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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Wednesday, January 5th, 2020.

22.

Victor Davis-Hansen, the namesake and star, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's also the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History, I believe, at Hillsdale College.

Victor Hanson, S-O-N, VictorHanson.com is his website.

It's got a plethora of original material there.

I do recommend our listeners check it out.

We've got a lot to talk about today on the traditional list.

We're going to start with my old stomping grounds, New York City, which now has a DA in Manhattan that doesn't want to prosecute.

And we'll get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the traditionalist Victor, as you know, and as anyone can tell by my accent, I'm from New York City, originally born, bred there, lived through, endured the terrible crime days of the 60s and 70s.

And yet, there seems to be a nostalgia for that amongst the

progressive political establishment.

New York City has a new district attorney, Manhattan, I should say.

There are five boroughs in Manhattan,

in the city.

And the DA there is Alvin Bragg, just elected.

And he has a laundry list, Victor, of things now that you will not be prosecuted for.

You will not be arrested for.

He sent out a policy and procedure memorandum.

Just briefly, a few of the things.

Let me just cite them here.

This was put out on Monday, this past Monday.

He said, this office, this is the DA's office in Manhattan, will not prosecute the following charges unless as part of an accusatory instrument containing at least one felony count, whatever that might mean.

Anyway, here's what they won't prosecute.

Marijuana misdemeanors, refusing to pay for affairs on public transportation, trespass, aggravated unlicensed operation, obviously, of a vehicle, resisting arrest, prostitution, other matters, residential burglaries.

If someone breaks in, but not in the living section of your house, maybe if it's in the basement, maybe it's in a shed, not going to prosecute drug cases.

You know what?

If you're going to be considered a low-level street seller working for somebody else, you're not going to be prosecuted.

There's a trobe of other things here, Victor.

So New York City elects a Democrat mayor who's a former police officer who seems tough on crime.

At the same time,

they elect a DA who is, it's not even going to be a revolving door.

You're not going to be prosecuted.

So, this is continuing madness in America's largest city.

Victor, what are your thoughts?

Well, the first initial thought is

they're not going to do that in special cases.

So, if you're a homeless person and you walk up to Chuck Schumer's home and you urinate on the door

or you expose yourself to him through a window, you are going to be arrested.

If you go into a particular tony neighborhood, Fifth Avenue, and you defecate on a sidewalk right in front of a poodle or something, you're going to be prosecuted.

So, we should understand that the left is always asymmetric when it applies the law.

The second thing is that human nature being unchanged and predictable, we all know that that theory does not work in our own lives.

So, if you have a house, Jack, and you decide, yeah,

paint's peeling, I'll just let it go.

Then you start to have a leaky roof, missing some shingles.

Yeah, no big deal.

Then you see your driveway's got potholes.

Yeah, it's okay.

I can navigate around it.

And that becomes incremental.

And finally, you're living in a dump.

Or when you get up in the morning, you say, I don't need to brush my teeth.

Don't need to floss.

Got a little snot on my nose.

No need to blow my nose.

Hair is a little long, haven't shaved in three days.

It's okay.

Don't really change my underwear.

Nah, I took a shower two days.

That is incremental.

And it's a dissent.

It's a descent into barbarism.

So what the left mischaracterizes the right is in this category.

They think, well, you know, there's all these anal retentive control freaks.

And they're just always trying to regulate our mode of life.

And the fact is, They are the control freaks because they control things like wearing a mask outside.

It's irrelevant.

And they do not control the things that are essential for the survival of civilization and so what traditionals are trying to do is simply say

you get up in the morning and you're a barbarian in a savage world and every moment for that day you have to do something on the side of civilization that means when you go

I don't know, you buy your groceries, you take your shopping cart and you do not leave your trash in it and you put it in the shopping cart.

Because if you don't, everybody starts to do that.

And when everybody starts to do that, you end up with a dirty diaper, which happened to me the other day in a shopping cart.

And I have to go retrieve them all over the shopping cart.

Or when you go into a supermarket, you don't handle everything.

You don't open the cereal box and let your kid take a bite because that is the breakdown of civilization.

But each one of those violations in and of itself is not felonious.

But in the aggregate, they are.

So what we try to do is create something like deterrence, de terio, the Latin for to scare somebody off, not to do that.

So it's very easy to make fun of the broken windows policies.

But the point was not that a broken window up in an unused factory is existentially essential to civilization, but the act of not having it broken and another one broken beside it, another one leading to all the broken windows is.

It's sort of the much caricatured Cold War identity of the dominoes.

So that's where we are.

One domino is allowed to fall and it takes everybody with them.

And that's what we're seeing right now.

And it's the intellectuals and the elite and any one given circumstance can say,

why should you arrest somebody for smoking a joint in front of city hall?

The guy had to go to the bathroom.

What do you want him to do?

So he urinated in the park.

Okay, he wants to shoot up and he threw his needle big deal add all of that up and you're living in chaos and that's where we are now

victor from the peak of murder in new york city back in it's hard to believe it peaked in the late in the early 90s but it did there was so much mayhem throughout the 60s 70s and 80s but it's calculable that um

Probably 30,000 people

are alive today who would otherwise have been murdered had

stop and frisk, had the broken windows not been implemented.

And this prosecutor wants very much to, well, of course, they don't have stop and frisk anymore, but broken windows was also the other anecdote there was the turnstile jumper at the subway.

You stop him because he's likely up to no good and he's on his way to do something no good.

This is one of the few implemented social policies, broken windows, that actually worked.

So this George Soros DA efforts here in New York, City and the Sky Was a Soros DA kind of dude, and other major cities, is a prescription for death, and mostly of blacks.

It's crazy.

It's absolutely crazy.

Yeah, but

the people who implement these policies do so with the assumption they're never going to be responsible for the consequences of their own agendas or ideologies.

So,

believe me, Mayor Lightfoot,

Mayor Newsome,

what they wrought and what they created, that tsunami never breaks on their French laundry lunch.

It never breaks in San Francisco up at Knob Hill or Pacific Heights or Presidio Heights.

Never does.

So they have mechanisms to avoid and sidestep and navigate around what they did to the rest of us.

That is pretty much a synopsis of the whole progressive movement.

And I'm not kidding.

Elizabeth Warren is a socialist

who believes in racial tribalism, but tried to fake an identity and wrote a book about how to flip houses.

and run up profiteering by buying something from somebody who lost their home, fixing it up, and then dumping it on the market.

Bernie Sanders has three homes, probably worth five to ten million dollars.

John Kerry married into a fortune of nearly a billion dollars.

He has to have his jet, but you should never be on a private jet.

That's how they operate.

And once you insulate in a Versailles-like class

or the Spanish aristocracy at the El Escoro during the Empire, whatever group it is, or the Kremlin or the Forbidden City elite, then you're going to have this disconnect.

And they're going to look down at people and they're going to say,

You're going to do this and you're going to do this and we're not going to do this.

And you know how it works out, Jack?

It always works out with this fake tenants or this fake gesturing that they have empathy with the poor that they exploit, and who they really hate or the middle class that are considered grasping and insensitive.

So it's, I'm Jeff Bezos, and I gave $100 million to Van Jones.

He's going to help the poor, and I'm going to do, you know, but he's never going to go out and build a section of a highway or fix a bridge or help the Boy Scouts of America or the Lions Club.

None of that.

It's always the grand gesture, the Obama library, because they cannot stand the middle class.

That sums up the entire political matrix of the last five years.

The left is a party of the very, very wealthy, the elite, the oligarchy, the aristocracy.

And it has romanticized the poor and enfeebled the poor through entitlements and patronage, and it hates the middle class.

And that's why, whether you're Latino or Black or poor white, you are leaving the Democratic Party.

There seems to be a hatred of children too.

Victor, you mentioned Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago.

So in Chicago today, and we're recording again on Wednesday, January 5th, kids are not in school because late last night, the teachers' union, which I believe did this in violation of its own rules.

I think you have to have 75% of the teachers vote to have a walkout.

73% voted but they walked out anyway why

because a small percentage of kids coming back from the january christmas and new year's break had tested positive for covid and this strong-arming politically powerful teachers union is hiding behind a you know zero covid or we're not going going back to work so my particular interest you can say whatever you want to say about that if anything but i've never thought the antics of these of Chicago, when these kind of strong arming tactics have been going on for a number of years, I never thought they caught on enough or had enough influence with the rest of America.

But now that we have an America that seems, parents are really sensitized now to how their kids.

are being abused and taught ideology in their schools and how they, the parents themselves, are being told mind your own GD business, that maybe this kind of a stunt, bad in itself, will have greater ramifications and bad ramifications for the Democratic Party as we head into important mid-year elections.

Do you have thoughts on what's happening in Chicago, or do you agree that there might be some political consequences to what they're doing?

Yeah.

I was a teacher in the universities.

My wife is a teacher in the junior colleges.

My father was a teacher and a farmer, but he was a teacher in the JC system.

My son-in-law is a high school teacher.

So is my own son.

I grew up with teachers, but the old idea that you were a public servant and you worked in conjunction with parents and the community to inculcate a generation and you didn't make as much money and you had to work and grade papers after hours and it was a calling.

That's over with now.

First of all, all, teaching now to young people is advertised as the following.

Hey, you guys, you teach about 175 days a year.

Or if you're in JC or university, you only teach nine months.

And you've got your big vacations at Christmas, Easter.

You get your whole summers off paid.

And once you're there for three to five years, depending on the type of education you enter, you're going to get lifetime employment through tenure.

Very hard to fire you.

And the old days when you were making very little is over with.

So you and your spouse, you're both teachers, you can make in California very quickly about $80,000 a year.

Two of you is $160,000.

That's pretty good.

And then you can do what you want in the summer.

Many of people do not hone their teaching skills or scholarship in the summer.

They sell real estate.

They do other things.

Okay.

I have no problem with that.

That's how it's billed for young people.

But it's also billed in the following.

And you have a chance to ideologically train a new generation into being diverse or to seek out equity or inclusion or race class and whatever.

It's an agenda.

And that's okay too.

But where they went one step further, each time they adopted this mentality, the public just shrugged and said, you know, I remember the ones, the stories of the one class school home that my grandparents told me, or I remember Mrs.

Redden from second grade, a saint.

Those days are over.

Now teaching is unionized.

It's at war with charter schools.

It's at war with any person who does not want to join the union.

It's a big player in democratic, maybe the biggest player in democratic politics.

And it has very little worry about the people who are there to be taught.

And by that, I mean it never says to itself, the teaching profession, I just graduated a class.

What percentage of those kids in that class could really read?

How well did I teach them?

It's always, well, I'm not their parent.

You should see the guys that come into my class.

They're armed or they're unruly.

All true.

But the teacher has abdicated responsibility for the teaching of so many students.

And

you can really see it during the COVID, which was kind of the scab, wasn't it?

We tore off and we saw the putrid wound before,

below, that we had not seen before.

And think about it.

So we come into COVID and we have a whole cohort who is not necessarily very vulnerable.

Even with the Omicron, we're not seeing a lot of children, if any children's deaths.

The deaths, even Fauci says that children go to the ER and test positive for COVID probably have COVID as incidentally, not essentially to their health status that took them to the hospital.

Okay,

so we have a whole generation that's largely exempt, but we know what they're not exempt from.

They're not exempt from suicidal tendencies, depression, social dislocation, to take them out of society for two whole years and put them in front of a computer screen and pass that off as education.

And so what we're getting at is these teachers were going to be dealing with children who, by and large, were not going to infect them.

Not like the delivery person, not like the postal guy that comes up and shakes hand and hands a package to you.

not like the woman who checks you out at your local food market, not like that mechanic that's every day with a bunch of people interacting with the public, not like that

driver on the bus.

So they were in a better situation, but they of all people and only them said, you know what, we're not going to take any risk.

And we don't really care about the education of these kids.

You know what?

We're going to sit home.

And that's our divine right.

And I think people have had it with them.

And now, this whole vaccination they're pushing the teachers' union are on young children.

And we've had these Pfizer kids in California that have to have the Pfizer vaccination at 12.

Now they're pushing it down to five.

This is still an experimental vaccination, whatever the government says.

We don't know the full consequences.

We know that there are some side effects, and we know that the side effects for particular age groups, such as five to 12, outweigh the dangers that COVID could inflict on them.

It doesn't matter.

It does not matter to this group of teachers.

They're saying these kids are going to be vaccinated so that I myself have no chance of ever being ill as if all the people in the United States.

I wish a teacher would just talk to a farmer out here.

I'm looking out my window right now at a guy in a tractor.

And I wish she would come over here or he would come over to that tractor driver and say, you know what?

It's kind of dangerous.

You're interacting with that pesticide advisor at noon.

You've got your manager coming over to talk to you pretty soon.

You've got to get out of your tractor.

There's people out pruning vines.

That's kind of dangerous.

I think you should just kind of social distance and quarantine.

And then I'd like them to see you to go to their food market and look at the face when there's no fresh produce there.

What do they think?

the United States is doing now, running on autopilot?

Does the teachers union really believe that pilots cannot have to fly?

That farmers don't have to produce food, that that guy filthy dirty in a fracking field in Texas, freezing cold, does not have to frack and pump oil, that that guy that climbs up on a power pole does not really in the middle of the snow have to fix that line so that you have electricity?

So people are doing exactly what they are telling us they will not do.

They're exposing themselves to the virus and they're providing an essential essential element of civilization.

And they're not.

They're not educating.

And they're finding ever-ingenious ways to avoid their responsibilities to their communities.

And they're injuring an entire generation of young people.

And

I don't know what happened to teaching.

I can see it at K through 12 with my own kids.

They see it.

They tell me every day what's happening in the classroom.

I see it at the JC level from talking to my wife.

And I see it myself in academia.

And it's not a pretty picture.

Well, Victor, let's move on.

And we're going to talk about two pieces that other folks have written.

We don't do that all that much on the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

One of them is from the American Mind

earlier this week by Michael Anton.

And it's titled Blue America's Messaging Problem.

It's a pretty...

interesting piece, worthwhile piece.

Recommend that

our listeners check it out.

American Mind is published by the Claremont folks.

I don't know if it's directly published by the Claremont Review of Books, but Claremont Institute, you can find it there.

I'm going to read a little here, but first, I mean, he did talk about, like, look at, let's look at some of the messaging from blue to red.

And one of them that is really bad, stupid, counterproductive was Terry McAuliffe's infamous messaging early last year when he was running for

governor in Virginia and essentially told parents, mind your own business.

You have no right to involve yourself in your kids' education.

And that blew up in his face.

That's a sign of bad messaging.

But there are other kinds of messaging per Anton and his piece.

And let me just read this passage.

And Victor, your thoughts on

this, and if you read the piece, anything else you might want to say.

Here's what Anton writes.

One type of message consultants never discuss is the negative message aimed at those whose views you ostensibly trying to win.

Call it, here's how I I plan to screw you.

This would seem to be, in political terms, the quintessence of the bad message, not merely ineffective, but downright counterproductive.

Yet, this is Blue America's consistent message for red.

One may reply that since no blue politician honestly seeks any red votes, the observation is inept.

But elite blues are seeking something from reds.

Not votes, to be sure.

They know that red votes are immaterial to Blue success, but acquiescence, acceptance, quietude, compliance, obedience, fealty, even gratitude.

And they're trying to catch red flies, not with honey, but with oceans of vinegar.

I read the essay.

I think he's largely right.

Blue America says...

to Americans, we control your communications and your information,

and we know how to make lots of money.

We control the corporate boardroom.

We control Wall Street finance.

We control Silicon Valley.

We have $5 trillion of market capitalization in Silicon Valley, and we control how we educate you.

And therefore, we are morally superior to you.

You have no idea how to create the internet or to message on Facebook or the real intricacies of critical race theory we're teaching to your kids.

So we are your moral superiors.

But the problem with blue America is if you're a blue American, you wake up every day and you say to yourself, that's ethereal.

I don't know how the concrete world works.

When my pipe brokes, I need a red American.

When somebody breaks into my house, I need a red American policeman.

When somebody breaks my window, I need a red American.

So the stuff

of life, the fuel that powers us, the people who pump it and drive the trucks to deliver it, the food that we eat, all the essentials they can't do without.

There's another problem, and that is the practicality that comes from dealing with the real concrete natural world.

That is imbued into politics.

And so a red state governor or a red state senator or a red state city council has to, it brings out people out of the business world out of the working classes the muscular classes and they have of a very limited view of government and they have a limited view of what people's natural benevolence is so they're very tough and the result is that red states tend to work better than blue states And so now the blue states are angry.

And they're looking at the mirror and they're saying, but we've got the best restaurants.

And we've got the most Tony at the Atlantic and the New Yorker Magazine, the New York Times.

And we control fashion,

but we can't control our streets.

And we don't know what to do with the homeless people.

And

Knoxville looks a lot better than San Francisco.

How can that be?

And boy, people seem to...

to want to move to Texas or Wyoming, to Montana, but not to the mile-high city.

I left my heart heart in San Francisco.

How can that be?

And the answer is that these are sort of like Eloy from H.G.

Wells, the time machine, that are completely inept and unable to deal with the Morlocks they created.

And so nobody wants to live around them.

Nobody listens to them anymore.

And they are going to red states.

They require a red state cocoon or embryo to nourish them because they are not independent or autonomous.

You can have a Lori Lightfoot.

If you have a tough police department, a tough municipal plumbers group or electricians or snow plowers in the city or honest zoners.

But when you don't have those people, then she becomes a wraith.

She's nothing.

The same thing with Gavin Newsom in California.

You can tolerate a liberal or a progressive for a while as your sort of, I don't know, hidden idea to be utopian, idealistic, if the infrastructure around it is realistic and pragmatic and red state-like.

But once you go full blue, there's no adults in the room and it's total chaos.

And they know that.

And that's why they leave.

And it's sort of like parents.

When you have kids, they can mouth off to you.

They can do this.

They can do that.

They can spout off that they know better.

The kid comes home the first semester from college and tells his parents, you know, I took a philosophy class and you are nowhere.

You are zeros.

You've got your kind of rat wrist mentality, mom.

And hey, dad, did you ever imagine of just, you know, dropping out for, I don't know, a month and going to Italy and relax?

Come on, dad.

They can do all that because the dad is going to the insurance office with his nose to the grindstone, paying that tuition check.

Take him away, and that kid has no luxury.

And so blue America is a luxury and it's subsidized by great wealth at the top, but

even more so by the gritty classes that allow it to live and breathe one more day.

And

I think that's why they're so worried about the type of divorce or tearing apart that

Anton described that a lot of people in Red America are already saying to themselves, I have dropped out of Blue America.

I just drop out.

I don't give a damn if my kid has a Stanford BA after his name or a Harvard PhD.

It means nothing.

Somebody calls me up from the New York Times.

I'm a reporter from the New York Times.

Yeah, you should might as well be from the Dayton Inquirers.

I don't care.

Oh, did you know that LeBron is 37?

He's going to be, who cares?

Or did you see this football player took off his jersey and there's a little cycle?

Nobody cares.

Or this latest celebrity tweeted, I couldn't believe, who cares about the Kardashians?

Nobody cares.

So we have dropped out of Blue America and it means almost nothing.

It's very dangerous because we are the people.

that make or the foundation for the blue american mansion they're up there in the top floor and they have no idea of what supports them and that's why they're scared because uh i think they really believe that they keep pushing and pushing and denigrating and caricaturing and damning the so-called deplorables.

And they're in revolt now.

You're going to see it in the midterms.

And you notice, Jack, that they know it's coming.

It's sort of like a guy on the beach and he's got his radio and he said there was a 7.5

earthquake right off the coast of Hawaii.

And he's sitting in San Francisco and he looks at his watch and he's got, I don't know, 17 hours before the wave is going to smother him and there's nothing he can do.

His car is broken down.

He's sitting on that beach.

And so then he starts, you know, fantasizing, well, it's not really going to happen or who did this.

It's somebody else's fault.

It's coming.

And the midterm tsunami is coming.

And they know it.

And you can

hear that they know it when they say, democracy is broken.

The whole system is going to be

destroyed.

I was watching some clips the other night from CNN and MNSNBC.

If the Republicans win, that's the end of democracy.

And these are not nuts from the far left.

These are the David Brookses and the Atlantic chorale of writers.

And they know better.

Robert Kagans wrote something to that effect.

They know what they're writing.

And what they're writing is essentially,

we have become so bankrupt that the middle classes are in open revolt.

And for the first time, they're going to really pay us in a way we haven't pay us back in a way we haven't seen since 2010.

And to prevent that and to preempt that, we've got to say they're racist January 6, January 6th, January 6th, Trump, Trump, Trump, get some more retired officers to warn us about a coup, da da da da da da, because it's coming.

Yeah.

Victor, it's coming.

And I think more so than 2010, it might.

not end just at the election.

You know,

hey, we have these numbers and now ineffectual implementation of policies.

I have a feeling this time it may be different.

I hope it's different.

But maybe that's where the fear is like, oh my gosh, these people take over.

Maybe they're going to do something like

say colleges with endowments

over five, you know, $2 billion must be taxed on that amount, or you're not allowed to donate,

et cetera.

You know, these kind of small bore, a collection of small bore things that will target these elites i think it's possible and it's also you know what's even thicker jack there's a sizable minority of the left that wants it to come they're kind of like the proverbial guy little boy of 10 that goes out and just says he's going to get dirty and play in the mud but secretly he wants his mommy to come in and clean up the mess And that's what they want.

They want the wall finished.

You know why they want the wall finished?

So instead of 2 million people coming across chaotically that they get damned for, that they can go down there and empathize with one or two people a day here and there that say, oh, these poor victims, they've been discriminated against.

They can manage that.

So they do want the wall.

And

they really do want a strong military so they can say that we are war criminals and this, but not in charge of Afghanistan.

And they do.

want that fracker to go out there and make sure that people have gas and oil and can heat their homes and drive so that they can, you know, get gas down to about 350 and then say well you know now we can experiment with this and that and that so

they understand that when they're in control they screw stuff up so badly that they can't operate but they serve very well as kind of a parasite

on the host that is always kind of you know going here and there and biting and scratching and saying this is this needs to be nuanced this needs to be trimmed but they're afraid of being in control because they know what they're doing and it's not a sustainable project i'm not talking about the majority but a minority of them you're going to see people

liberal independents soccer moms suburbanites old-style democrats maybe 10 of the electorate they're going to tell everybody how so worried they are about the destruction of democracy by trump and his subordinates and the takeover of the Republican Party by populist Nazis and all that.

And then they're going to quietly go in and vote for it.

Just watch.

Because when you see concierge gun selling in Beverly Hills,

or you see people in San Francisco that say we want to recall these board members that change the names of these schools by the bathrooms were filthy, or you see people who are very left-wing and are opening their trunks when they park and letting you know homeless people crawl through the car to see if there's anything they can take in the hopes that they won't take anything if they have open access, they understand that that's not a sustainable situation.

And that's why AOC Jack is in Florida.

That's why she hugs people.

She violates quarantine.

She does not care about masks.

She doesn't care about social distancing.

She wants to be as far away from the hellhole that she helped create as possible.

She's always giving lectures about white supremacy.

She's always giving lectures about whiteness.

She's always giving lectures about DeSantis and the Nazi criminal state of Florida.

And the first opportunity she gets when New York is locked down, it's cold, she's around neurotic people like herself.

She zips down there with her yuppie white boyfriend.

They sit in flip-flops at a cafe.

And then she goes to the appropriate, you know, I don't know, transgender this bar that.

And that's what she is.

She understands that she can do that in Florida and she can't do that in New York.

She never asks why that is, because to do so would end her political career.

But it's emblematic of how that left-wing mind works.

I am going to be a trimmer.

I am going to be a bird on your shoulder that crack cackles all the time.

But do not expect me to make the system work.

I can't do that.

I can only...

trim it and tear it down and make fun of it but i never want the responsibility to make things work

And that's how the looks in New York also.

Yeah.

Victor, well, this kind of addresses

much of what the other article I was going to bring up.

That's Joel Kotkin.

He's written in the past for National Reviewer.

I used to hang my hat several times, mostly about demographics, urban matters, or California going to hell in a handbasket.

He's got a piece for a really good British website called Unheard, U-N-H-E-R-D.

But it's called, Is This the End of Progressive America?

And he, Kotkin, who I think you know,

probably maybe have

run into each other across each other in the past.

He teaches at Chapman down in Southern California.

He writes that multiple fronts of resistance are taking shape.

And so it's one thing for there to be multiple people who are fed up, but to have actual resistance taking shape.

Yeah, I mean, we see that.

We saw that in in virginia in in these elections we're assuming it's going to happen in november other things that are signs that that progressivism is coming i don't know if it's coming to an end you know is that you've written many times about progressive it just has to and wokeness cannot sustain any insane level of intensity that it has but is it going to be pushed back is another question and very briefly this is just how he ended his piece and if you want to say thanks jack let's move on we will but he wrote so here's the good news after citing a number of interesting signs on what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture we can see multiple fronts of resistance and the early congealing of independent-minded forces from the rational right to the traditional liberal left.

Our society may never regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions.

But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.

They do, don't they, Victor?

Yeah, they do.

I know, I've met Joe, I think I met him at Pepperdine a couple of times.

He's been gravitating as a classical liberal on the left to a centrist, and he's been offering a lot of astute,

and I've done something similar of a medieval paradigm to characterize California, a society without a middle class, a keep

on the coast, and then peasantry around that's vulnerable to what the keep does.

So I read him a lot and I admire what he's writing.

And what he's trying to say is that none of these progressive movements are grounded in reality.

They don't work.

You can't have the largest consumption of gas in California, fuel, and the most crowded freeways and be number fourth in gas oil reserves and not utilize it and then lecture people about the evils of carbon emissions and import your fuel, natural gas from Alaska or your oil from the South or whatever.

Same with electricity.

He understands that's not sustainable.

You can't say that you're a racist or you're insensitive or you're vicious for not worrying about the homeless while you sidestep the homeless and you unleash them on what's left of the middle class.

So he understands that this is not a sustainable proposition, the wokeness.

And

it is coming.

When he says it's coming to an end, I always ask myself, well, we have to be a physician.

So that's a prognosis, prognosis.

It's coming, I think, to an end.

And we have a diagnosis, the problem.

But what are the symptoms?

What are the symptoms of this problem that suggests it's waning?

Is the temperature going down?

Is the rash going away?

So I look at this and I look at BLM.

Take BLM.

Right after George Floyd, it had manipulated pretty ineffectively the Trayvon Martin and the Michael Brown shootings.

It was getting in the news, but it wasn't really approved of.

And then after George Floyd, it took that narrative that was completely untrue, that the police were on an epidemic of killing black men, I think 25 black men out of 52 people,

excuse me, 11 black men out of 52 unarmed suspects, 25 of whom were white, the others were of different races, but only nine or 10, 11 of them were African Americans.

And by the way, I think Heather McDonald wrote the other day that a police officer is 400 times more likely to be shot by a black suspect than to shoot a black unarmed suspect.

So they took one shot yesterday in Chicago and another

always happens.

And it takes that reality and it turned it into a lie but it was popular it's popular because of that grimace on shaubin's face that kind of callous look that he had and then george floyd i can't breathe and he did nothing or when michael brown was shot his body was left out on the street so there were things that were insensitive but they did not suggest there was a reality there as blm had had created it.

And now BLM has got less than majority support.

Every single poll shows that people are fed up with it.

Why are they fed up with it?

Because it's a racist organization run by grifters.

All of the three people who started it, Marxist,

we forgot what they said at the beginning of it.

They said that they were largely an anti-homophobic gay group.

And then suddenly they mainstreamed.

Well, now they've got their money from corporate America.

Miss Quellers owns, what, four houses?

She's up in all white Tabonga Canyon with her big $35,000 security.

It worked for her.

It worked for the others.

And on every major issue that we focus on, about trials, for example, they're not just wrong.

They're absurd.

Juicy Smollett, the complete faker who is torn to shreds on the witness stand, what does BLM say?

It's racist.

He didn't do that.

He was a real victim.

This shows you how awful endemic racism is.

Kyle Ritterhouse, let's go and protest and intimidate the judge and the jury.

This is all about race.

Waukesha,

this is the story of the revolution.

This is great.

This is what they do.

They have no reputation.

It's like Me Too.

Everybody was giving Me Too their due, given the repellent nature of Harvey Weinstein, et al., and Hollywood until they bumped up to what?

Joe Biden.

And this woman came out of the shadows according to Me Too standards.

There is no statute on limitations.

Remember the senator from Hawaii?

Women must be believed.

So she came out and said, she was not just harassed, that she was sexually assaulted by Senator Joe Biden.

And even her mother had been on a radio show substantiating that her daughter had been a sexually assaulted.

And we had the tape at the time.

And what did people say?

Hey, man.

Look at this bunch of plowings we've got in 2020.

Do you want Pete Butterjig as your nominee?

Corey Brooker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris?

Is that what you want?

Neon Costro?

Is that what you want?

We only got old Joe Biden from Sprint.

That's it.

So she must not bullet.

And they destroyed her, and they destroyed the meat too.

And so what I'm getting at is that all of these woke instrumentations

are gone now.

Nobody believes in them.

Nobody believes BLM.

Antifa is a bunch of spoiled brat thugs.

And everybody knows that for 120 days, they inflicted $2 billion of damage along with BLM.

30 people died.

2,000 police officers were injured.

Looting, arson, 14,000 people arrested.

And that's what they did.

And I know that we want to talk about January 6th and not this greater catastrophe with the free zone in Seattle and all that.

But everybody's sick of Antifa.

Everybody's sick of BLM.

Nobody takes seriously the Me Too movement anymore because they created their own, you know, their own ridicule.

And so I look at these institutions of the woke movement, the progressive cause, and they're not there.

And then when you look at the actual issues, they got everything they wanted, Jack.

In 2020, they got the Congress.

They've got Joe Biden in the presidency.

And that was in addition to academians, the media, Silicon Valley, professional sports, Wall Street.

They had everything but the people.

But they did run through the gamut of all of these issues.

We had an open border.

How did that work out?

We fled Afghanistan.

How did that work out?

We shut down pipelines and fracking fields and leasing.

How did that work out?

We printed money and money and money.

How did that work out?

We told the world that Donald Trump created COVID and should resign because 260,000 people had died in his watch.

The virus was essentially over because Biden had created essentially, as he said, the vaccinations.

Nobody had been vaccinated.

He came along, he said, and it would be over by 4th of July.

How did that work out?

How is the availability of testing working out now?

A lot of tests there for everybody to get tested.

So they got what they wanted, and they did a Venezuela, a Nicaragua, a Cuba,

an old Soviet Union for nine months.

And what's the result?

He's got historic, almost historic lows.

Biden does.

And his positions are historically historically low.

And this is the important thing to remember, Jack.

He's down to 40%, 39% approval, 57%, 58% disapproval.

But unlike Trump, these are left-wing polls that are showing this.

And this is a left-wing media that has never covered Hunter Biden, or has never covered the Biden crime family syndicate, or has never covered the fact that he's non-composed mentes.

So Trump sneezed and he infected everybody with COVID.

Trump slowed one world

or he walked slow down a ramp and he's all of a sudden dehabilitated.

Joe Biden can fall and he's Superman.

So what I'm getting at, his low ratings are much lower than even Trump's were because they were massaged and they were protected and cocooned by fake polls and fake news.

And so what I'm getting at is I don't think we have really plumbed the depths of just how angry people are.

And all of the king's men in the media and all of the king's men in the polling industry and all of the king's men in corporate America and academia can't put Humpty Dumpty Joe back together again.

Well, Victor, you mentioned January 6th.

And we are going to talk about that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Traditionalist.

We also do the Classicist.

I do that once a week.

And then the great Sammy Wink does a few episodes of The Culturalist.

Thank everyone who listens.

This is the eve of the anniversary of the mob attacking, entering, meleeing at the Capitol last year.

It is widely known as an insurrection in certain media circles.

It was an insurrection, Victor.

I thought that was an attempt to undo the 2016 elections in a more nefarious way.

Attempted insurrection anyway.

But by the time this is broadcast, the, I hate to even use the word anniversary will have happened, but it will have.

Victor, what thoughts do you want to share?

Anything you have to say about that day, about the reaction to that day, about the glorification and the sanctification of certain people,

abuses by our government and in hindsight, in jurisprudence.

What are your thoughts, Victor?

The reality of what happened on January 5th, and then there's the the construct of what happened.

The reality was it was a despicable riot by a bunch of buffoonish people for the most part.

The guy with the horns, the guy that's sitting in Nancy Pelosi.

It was theater, performance art.

It was dangerous in the sense they went inside the iconic capital of the United States.

Okay,

it was one day.

And everybody...

on the conservative side that had any sense condemned it.

The left looked at this Reichstag fire opportunity and said, wait a minute, there's things we can work with here.

They knew that they were going to have no issues.

They were worried about Trump and they were worried about the elections in Georgia.

So they decided to impeach him over it.

They couldn't quite say it's a high crime and misdemeanor or any of the types of charges spelled out in the Constitution.

So they just said, you know, he's inciting to riot and that stuff.

So let's, as a philologist, always look at the words insurrection, revolution.

Let's look at those words.

So what were the instruments that this mob, these buffoons used?

Weapons?

They had to have weapons to take on.

You saw those people in the tapes, even though we haven't got 14, is that 14,000, 20,000 hours of videos?

We have enough videos to see there were people with SWAT armaments.

How do you confront those people?

With flagpoles?

I mean, they did not arrest a single person inside the Capitol with a gun, much less for using a gun.

There may have been people out in the larger group that had a gun in their car, or I think there was some people that were undercover that had a gun.

But so far, insurrection, no.

So then you say insurrection.

Insurrections and revolutions are planned.

So where is the blueprint?

It's not somebody's Lego set of the White House.

So we need some plans.

We need a guy to break down under rigorous questioning.

Said, I'm so sorry.

I planned it all.

I used social media just in the way that Antifa and BLM on Twitter

and Facebook had coordinated their attacks on federal courthouses, et cetera, during the summer of 2020.

They couldn't find it.

It's not Victor saying this.

It's the FBI.

The FBI did an investigation.

And this is the politicized FBI in the era of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Christopher Wray, and Kevin Klein Smith, and Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

That FBI.

So it had no no goodwill to these people.

And they said, you know what?

There's no insurrection.

There's no planning.

So then we say, well, what was the result of it?

Let's look at the dead.

Oh, five people dead.

Remember the headlines?

Five die in Trump takeover.

Five killed, killed.

It's not like Waukesha where somebody dies by a car.

These people were killed by mysterious forces.

So we look at it.

And we, Officer Signick,

who probably was a Trump supporter, murdered, backed his head, head caved in,

head trauma.

That's what we heard.

And then we started to look upon examination.

We find out that Officer Sicknick died the next day.

Then it was bear spray, terrible allergic action to a Trump supporter.

It didn't happen.

He probably died of a stroke.

You could argue that it was stress-induced, but he died of natural causes.

The other three died of natural causes, and you can argue maybe in one or two cases by excessive police force.

So there was only one that died violently, and that was a 105-pound, 14-year military veteran, small business owner, Ashley Babbitt, a female, and she was unarmed, who committed a low-level felony by breaking into the window of the house chambers.

Okay?

Capital.

You don't kill people in the United States for that.

And I'm quoting now chapter and verse from the left.

If that happens,

and had

Ashley Bobbitt been black and that officer had been white,

and this had been sort of the takeover of the Supreme Court chambers and during the Kavanaugh hearings, or Chuck Schumer banging on the door of the Supreme Court saying, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, we're coming.

Yeah, say, say,

Wisconsin, the

attacks on the team of capital during the teacher's boy.

If this, and that officer had been white, within one nanosecond, his picture would be over every major newspaper, and Ashley Babbitt would have been canonized as a victim to the cause.

Instead, what happened in the next 24 hours, there was a complete news blackout that continued for months so that we did not know of the officer's race, the circumstances of the shooting, his prior record as a law enforcement officer, and and then she was demonized as an anon, nut, kind of weird, sexually,

and they just destroyed her character.

Just defy, you know,

just rejecting the whole me too credo that you don't attack a female victim.

Okay,

so that's what we found out about the violence.

And then we're, no insurrection, no violence.

Officer Sichnik, who laid in state, tragically died, but he was not killed.

And then we're starting to learn that for some reason, there's a complete, I don't know, blackout, resistance,

wall around the release of videos and

communications between law enforcement grandees that might tell us what was the strategy.

Because, I mean, after all, you don't let a bunch of people that come dressed with horns and stuff into the Capitol.

So how were they let into the Capitol?

And how many informants were there among the crowd?

And was the FBI aware of this?

That information were not forthcoming.

And then finally, the denouement of this entire bizarre situation is the people who were arrested and put into what was mostly solitary confinement under very harsh conditions was not any way comparable to the people who killed people in the summer of 2020.

Is this guy that was in the Chaz

Free Zone in Seattle?

Remember him?

That African-American, violent revolutionary declared he'd taken over part.

That's an insurrection.

Part of, where is he now?

That rapper, I don't think he's in incarceration.

So there was an asymmetry against these defendants.

And some of them haven't been formally charged.

And none of them have been formally charged with insurrection or treason.

And yet, and yet the civil libertarians on the left are delighted that these people are suffering without charges being brought and without full evidence being available.

And they turn, you know, they don't care about prison conditions.

So the whole thing is an embarrassment.

It was initially an enormous embarrassment to the right that this thing happened to begin with.

But now it is sort of metamorphosizing into an even greater embarrassment for the left.

And that's well aside from the reality.

It has no other issue.

So January 6th, we're going to see on January 6th, and when you hear this, you've seen it, the left is going to go nuts.

It's going to be a national day of mourning.

It's going to be comparable to Jubal Early's 1864 summer raid on D.C.

in the midst of the Civil War.

It's going to be something like that.

It's going to be the British burn the White House.

That's going to be the level of this construction on the part of the left.

And it's going to be that way because A, they're terrified of the midterms in the 2024 election, and B, they have no agenda.

If you're sitting right now in your Ron Clain and you're talking on one phone to Joe Biden, you're probably talking to Jill Biden and Michelle Obama and Barack, and on the other phone, you're talking at the same time, well, hold on, let me listen to what Elizabeth Warren has to say in the squad and Bernie Sanders.

And you say, we got to come up with an agenda to run on.

And I'm talking to my house members in these swing districts, and they don't know what our agenda is.

Is it let's print more money, let in more illegal aliens, do to Iraq what we did to Afghanistan, talk more about critical race theory, more racial preferences to see who gets a new drug first to treat COVID based on a person's skin color.

We have all of these issues, so we double down on them.

So that's what it's about, Jack.

They have no issues.

They're panicking and they've created a buffoonish, despicable one-day riot into

something like a revolution to destroy the United States.

And it did a lot of damage because now we've got Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley ferreting out white supremacists supposedly in the military and it fueled all these people on campus.

You know, as somebody who was in a campus community, when I see references to January 6th, I mean, it's with eager delight.

And it's always in the context of, let's do something to the Constitution.

Let's pass some law.

Let's have some bureaucratic edict to limit personal expression and freedom from the right, because we'll have January 6th.

That's what it is.

And I think this...

investigation that was ticked apart on the House part, they took two House Republicans that are going to lose their seats, most notably Lynn Cheney, and they basically said, if you serve as a token on this committee, we're going to give you a lot of press and publicity.

And as you lose next year, you're going to be sort of a martyr for your principles.

And we will let you use this to attack Donald Trump.

And we're going to try to find out if there have been communications with our colleagues that are going to take over the House soon.

And maybe we can go back to 1866

and the 14th Amendment and say they're neo-Confederate insurrectionists that are barred by the 14th Amendment from ever serving again in Congress.

We'll try to kick them out before we lose power.

It's that kind of stuff.

But they will, at some point, say it's time to shut this investigation down because we don't want to get too close to the number of FBI informants that were involved, or who made the decisions to pull back the law enforcement, or who

covered up the identity and the nature of the shooting of Ashley Babbitt, etc.

So I think they have so much exposure there that after they have this performance art on January 6th, it will start to fade.

Victor, we've come almost to the end of this episode of The Traditionalist.

I would like to remind our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

And that's where anything you do, appearance on a radio program or another podcast, your own podcast, other writings that you do for American Greatness, and a lot of writings you do exclusively for the website, they're to be found there.

If you want access to the, what's called the Ultra, that's the exclusive content.

It's $5 a month or $50

for the year.

Do check it out.

Me, what about me?

I am Jack Fowler.

I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and we are trying to strengthen civil society.

I'd like to invite our listeners to visit centerforcivilsociety.com.

And I also write a weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

It's free.

It has a dozen or so recommended readings, links, and some excerpts.

So, hey, visit civilthoughts.com.

Sign up.

Again, it's free.

Harmless.

Hopefully tastes great.

We do have many people visiting iTunes regularly to leave reviews of the show, which still maintains a five-star average rating.

And some people kindly leave comments.

And here's one from John B.

Whalen, who wrote the other day: Victor is fantastic.

What a narrative.

What an intellect.

Thanks for providing your knowledge to all ears persons like me.

As Rush Limbaugh would say, he was made broadcast.

We were made to listen.

I love you.

One TV and on the radio.

Were we to get more time with you?

Thank you.

JBW.

It may

have been written on New Year's Eve, I'm not sure, but it's clearly an expression of admiration and love, even.

So thanks, John B.

Whalen, for that, and for all others who leave their

comments.

Victor, I think there's kind of a rule now up to January 5th, you can say Happy New Year's to people.

And beyond that, it gets a little ridiculous.

So today is January 5th when we're recording.

To you, Victor, to the great Mrs.

Hansen, to all our listeners, happy new year.

And we'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Traditionalists.

Thanks for listening.

All your deplorables and irredeemables and rags and clingers out there for listening to us one more time.

Amen.

Amen.

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