60s, which reminds us how hypocritical these people are because the people who are

the status quo right now, the corporate status quo, the athletic status quo, the rapper status quo, all of them do not like dissent.

They do not like individualism and they're protectors of the established order.

And they're very, very, as we've seen, intolerant.

They're very, I know, they're kind of creepy.

And I'm talking about the college administrators.

If you

You know, a guy sent me a letter, I think it was about four years ago.

It was a brilliant letter.

It's kind of circulated on the internet in which he was writing as a dean

to the students about some incident, didn't matter, and just said, Here, have you read this letter before?

And it said, This is not who we are.

I'm outraged.

And I, as dean, I'm going to do this.

This is intolerable.

This will not.

And it was just a boilerplate that I had read a thousand times that meant nothing.

It was just gibberish.

But this iconoclast was trying to show you how much he despised these orthodox company people masquerading as academic deans.

So there's a good place in American popular culture for dissent.

And that's why I really like these truckers.

And they're the inheritors of that.

And if you look at a trucker today, a lot of them could come right out of the 60s and they're grooming or

their fashion.

You know, I see guys at rest stops with jean jackets, Fu Man shoes, cowboy hats, berets, you name it.

They're kind of of an independent cowboy type lot.

And I like that.

And there were some people in the 60s that were like that, but most of them weren't.

Most of them were just play acting, very, very upper middle class, wealthy kids that went through a period of youthful transition.

Yeah, it was supposed to be a celebration of the,

yes, and they did damage the middle and lower classes.

Yeah.

They did damage to the middle or lower class.

There's no doubt about it.

I could see very wealthy people at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz, especially when it first opened, when I was there, just three or four years after it opened, and I could see

that their recreational drug use was very expensive, but not exorbitantly so so for them.

And they could afford to miss class and make fun of professors because they were eventually going to have the supporting network of Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades or Palace Verdes or Atherton, but not some guy from Stockton or Sanger or Levining.

They emulated that behavior.

They were done for.

All right, Victor, we're getting close to time that we need to stop, but let's have a word from our sponsors first, and then we'll come back and talk about one more of your books.

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Welcome back.

And Victor has, like a surgeon, just taken us through the bowels of the 1960s and back out again and did it so well and so smoothly.

Thank you, Victor, for that.

We appreciate it.

I have one more book that I would like you to talk about the production of, and that is The Savior Generals, an excellent book on three, I believe, generals.

And can you give us the background?

It's kind of a perennial quest.

It starts with Plutarch's the lives of the illustrious Greeks and Romans.

Almost all of them are either politicians or generals or both.

How you assess generalship or leadership in war.

And there's certain, you know, are you cool under pressure?

Do you speak well?

Are you magnetic?

Do you understand that there's the unforgiving minute, as George Patton said, you had to move, you know, or Napoleon, if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

Don't ask me to take it.

That delay is hazardous, but so is ration.

So, and there's all of these great works, you know, about the great generals or profiles in command, all of this stuff, because they never adjudicate the landscape around the particular general.

And by that, I mean,

let's say, it was the job of George Patton as the southern flank of the American advance into Germany.

Was that a longer route than, say, Bernard Montgomery?

So, I was trying to look at criteria, and one of the things that came up is

what happens if everything is lost, completely lost?

And so can you bring a person in there like a Grant or a Sherman where it's lost, especially Themistocles.

And when he came in, I mean,

there was no Greece.

They burned Athens.

And yet he was able at Salamos to reverse the situation and take control of Athenian fortunes, both against the Persians and establish the Athenian.

model of imperial power and conquest after he was exiled.

And then I thought the most stunning, though, was Belisarius, and he was this Byzantine general for the Emperor Justinian.

And remember, Justinian's whole idea, at least before the plague hit Constantinople and wiped out half the population, infected the emperor himself who survived,

that he was going to reclaim the lost Western Empire after 60, 70 years of having it overrun by Goths and Ostrogoths and Vandals.

And he expanded the Eastern Front, he expanded into Egypt, he reclaimed North Africa.

He reclaimed Sicily, and he got about half of Italy.

And he didn't have much to work with.

And he and the eunuch, General Narcissus, were examples of savior generals.

I mentioned a lot of others.

I mean, there were a lot.

And one was Matthew Ridgway.

And when he came into the Korean War, it was hopeless.

Remember that, that General Walton had been killed in an auto accident.

MacArthur was in a veritable war against his commander-in-chief, Truman.

We'd had the longest military retreat in U.S.

history from the Yalu River all the way down to the 38th parallel.

And then we had lost Seoul.

We would lose Seoul.

And we brought in Ridgway, who'd never really been to Asia.

And he had a heart attack at the end of World War II.

And my God, he was an illustrious.

two and three-star general in World War II, but he had kind of been passed over.

He was married three times.

He was outspoken.

But kind of like Sherman and Grant, once he took control, he stalked the front lines.

They called him old iron tits.

You know, he had a medical kit on one side and a grenade on the other of his chest.

He was slightly wounded by shrapnel.

He made sure everybody had their mail on time and he restored morale.

He went back, he retook Seoul, he destroyed probably over a million invading North Koreans and Chinese with unleashed.

You know, he got the A-86 in there that restored air superiority and supremacy.

The B-29 started to wreak havoc on Chinese.

And we forget how much damage we did to the enemy in the Korean War, which probably explains why the Chinese were not eager to invade during the Vietnam War.

And he didn't get very much credit for it.

He never did.

But he was a savior general.

I talk about David Petraeus, too, that at the time of the surge, and people, I think I was most criticized for that.

When he came in, there were people, remember Hillary Clinton and that testimony that he provided said, you know, your testimony is beyond belief basically there were people in the new york times that ran an ad general betray us i know that he went into the corporate world and he had the problems with his girlfriend and he kind of went left but at one time they hated him because they wanted to get out of iraq and he figured out in this surge how to restore an equilibrium to allow us to wind down without a complete defeat.

And he did it.

And I examine it in the book.

It was not what you think.

What he did was he talked about building communities and planning gardens and parks and outreach for the Iraqi community.

Yes, he did that.

But that was kind of a veneer to unleash special forces and rangers to just go out and decapitate.

the Baathist resistance and the ISIS resistance.

And I went to Iraq twice during the surge.

And boy, when you talk to people who are at the captain major level, what we did there was we really got rid of a lot of people.

And we didn't talk about it because we were saying that we're, you know, we're winning hearts and minds or we're fish that have to swim in the aquarium of Iraq.

So we have to work on the larger landscape.

But I thought he was underappreciated.

So I was trying to look at figures throughout history that inherited hopeless tasks and yet they overcame them.

And that was a more valuable barometer of what general skills are.

And of course, throughout, I talk about throughout people like Apam Anandas and William Decumce Sherman, Ulysses S.

Grant, as well as the people who are the subject of actual chapters.

All right.

Well, that, as all your other books, sounds like an excellent book for our listeners.

We would like to thank you.

Our time is up here, Victor.

And again, thanks for that walk through the 1960s, some of the key features of it and linking it to today.

It's wonderful.

Well, thank you.

And I hope even if you don't want to buy the Savior Savior Generals, you'll look at these five people in other places because I think they're extraordinary general and they're underappreciated.

Well, thank you.

I'll go ahead and say goodbye to the listeners right now and to you, Victor.

Thanks.

Thank you.

All right.

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