The Classicist: Unappealing Agendas

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, the Classicists.

We are recording on Tuesday, December 21st.

This is the first day of winter.

We're coming to the end of Advent, a few days off from Christmas.

I couldn't be merrier.

Why?

Because I'm talking with Victor Davis-Hanson.

By the way, I'm Jack Fowler.

Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the namesake and star of this show.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, the best-selling author of many books, the most recent being The Dying Citizen.

Try ordering it on Amazon.

Maybe delay, but Barnes and Noble will have it.

Great book, doing tremendously well.

Victor, we've got a lot to talk about in not that much time.

We're a little crimped today, but one of the things I'm very fearful of, because I've heard it from the leftist media, is that democracy in America is dying.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

I'm the host, Jack Fowler.

I also host The Traditionalist, and the great Sammy Wink hosts the culturalist.

Thanks for listening to the podcast.

So, Victor, you have written a piece for American Greatness.

You do two pieces a week, and one of them is titled, Why is the Left Worried Suddenly About the End of Democracy?

And here we have in the United States, Democrats in control of the White House, in control of the Senate, in control of the House of Representatives.

Why should the left be worried about democracy?

Here's how your article begins, Victor.

What is behind recent pessimistic appraisals of democracy's future?

From Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Brian Williams, and other elite intellectuals, media personalities, and politicians on the left.

Some are warning about its possible erosion in 2024.

Others predict the democracy downturn as early as 2022 with scary scenarios of autocracy.

and Trump coups.

Victor, why is the left worried suddenly about the end of democracy?

I just say, Jack, that the reason we don't have very much time today, it's a Saturnalia and the Roman festival marking the shortest day of the year.

So this is always a depressing day, but it was always a time of festival in the ancient world because it marked the idea that when you got up on the 22nd or their equivalent of, depending on which calendar you use, a Julian or the Gregorian, everything was better because you gained two or three minutes every single day from now on.

Now we're over the hump.

So we should be very depressed today.

It's the longest night of the year, the shortest day, and tomorrow things get better.

And we're looking toward March 21st when we have the spring equinox and everything is equal.

And then we have that wonderful time of the year

between the equinox of the spring and the equinox of September when we have the longest days of the year.

I go into depression on September 21st

because the days get shorter every day until today, and then I'm going to be very buoyant tomorrow.

Just want to put that editorial.

Why are they warning us about, well, Jack, would you believe me if I said it's because they're so principled and they're worried about democracy?

They're worried that after 233 years, it might not survive.

No.

I wouldn't believe you.

No.

No, I wouldn't believe myself.

They didn't say this when?

In November, December, January, February, March.

They started a little bit in April, and now, and it's contingent on one thing, polls.

When they won, I can go back and cite chapter and verse in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Magazine, NPR, PBS.

They were jubilant, and they said that the system was resilient.

It had survived.

It had

trusted the people and the people had come through.

And then all of a sudden, Joe Biden, all of a sudden, over several months, his popularity tanked between 37 and 41.

All of the issues failed.

The left had a rare occasion in U.S.

history when they controlled both houses of Congress.

I'm not talking about the Democrats.

I'm talking about the hard left and the presidency, and they blew it.

And they know what's coming.

You know, and they keep saying, you know, Joe Biden says winter is coming.

He's trying to get this Game of Thrones men.

Yeah, it's coming.

It's called the November midterms of 2022.

And that's why they say 2022, but especially 2024, because again, all they have is Donald Trump and January 6th.

And even the January 6th narrative is blowing up.

If you think about it, there was nobody ever charged with treason, insurrection, conspiracy.

Officer Sicknick tragically died of natural causes.

He was not bashed in the head and died of violent Trump supporters.

And the only person who died violently was Ashley Babbitt, a petite, small, what, 105-pound unarmed female whose crime was entering a window trespassing and she was shot and so that whole narrative i could go on but it's crumbling no one was ever arrested inside the capitol with a gun which makes the idea of an armed insurrection very suspicious we don't have the thousands of hours of video the house investigation has turned into a liz cheney disaster so they're worried is what i'm trying to get at jack and so now the military is in on it the media is in on it, and the Democratic Party is in on it.

And if you dare vote for Donald Trump, you dare vote for his minions, and the next years, we're not going to have a democracy anymore.

A final irony, they are the ones that have been trying to destroy the system for their own political advantage.

They were the ones that tried to pack the court and are trying to pack the court after 150 years.

They are the ones that want to get rid of both a 233-year-old electoral college and a 233-year-old constitutional law that says the states will be the primary adjudicators of balloting in national elections.

They want to nationalize or federalize all elections under their control.

You know what that means, no voter ID in any state.

They want to get rid of 60 years of a 50 state union.

They want to get rid of a 180-year custom and tradition of the filibuster.

They are the revolutionaries.

And so they always project that.

They are the ones that talked about, you You remember the anonymous Jack?

Yeah.

Remember that guy who was just a minor little figure and they inflated him into a senior cabinet-level grandee that was saying that there's a revolution, a coup going on.

And he had those stupid little anonymous op-eds in the New York Times.

And he was just some guy who was bragging that they were trying to subvert the Trump administration, just like the entire Russian hoax,

just like what, Rosa Brooks writing in foreign policy policy about, well, we can get rid of Trump.

It's been 11 days.

Now we know he's no good.

So let's get the 25th Amendment very prescient when we think that Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe thought about getting wired up and tapping the president.

And then she said, let's get the impeachment.

They did that twice, once when he was a trial of a private citizen without a chief justice in attendance at the trial.

And then we had, of course, John Nagel and Lieutenant Colonel Yingling writing, I think, in a major up-it in August, right before the election, saying it was incumbent upon Milley to get rid of Trump if he need be.

Milley thought that Trump was trying to obstruct his loss and wouldn't leave office.

Joe Biden said that.

So coup, cool, cool, cool, coup

is all that the left has been talking about.

And now they're projecting it.

Remember that, Jack, about projection with the left?

If you reset, and you appease Putin and you get caught on a hot mic basically making a deal for Putin to behave in exchange for dismantling a very valuable anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe, and you cut defenses, then you project that weakness onto Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump, of course, killed mercenaries in Syria.

He got out of that asymmetrical missile deal.

He flooded the world with then expensive oil.

He beefed up NATO by jawboning them.

He beefed up the U.S.

defense.

But that's what they do.

So they have been the ones talking about coup.

And that op-ed in the Washington Post, it's all about what we have to do as a military.

It's really scary.

I think one thing that our listeners should really,

they understand better than us probably, the military is not the military of what we have been accustomed to.

The fighting men are wonderful.

They always have been.

They're the strength of the sinews of this country.

But when you get to one-star, two-star, three-star, four-star, and you start to look at the inability to have strategic resolution in Afghanistan or Libya or Iraq or to deter Russia or China or to be one step behind them on super

modern or post-modern weapon systems, hypersonic or all these things.

And then you ask what they're doing instead, whether it's transgendered surgery subsidies or pregnant women in the military or women in

special forces or gay marriage, all of that.

They love them or you know, the USS Harvey Melk or the USS Cesar Chavez.

They love the military now, and they have transformed it.

And when you look at polls, only 45%

don't believe that the United States, they don't warrant trust or confidence in the U.S.

military.

That's pretty high.

It's almost half the country.

That's staggering.

Staggering.

And they did it.

Who's they?

It's people like Secretary of Defense Austin, who seemed to go right from Raytheon, right into his cabinet post, and will, as sure as the sun rises, go right back to Raytheon.

And it's Mark Milley, who broke the law when he violated the advisory limitations on the actions of the Joint Chiefs by saying that subordinates would report directly to him in a crisis that Donald Trump created, he said.

And of course, he's very friendly with the Chinese, at least friendly enough that he warned them that if he thought Donald Trump was an existential threat to them, he would join them and warn them about it.

Right.

This is a great sense and uh of of calculation now right if i'm going to make a career of this if i'm going to end up a second two-star general etc from the get-go i'm plotting the course which is

to be a bureaucrat and that is so when you saw those guys the chief of naval operations and you see now the vice chairman or Millie and they go before those congresspeople and they fall over themselves to show that they're out looking for white supremacists right or Or white rage or they're woke.

So you're right.

They want to make sure that their promotion or their future career is not impeded by the left wing in Congress.

But I think also what they're doing is two things.

There's so much money now

in military contracting, more than there ever was in the old days.

It's so lucrative that what they are doing is two things.

They understand the corporate woke ethos.

And if they want to be on a corporate board of a military contractor, or they want to be a lobbyist, or they do not want to be attacked by the left for going into the revolving door, not that the left cares anymore, as long as the military does what they want, because they have no principles.

But you can really see their virtue signaling their fee days in the last two or three years of their careers.

And then when they revolve out of the Pentagon, they really rake in the money.

And it's not just the old 40 or 50, 60,000, 70,000.

It is stock options.

It's salary.

It's guaranteed income.

It's all sorts of stuff.

They won't get that, Jack, if they sound traditionalist or conservative.

No corporation will want them.

And they surely won't want them if they have anything to do with Trump.

And they'll be in big trouble as because they'll be accused of cashing in by the likes of Elizabeth Warren.

You tell Elizabeth Warren that you're out there in the military doing her bidding, she will just keep mum when you go right onto the the board of Lockheed or something.

Right.

Well, I don't think it's even necessarily to be a member of the boards, you know, pretty significant.

I think it's much more widespread.

A family member works for a military contractor.

There is no way you're getting a military contractor.

You have the most amazing technology and product that would benefit American security.

There is no way you are getting a military contract unless you hire retired generals, admirals, colonels, and then also also have to hire these companies to act as middlemen.

It's the weirdest thing.

And who runs those companies?

Retired military officers.

Stanley McChrystal, Stanley McCrystal has, quote unquote, a leadership corporation.

What does Stanley McChrystal do?

I'm not a big fan of Robert E.

Lee.

I've written that in a solo battle.

And I always compare his military efficacy to someone who is really a remarkable genius like William Decumps of Sherman.

So I don't have pictures of Robert E.

Lee.

I don't know why anybody would, but Stanley McChrystal did.

And then as soon as Charlottesville came, guess what he said?

He wrote in the Atlantic, I saw that picture and I just whipped it off the wall.

And by evening, it was in the dumpster.

Okay,

we understand you're virtue signaling.

And that's a very wise thing to do, given your corporate clients and the malu of the country.

I could go on and on about other generals who did stuff like that, but it's all performance art and it's corporate.

And it's exactly what you're saying.

and and it's really drives me crazy because we have all of these brave people courageous people who die in afghanistan in iraq they go fight all over the world

and what are we hearing about them now we're hearing from millie that he's looking at white rage and we're hearing in this op-ed by these three retired generals that X amount, 10%

of the people who were arrested were veterans.

Well, 7% of the country, 7 or 8% of the country is veterans.

So what?

So they're almost disparaging in the military rank and file of the military or to these generals.

They're playing the role of the deplorables in civilian life to the left.

And there's the same breakdown.

You have a bicoastal elite that has nothing but contempt.

for the interior of the country.

And then in the military, we have created a New York or I should say Washington-centric elite in the Pentagon, and they don't have a lot of confidence with the people who fight in the enlisted ranks.

And these people are never going to get to be major colonel and one-star, two-star.

They're never going to

get a corporate job or billet.

They're never going to become wealthy off of this.

And they are going to be from time to time from congressional members and from retired military, disparaged as possible white national.

But they are going to do one thing, as I said before, they're going to die at twice their numbers in the general populations in Godforsaken places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Well, let's hope some of them run for office too and show us out of this madness.

So, Victor, you've written a piece for your website, victorhanson.com.

As we've mentioned many times before, there is exclusive content there, and I do recommend our listeners subscribe.

It's very reasonable, $5.

Test it out at $5, $50 for the year.

And here's a typical piece.

It's called The Thinning Veneer of Our Civilization.

This is under the Eeyore's cabinet, a feature on your website.

We all remember who Eeyore is.

Victor, there's a lot about crime in here, but of course, there's far more than crime.

And we're going to talk about crime also after this with the mayor of San Francisco and other people all of a sudden realizing there's madness in the streets.

Victor, you begin this piece, The Thinning Veneer of Our Civilization, by recounting a story of something that happened happened to a friend in Fresno.

Would you tell us about that and then more about this piece?

Well, I've heard this happen and my wife related it to it.

I don't want to mention names, but let's just say that, and this is a true story, but I've heard it from other people as well, that you're in a line at a store and someone comes in and loots the store and the security watches them loot.

and the checker watches them loot and they walk out and people are lined up with their produce and maybe they're not very wealthy, maybe they're wealthy, who cares?

But they start, this person saw this where the people just walk out.

And so what I'm getting at is if you undermine the enforcement of the law and the law no longer exists, then for some people who may have quasi beliefs about the law, it's sanctity.

They're saying, well, why should I follow the rules when that person isn't following the rules?

And the people in charge of enforcing the rules either aren't here or won't enforce them.

So I look like an idiot and therefore whatever abstract allegiance I have to law is vanished in the concrete reality of I'm paying for a commodity that the store itself doesn't appreciate because they just let somebody walk out without penalty that didn't pay.

And that's what you start to see with the undermining of civilization

and when people don't enforce the law.

And that was what the whole broken windows concept was about, that once you start not fixing broken windows or you don't stop those squeegee people obstructing traffic or you don't remove the homeless off the street, then everybody thinks it's a-okay.

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

When Gavin Newsom says he's going to spend $300 million, which, by the way, to stop this new smash and grab, which is about $200 million less than he gave of the $500 million he gave to illegal aliens.

So he's not a serious person.

But you're starting to see people, Jack, that don't go to the downtown of major cities in California when you have the LA law enforcement union saying, don't come to L.A.

We can't protect you.

And it's not just L.A., just pick up the Fresno B and you can see the same sort of thing on a minor scale happening with people going into liquor stores, food stores, and just taking off with stuff.

And apparently, people can't stop it.

And of course, remember the democratic narrative about that?

It was the corporation's fault.

They have these summits and they come up and say, well, it's a corporation's fault because they don't enforce their law.

It's their problem.

Why don't they enforce the law?

And what would they do?

They would hire a security guard with a gun.

And if somebody came in there and he said, freeze.

And the person turned around and lunged at him and they shot him.

The first thing the New York Times would do is corporate greed gets young man killed.

So they're going to say, no, thank you.

And that's how societies unwind.

And ours is unwinding because from the ground up, each little incremental latitude and exemption starts to accumulate and intensify and become force multipliers.

And so you can see it everywhere.

Everywhere.

It's like that old song, you know, don't it always seem to go?

You don't know what you got till it's gone.

And I think that was Joni Mitchell.

But let me just read to the consternation of some folks, listeners who don't like when I do this, but tough noogies, this piece is exclusive.

So if you're not a subscriber, you're not going to be able to read it.

But I think the end is important here.

You wrote, because this is not just about crime.

Again, this is the thinning veneer of our civilization.

Victor, you wrote, democracy is rare and fragile.

Its murderers are not coups and barbarians on the frontier, but sloth, laziness, cynicism, nihilism, affluence, and leisure.

Without a middle class, there is no democracy.

Without a border, there is no nation.

Without assimilation and integration of tribes, there is no country with a permanent administrative state of millions.

There is no democracy.

With constant efforts to change, amend, scrap a system that does not benefit ideologues political agendas, there is no democracy.

With allegiance to a global project rather than one's own nation, there is no democracy.

Victor, you also, I don't have it in front of me, you wrote a piece, it's just out in the new criterion, and much of it has to do with the themes of the dying citizen.

But at the end of your essay there, you also wrote about this is a very fragile thing that we have here in America.

Nowhere else in history and very few places, you know, in current history is anything like what we have.

And it needs to be protected and seems to be disintegrating before our eyes.

I'm really worried about it.

I don't think I've ever, I mean, I don't want to sound like a leftist, but I've never seen people so emboldened to want to change the makeup of the court or the Electoral College, like we've talked about, or national voting, or in the filibuster, or bring in states.

If you had a bunch of Republicans right now and they

well, we want to cut California in half and get two more senators from Northern California, there would be a howl.

Or during the war in court, if the Republicans said, let's get 15 justices, there would have been a howl.

Or when Barack Obama tried to filibuster the Alito nomination and the right had said, let's get rid of the filibuster, there was a howl.

Some of them said that.

And so This thing is a revolutionary spiral we're in where the left feels that they don't even have to account for this asymmetry that they are so pure and moral and

they have that they dominate this cancel culture this social media and the message that they're sending is equity equity equity equality of result equality of result if there is not perfect equity or equality economic equality then somebody has to pay and that person has gotten his wealth or his greater material abundance illegally or unlawfully unlawfully or amorally.

And we're going to take it from them.

And we are exempt from any consequences because we're morally superior guardians.

That's how they think.

And they're totalitarian.

They try to involve every aspect.

Bake a cake,

you're a guy who bakes a cake, then you're going to have a gay theme on your cake, or we're going to sue you.

And you just want to...

close your ears, turn on the Super Bowl.

No, it's going to be right there in your face.

Oh, let me just go on Facebook.

No, it's on Facebook.

And oh, my child is in the seventh grade.

Oh, what is this segregation race talk?

No, it's there.

Oh, I sent my kid to school and they came home the first semester and they're telling me things I don't believe about.

No, it's there.

So it's every aspect the left wants to control because they have a message that is contrary to human nature.

That humans, for good or worse, have predictable characteristics across time and space.

And they equate man-made law with a natural, almost a divine law.

And they know that you cannot have a society that excuses theft or assault or murder.

And, you know, it's sometimes it just becomes so in your face and ridiculous, Jack, that you don't think it can go on.

When you saw the Kenosha Rittenhouse trial and that paranoia to make a white-on-white violence into a racial explosion and all of the BLM protesters outside the courthouse, et you know, protesting about on the desks, these two, two of them, three of them, actually, if you count the fourth who kicked Rittenhouse and threw up, were felons.

And the other person had a sizable arrest record, but making them into saints.

And then when you had a mass murder in Waukesha, mass murder by a African-American 20-year felon who had a history of saying, you know, go up and hit white people.

And there's nothing.

There's nothing.

And then even a BLM local official in Milwaukee says, this is the start of the revolution.

And that is not covered.

It's not covered.

It's buried.

Then you ask yourself, what is going on?

And the answer is equity, equity, equity.

We don't care if this person is deemed marginalized or a victim, then they get latitude that the law-abiding person doesn't get.

And so people are reacting to that.

And so when you talk to people, they say, I am in the bullseye.

I know that when I turn in my taxes, I will be audited.

If I stray, the other person won't.

I know that if somebody breaks in my house and I use a gun, I'm going to be subject to criminal prosecution in a way that somebody in Chicago will be called just gang activity, as the mayor said of that shootout where no one was prosecuted.

So the law is asymmetrical and people are getting very scared about that.

You look at the people who broke in the Capitol and committed felonies of trespassing or illegal parading or whatever the charge was, those were felonies.

But when you compare it to firebombing a police precinct or trying to firebomb a federal courthouse, and you look at what those people, what happened to them versus the people on January 6th, you can see this asymmetry in the courts.

You see it in the military.

And we just had a person arrested in San Jose, excuse me, four people arrested.

And they had committed 70.

70 acts of violence against a particular profile of the population, female, elderly, Asian American.

And they had beat them and robbed them and tormented them at shopping centers, at stores.

All were African American.

No one talks about it because it is contrary to the meme, the theme, the narrative that hate crimes that have spiked against Asian Americans are all committed by juicy smooth suspect guys with red MAGA hats.

Projection again.

Exactly, because they know who's doing it.

African-American males make up 6% of the population.

And you look at the number of African-American males who've been accused or arrested for anti-Asian hate crimes, enough said.

They know that that's disproportionate to a degree that's absolutely staggering.

And it represents a culture of anti-Asian hatred that no one will talk about.

No one.

And it's very strange.

I know that.

the sins of slavery, I understand all that, but no one in the African-American community wants to talk about anti-Semitism and anti-Asianism.

And boy, when you look at some of the pillars of the racial industry the last year, they have one thing in common, whether it is Louis Farrakhan or whether it's Al Sharpton or whether it's Jesse Jackson or whether it's the Women's Day parade people, they have a history of anti-Semitic remarks.

No one says a word, not one word, not one.

The Jaime Town, right?

This goes way, way back.

Dim Jews put on their yarmica and come over and I'll come over to their hobbies.

I'll sharpen.

Yeah.

And then the gutter religion from Farrakhan.

No one said a word.

Well, Victor, let's talk a little more about time and then we're going to move on to another piece you've written about for American greatness.

So we have, I'll throw three things out here from three cities.

We mentioned before Chicago.

So here's a headline today in the Daily Mail.

Chicago Mayor.

Lori Lightfoot pleads with Attorney General Merrick Garland to send ATF agents to city, alcohol alcohol tobacco firearm agents to city after more than 760 murders this year, a 25-year high.

She's doing this just one year after she proposed cutting $80 million from the police budget.

Also, this is the other day from the Daily Mail, Andy, I think it's now, NGO, the guy's had concrete thrown at his head while he's covering his Antifa SOBs.

He's from Portland.

So he's now writing for the Daily Mail.

He has a piece on the crime spike in Portland.

The murders in 2016, there were 20 murders in Portland.

This year so far, there are 87.

This is insanity.

And then another, some people are writing, I'm pleased by this, that this is that San Francisco mayor London Breed, who, you know, came to fame recently.

She danced in a club without a mask and then defended herself.

You know, these I can do it.

You can't, I can.

Anyway, she's declared war on crime.

She called, said, quote, the reign of criminals who are destroying our city.

So, Victor, okay, there's some pushback, maybe some realization from some of these progressives that they've gone a bridge too far and where they're living is turning into what Trump would call blank holes.

Say what you want about that, but one other thing.

Crime now is what?

Is these fighting smash and grab high-end retail thieves?

That has lit Mayor Breed.

But what about the burning down of businesses by quote-unquote peaceful protesters?

That wasn't a crime.

This was, though.

And it's not a crime, Victor, but the lockdowns also, you know, they abused small businesses, closed them, crushed people's lives.

But when high-end retailers are getting smash and grabbed, well, okay, I'm glad they're rising to the attention.

But, you know, there's a wake of debris and damage from these lefties.

Yeah, I think the left understands that without security, there's nothing.

So you take your most liberal soccer mom in an upscale blue suburb, and if she can't get into a Range Rover and drive to Nordstrom without fear that either somebody's going to carjack her prized possession, or when she parks, cut out her catalytic converter, or when she goes in the store, somebody's going to be smashing and grabbing.

Then she understands that what she supports in the abstract is come back to haunt her in the concrete.

And that's what the left is afraid of.

So all of these Sorrels district attorneys are now lying pathologically that they're not to blame.

They know they are and they're proud of what they did, but they understand that there are liabilities for the Democratic Party and that the public may want to recall them.

The mayors know what they did when they defunded the police.

And they know deep down inside their hearts, they know that the catalyst for this critical legal theory that Soros got in was kind of a lie.

The whole Chartistville meme that Donald Trump said, oh, there's good people on the right that were, you know, Klansmen, he didn't say that.

He talked about both sides having extremists, and they both sides did.

When you look at the Ferguson murder, the tragic murder of Michael Brown, Michael Brown did not hold his hands up and say, hands up, don't shoot.

And we know he was not shot in the back.

And we know that Eric Holder's DOJ did an investigation, lengthy, among others.

And we know that George Zimmerman didn't just go out and shoot Trayvon Martin.

They had an altercation, white Hispanic though he was.

And that was a term the New York Times.

And even George Floyd, we know that Derek Chalvin was culpable with not taking that knee off his neck when he said he couldn't breathe.

He should have done that.

But George Floyd has been turned into, I mean, there are murals with halos.

This is a person who broke into a pregnant woman's home and put her gun to her belly.

and had a long history of violent crime and illegality.

So what I'm getting at is that the anecdotes are the red buttons that you pushed to get to this climate that the United States was oppressive society, it was locking up everybody, were based on a lot of things that were inaccurate.

But that was the fuel that got us to the point we are now.

And it was the opposite of broken windows.

It was, don't fix a broken window, break more of them.

And tell society that you have nothing but contempt for it.

And now it is completely boomeranged on London Breed.

She even used the word bull, S-H-I-T, right

in front of everybody.

She said, this is, what is bull?

You know, what is this bull you're talking about?

Was it you that helped defund the police?

Was it you who created, yeah, was it you, you, you?

And they have, they think we're idiots.

We have amnesia.

We watched these people talk down to us for years.

And they bragged that the years of Giuliani are over with.

Bloomberg can never come back and do what he did.

The broken windows is gone.

Crime has gone down.

And then they got every two-bit academic to write a study out showing that crime had gone down by, you know, looking at things like, I don't know, tax fraud is down.

Therefore, when murder is up, you average the two and crime is no different.

Is that what they're doing?

Because we know that murder is in many cities at a record level and assault is.

And we don't talk about.

one of the major drivers, not the only driver, but one of the major drivers we will not talk about.

And that is that the African-American male community collectively, and I'm saying collectively because that's what we use in America Day.

We talk about white supremacy and Latinos.

We talk as if there's no individuals.

But collectively, about 6% of the population is responsible for over 50% of the crime.

And we should have a dialogue why that is.

I'm sure that BLM would say it's because of institutional racism or the legacy of slavery or discrimination.

And I'm sure that people who say, wait a minute, we have $20 trillion of great society programs.

We've had affirmative actions for 50 years.

They can fight it out, but that's to be fought out.

But in the here and now, that is a fact.

And what we see in Chicago at night or Baltimore at night or Washington, D.C.

at night, or Newark at night, the Asian community is not committing those crimes.

The Latino community may have, because of illegal immigration, may have a higher propensity per capita, but it's not at that level.

The so-called white dysfunctional community is not at that level.

So, if we were to address that and solve that, then I think it would be much easier.

We would just say that African Americans commit, males commit crimes no more disproportionately than the numbers in the general population.

And how do you get there?

I think the only way to get there is it has to come from within.

If you're going to talk about collectives, it's we have to stay married, we have to have two-parent families, we have to raise our children.

We have to be very distrustful of the government.

We have to be individually empowered and economics, economics, economics.

We're going to have to be very shrewd business people.

We have to be very careful about spending and income.

And we're going to be better educated and we're going to be more successful than any other community.

And until you get to that point,

it's not going to happen.

But what I just said, if it's being recorded, I'll probably be brought up in charges by this Stanford Faculty Senate because that is so logical, but it's incendiary.

Until it's considered logical, you're never going to discuss this.

You look at a local paper.

I won't mention the names of the papers I look at, but if you have crimes, it's a joke.

You read the comments.

And the joke is, if it's a violent crime and the offenders are not portrayed, their pictures, then they're non-white.

If the person's picture is there, it'll be a white person.

And that is done deliberately on the part of many journalists.

And I'm not being rhetorical, Jack.

BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, Transportation System, stopped showing videos of attacks on the subway.

And even though these were suspects at large, and it would help law enforcement find them because they were worried that this would fuel stereotypes about the profile of type of people committing those crimes, which would be translated into, we don't care about the victims.

That's their tough luck.

We're worried about the people that maimed and hurt them and killed them.

We don't want those people to be stereotyped.

So it's a sickness.

And, you know, we've talked about this before.

It has something to do with the affluent, leisure,

white, academically certified, professional class, bicoastal population.

I think it has something to do going way back to the Protestant, puritanical New England.

We're going to save the world, city on the hill, by our good works.

That has been, you know, metamorphosized when they lost their God and they became atheists and agnostics.

It's come now.

Their God is, I am going to be more virtuous.

according to modern definitions of virtue than anybody else.

And I'm going to be absolutely intolerant, just as the Puritans were, of any sinner.

And the sinners are the deplorables now.

And so they have a religious like, I'm not making fun of religion, but they have this frenzy.

And you cannot give them any evidence that contradicts their belief and their faith and their dogma and their ritual because they get very angry.

They raise the volume, right?

I won't mention universities.

There is a law that says after that tragic death, I think it was at Temple University, that on major campuses, they are required to report any crime of violence against students to the Department of Education, and they must inform the university or college community that a suspect is at large with a description of the suspect.

Well, many universities have been fined for not doing that.

And then the Trump administration really cracked down and increased those fines.

But now, and I get communications from three universities, and Hillsdale is not one of them, but of the three that I do get communications from, I can tell you they are violating the law.

They will say there's a suspect on campus and somebody reports an intruder in the dorm, somebody is breaking, somebody a theft, somebody an altercation, and they never give a description.

And that, again, is the message is we don't care about the members of our own university community to the extent that we can find the person by informing the community if they see this person.

because we're more worried about being tagged as

biased or racist or something.

Right, right.

What What could be worse to Karen than being called a racist?

And it's never going to end until people have the integrity and the morality and the courage to say, non-hick porkus, not this pig.

I'm not going to play this anymore.

Go do your worst to me and I'll do my best.

But it's a moral cowardice that, boy, I used to be, if you had talked to me 40 years ago, I was a zealot.

in the advancement, power, beauty of higher education.

My parents, their parents, my grandparents didn't go to college.

My parents got GI, my dad got GI Bill.

My mom went, you know, when she went to Stanford, my dad went to the university.

This is what the future is.

You've got to go to college.

You've got to get an advanced degree.

And after going through that, I believed it.

And I try to tell students that at Cal State, you know, Minority Institute.

We're going to get you a BA, then an MA, and we're going to get, and I don't believe it anymore.

I believe that if you go into most universities, you're not going to learn how to calculate, compute, master written and oral prose, that you're going to be woke.

And a lot of your time is going to be spent on psychosociological crap.

And you'll be indoctrinated.

And it's a waste of big loan you're going to take out that basically allows tuition to be jacked up higher than the rate of inflation per annum.

You know, Sally Sattell, the psychiatrist who works at AEI, and she talks about how bad this has gotten in the medical profession when you're supposed to be training, you know, doctors, looming psychiatrists, that most of their coursework is not about how to interview a patient, et cetera.

It is about woke policy, et cetera.

It's about seeing mental health as a systemic thing and not treating the individual in front of you as a patient.

But, Victor, we've got about eight minutes left.

I've got a big thing to talk about, and that's deplorable Hispanics.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

The classicists were recording a few days before Christmas.

This is the first day of winter.

So, yeah, deplorable Hispanics.

Victor, maybe this piece will get you in trouble too with some of those Stanford WeDot professors.

So, this is titled, Why Would Hispanics Drop the Left?

You Wrote This for American Greatness.

And, you know, we've just talked before about talking collectively about some groups in America.

Well, we're going to talk collectively now about Hispanics.

And here's something.

Recent polling, not even polling, voter results from the recall election of Gavin Newsom.

Here's what you wrote: a 60-40% pro-Newsom margin among mostly Democratic Hispanics was striking versus erosion from a once lockstep Democratic constituency.

Are Hispanics then following the trajectory of middle-class whites who have left the Democratic Party in droves and helped redefine the Republican Party as a more populist working-class movement.

Victor, you asked the question, why would Hispanics drop the left?

That's the title of this essay.

You have three subsections.

One is called Biden Discontent, question mark.

Assimilation, integration, and intermarriage.

Italian style.

Thank you.

My people appreciate that.

And then the third area of grouping of explanations for why this trend is happening comes under what you title Karen's, the bicoastal nomenclatura, and the obsessive, compulsive left-wing scold.

So Victor, tell us why you wrote this piece and why Hispanics are dropping the left.

It's based on this hysteria that came out a couple of weeks ago in the Democratic Legions, and that was in reaction to the Wall Street Journal article in which a poll that they had conducted revealed that if the election was going to be held today, that Biden would only be one point up over Trump in the Hispanic community.

And there were other polls that reiterated that trend.

And we saw it along borders, along communities along the southern border where city council or mayors that were very conservative were being elected on the basis of opposition to open borders.

And so I tried to analyze this.

Why is this happening?

Because I think it's happening from my own anecdotal experience of living in a community that's overwhelmingly Mexican-American.

And so one of them, of course, is that there is no such thing as Hispanics any more than they're Swedish.

They're just people.

And when they look at what's going on in the country, whether it's the crime or the inflation or the southern border or foreign policy or their gas prices, they don't like it and they don't like the party in power.

But secondly, there is a greater Democratic left-wing liberal worry that this is not a short-term rebellion, but it reflects deeper issues.

And the Republicans, Karl Rove, had been telling us for years that the Hispanic community being Catholic and traditional and family-oriented, not that everybody isn't family-oriented or religious, but they were supposedly that was their signature, cultural signature, that if the Republicans would ever get on board with amnesties and closed borders or, you know, legal something, that these voters would flock to the Republicans.

And I think that was only partly right.

What's happening is that a lot of Mexican Americans don't see themselves as a hyphenated group.

I was talking to a fellow the other day that I know very well.

And I said, the Mexican, he said, I'm not Mexican, I'm American.

And I said, well, you guys talk about white.

He said, no, I don't.

I'm American.

Understand that?

I'm not Mexican.

I'm not white.

I'm not anything.

I'm an American.

And as we get into the third generation,

There are a lot of Mexican Americans, if I can use that term, who don't speak Spanish.

They've never been south of the border.

They don't like people coming illegally and being dumped in their communities six hours from the border.

They do not like M13, Norteños, Serenos gangs.

They don't feel they're collectively responsible for high criminality or people coming across the border illegally.

And most importantly, they feel that that impacts them inordinately.

That if they have a grandmother who needs support for dialysis, the dialysis clinic is now jammed with people coming across the border, or their schools have had advanced placement, and they feel now it's going to go back to bilingual education for newcomers who came illegally and residing illegally.

And they don't like the price of gas.

So they look as their middle class existence and upper middle class is now being threatened.

I'm not talking about a majority yet, Jack.

but a number that is so high at 40 to 45 percent, and the constituency is so large within the Democratic Party, and they have lost the white working class that they are becoming paranoid.

And I listed a third group, a third reasons that will never be shown.

It's kind of a taboo, but I think it's valid.

And that is, I don't like talking to people that if I could stereotype in a very unkind way, I would call them Karens or Skolds or bicoastal professional elites or nasal, twangy, you know, Silicon Valley people.

What I'm talking about is someone who doesn't live in the real world, but has a pretty good income and has an inflated view of themselves and feels that they get up in the morning and think, how can I tell those deplorables how to live and how do I get the power to make sure that I can reify those commandments to them?

And people don't like to be talked to, but a lot of Mexican-American and Hispanics, whatever the term is popular now, they have businesses, they work hard, and they do not like to have some recent young Antifa-like person or college protester or environmental activist or transgender rights in your face person saying to them, well, you know, you have to do this and we expect you to do this and look at what I'm doing.

And they view this as performance art.

And they feel that they've noticed that as soon as they say they're conservative, the fiercest critics, this is true of black conservatives, are these white bicosta liberals, as if to say, well, you know,

we were the one that helped you, and we support Latinos, and now you don't show any loyalty to us.

Oh, and they don't just get angry at that, but they feel that you can sense it, that they feel that these people are elitists and don't want to put their kids in the school with them, don't want to associate with them and think they're better than they are.

And this whole liberal left-wing progressive empathy for quote-unquote Hispanics is sort of a psychological mechanism to square the circle of their own unease.

And when you add in sort of machismo culture, the vestigial residual of that, they don't see that culture as particularly muscular, if you know what I mean by that.

I mean, in other words,

they're not decisive people.

And one of the things that that culture couldn't figure out was Trump.

because he was so, they thought, vulgar, but he was muscular, they thought.

And there were a lot of people in the Latino community, not the majority, who said, you know, he makes a decision.

He just says yes or no, and he moves on.

And that had some appeal.

I'm not suggesting he's ever going to get 50% of the Latino vote, but he doesn't have to.

And people like him don't have to.

And I finally finished the piece, as you said.

It was exactly like the Italian Americans that came in the late 19th century, in the early 20th century.

People said, you know, they're coming from southern Italy or Sicily.

They're the poorest of the poor in Italy.

They're all Catholic monarchist.

And they're coming here with no money.

They don't learn English.

They're in the mafia.

And they're all going to vote for the welfare state such as it was.

And they were pretty much democratic.

And today, as I said in the piece, Giuliani, Pataki, Cuomo, Pelosi, you don't know what their politics are.

You don't even know if they're Italian American anymore.

And that's where I think the Hispanic community is headed, Dash, if the border is closed, which is terrifying the left.

But if this continues, Jack, even with the open border, and you can't bring in deathly destitute people, then the left will turn on the border.

They'll say, you know what?

These guys are Poles.

These are 1956 Hungarians,

Eastern Europe, those damn Chicago Poles, and they're going to be right-wing.

And they're kind of like, you know, these damn Cubans are fleeing Caspar.

Let's close that border.

We'll be quoting Cesar Chavez.

Yeah, Cesar Chavez sent dogs to the border to physically restrain the illegal alien.

Well, Victor, I think that's all almost all of the time we got today, but I want to say a thing or two.

We thank our listeners for listening.

A, B, those who listen on itunes, who leave five-star reviews, and that's 99.99%.

Thank you for that kindness.

Some leave.

comments.

Here's one from the other day.

And you remember a couple of couple episodes ago, we were talking about chooches, chuches.

And this review is titled Chucco.

It's by Mark in DC.

Jack Fowler and Professor VDH, the Italian term you're looking for in your latest recording is Chiuchio, which means donkey, jackass, fool idiot, or dummy.

The Sicilian dialect shortens the term to chuch.

Love the series.

Topics, discussions, and dialogue between the two of you.

Thanks for everything you do.

We need more logic these days and you provide it.

God bless.

Thank you, Mark and DC.

Appreciate that very much.

What else?

Oh, yeah.

I write a newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

I want to recommend to our listeners, subscribe to it.

It's free.

It doesn't cost anything.

It's a dozen reading recommendations and links and some excerpts of interesting stuff out there, mostly on the right and sometimes about civil society.

I run the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

If you're interested in that, centerforcivilsociety.com, civilthoughts.com, and of course, victorhansen.com.

Go there, subscribe.

Five bucks.

Stick your toe in the water, five bucks.

You're going to like it.

And it's 50 bucks a year.

Victor, I just want to say that again, we're recording a few days before Christmas.

I don't know if this show will be up and about before Christmas, but that said, I wish you.

I wish Mrs.

Hansen.

I wish all the Hansen dogs and the almond trees and everything a very blessed Christmas.

The same to our listeners.

God bless you all.

I hope the good Lord provides you with the graces of the season.

And thanks for listening to this episode.

And we'll be back again with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks so much.

And thank you, Jack.

And in honor of a great American friend of us both, mega dittos to that.

Amen.

Amen.

Immemoria.

Rush.

Yeah, God bless Rush.

Rush.

So thank you and happy Saturnalia.

Shorter stays up here.

Okay.

Thanks, Eeyore.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.