The Classicist: Civilization’s Petri Dish

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Victor Davis-Hanson, the namesake and star as the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is also a resident of California, and we're going to be talking a lot about California and its very questionable governor, Gavin Newsom, on today's podcast, which we are recording on Tuesday, December 14th.

Let's start talking about Newsom, but right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the classicist. So, Victor, my friend, there's a lot of, I think, worthwhile stuff about California to discuss.
Always, Gavin Newsom has a gift.

for not only the residents of the state, but for America. Let's lump two things, two topics, guns and babies, into one.

So let me just read this beginning of an article from, of all places, the nation magazine. But what the hell? This is pretty accurate, at least the beginning of it.

It says, Gavin Newsom's gun stunt is inspired and doomed to fail. This is from The Nation, but it says here that Newsom, he's got a proposal, a la, the Texas abortion bill.

Newsom's proposed law would allow private citizens to sue manufacturers, distributors, or sellers of assault rifles or quote-unquote ghost gun kits in the state of California.

These bounty hunters would be entitled to at least $10,000 plus attorney fees per violation if enacted.

The threat of a lawsuit would make it very difficult for anyone to open a gun shop in California.

Newsom said, quote, if the most efficient way to keep these devastating weapons off our street is to add the threat of private lawsuits, we should do just that.

period end quote no comment about that thing called the second amendment and the constitution And Victor, the other thing on the babies front, well, Gavin Newsom, we've heard, and I'll just leave it at this, essentially wants to turn California into some abortion paradise.

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v.

Wade somehow or other, California and the taxpayers of California are going to say, come here, bring your fetuses and we'll abort them and maybe even pay you for the privilege.

Victor, it sounds like madness, probably is madness. What are your thoughts about this? Well, he's going to lose the san joaquin valley vote not that he cares but we're out where we live

i think all my rural neighbors and they're mostly mexican-american are all armed and they're all anti-abortion so the idea that you're going to punish

a person who's following the second amendment has a right to protect themselves and feels that abortion

you know, is a matter of the states, I suppose. And if Gavin Newsom wants to say that, you know, abortion, and he doesn't really specify what does he mean by abortion.

Does he mean part of the third trimester is he's specifically referring to? But the point is, it's a very popular tact now on the left to challenge existing law. I'm not talking about court rulings,

but not a Supreme Court ruling that is vague or something like Texas or other states are doing and both, both sides do it. But I'm talking about a law like the Second Amendment.

And we saw that with federal immigration law, too, this idea that you're morally superior to everyone on the left are, and therefore that

man's law or the state's law or natural law or whatever term we use is subordinated and you can violate it. You can have 600, 550 to 600 jurisdictions where immigration law does not.
exist.

And you know, when Gavin Newsom thinks he's going to, within California, sort of make an anti-Second Amendment sanctuary, then he's only going to invite people on the other side.

And it's already starting to happen in Virginia. But there will be red states that will say, okay,

so the states then can massage a Second Amendment. Well, then I'm going to, just in my jurisdiction, say that no, no infringement whatsoever.

Even if you want a 20 millimeter anti-aircraft gun, you can have this in my county since we're nullifying federal law. And then it's going to unwind like it already is.

But the question is, why is he doing this? Because as we're speaking right now, you can't really go in to Los Angeles if you're a visitor without a chance of meeting a criminal.

The people in Los Angeles, the police chief, the police union said, don't come. We can't protect you.

If I just went to the Monterey Bay area on Sunday and of all places, Jack, Jack, Carmel by the Sea, the quaint little village of tourists that's high end, they had a jewelry store on Ocean Boulevard where four juveniles or one juvenile and three people went in and they looted, like smash and grab in Carmel.

This is right in there with Beverly Hills and Walnut Creek and the other places that are targets.

And now we've had our first rain because we were told that it wouldn't rain again because of climate change.

Now we've had some heavy rain and we're wondering this week if Gavin Newsom will allow the water to fill up the reservoirs or whether he's going to, as in the past, let the water out the Sacramento and San Joaquin tributaries to the ocean.

So he's got a, my point is he's got a lot of things on his plate. We have the second highest, I think, unemployment in the United States of all the different states.

We're having another lockdown, I should say, mask down starting, I think, January 1 to 15, where you have to wear a mask indoors in California. We're really pushing parents to make their,

you know, I have 11-year-old daughter who's sort of underweight, frail, and she's had to get two Pfizer vaccinations or she's not going to be allowed to go to school in January.

She had terrible reactions to both shots. So these are really questions that, you know, that he could address and he could.

and we have a housing we're about a thousand dollars a square foot for housing on the coast but he's not addressing any of these things. And he's just virtue signaling.

I think I called it in a column a few years ago, the Bloomberg effect. And that is when you can't get the snow out of New York, you start talking about either climate change or supersized drinks.

So he's talking about all of these things to virtue signal in an effort to disguise his impotence on things that really count. So what really counts? Energy.

We're paying, it's 25 cents a kilowatt hour, and we're dismantling the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. We just dismantled the Moss Landing natural gas generation plant, freeways, infrastructure.

I was on I-5 the other day. It's like a cross between Mad Max and Escape from New York, falling down Road Warrior.
It's just a nightmare of semis in the left lane going 75 miles an hour.

don't dare stop at a California rest stop compared to Florida's or Utah's. They're completely third world.

So he's got a lot of problems and his state is decrepit. People are leaving it.

And of all things at this time and this place to start virtue signaling about guns as a reaction against the people of Texas is just crazy. California, finally, Jack has an obsession with Texas.

Jerry Brown did. He hated Rick Perry.
And every time Texas championed another impressive GDP or unemployment statistic to contrast California, Jerry Brown would be snied about it.

And Jerry Brown can never explain, nor can Gavin Newsom, why people that are here in California were born into or moved into a natural paradise and they made it hell.

And not to be unfair to Texas, but visually or weather-wise or climate-wise, it's hell and they made it paradise. And

that's the truth.

Yeah, well, as a non-Californian victor, I can tell you the first time I went there and not only the last, every time I go there, your kind of mouth hangs open, like this place is gorgeous.

I can see why people will tolerate things, you know,

things being 13 or 14% income taxes.

Absolutely. I can, you can go down where I live.
You can be in four and a half hours in San Diego in that beautiful city.

If you don't like that, you can go with the central coast, San Luis Obispo, Morrow Bay. If you want to have a little high end, you can go to Carmel and Monterey in three hours.

You can be in San Francisco if you would dare step, want to go there in three hours. You can be in Yosemite in an hour and 45 minutes.

You can be at 7,200 feet in the central Sierra in an hour and 35 minutes. So it's just, you can be from the ocean to the mountain and they're just beautiful place.

And what people forget about this overcrowded 40 million person state that all the people are in a very confined place along the coast and basically in the center.

And so you've got 500 miles of mountains that are empty and foothills that are empty and the third of the whole northern third third of the state is empty.

And so it's a very beautiful, pristine place. And how they ruined and screwed it up in just 25 years is

tragic.

Well, Victor, let's keep on California because that's one of the topics we always discuss on the classicist.

And Ayon Hirsi Ali, does she have a role at Hoover, by the way?

Yes, he does. She's a named research fellow, wife of senior fellow Neil Ferguson, and she's got an Islamic task force studying Islam in the modern world and the contradictions that that poses.

And she's a California resident.

And I think that she and Neil have been very outspoken, but very wise and perceptive about very valuable commentary about California because they come as people who are Europeans

and then lived on the East Coast. So they come with this nostalgia, or I shouldn't say nostalgia, but this admiration of the climate and weather and scenery of California.

And they have been living here, and so they're very perceptive in what they point out. Somebody like me, my frame of reference is, this is not the way it used to be as a long native.

Their frame of reference is, this isn't what it is compared to A, B, and C.

And that's valuable. Well, actually, in this case, then the case being that Ion Herciali has written a piece for, it's really, I think, great website.
It's called Unheard, U-N-H-E-R-D.

She did a piece the other day will california ever be safe the affluent look away while their cities burn and she also has a perspective not necessarily european but well she does have that but it's of a third world uh living and what you wrote about recently you called it third world and she hits the same themes so let me just read this quickly she starts off talking about you know two friends who were robbed near san francisco one owns a popular restaurant front door was destroyed, cash register robbed.

The other was renting a car, the entire rear window of which was smashed to bits, content swiped. So common is this sort of looting and thievery.

Like when he returned the rental car, you noticed that the car company slot was full of vehicles with broken windows.

She goes on to give a number of other anecdotes, including one from that, the LA, the head of the LA Cops Union, who's saying, don't come here, folks. We can't necessarily protect you.

So she arrives at this point. Like, how did we arrive at this point? And then she answers that.

And I'd like you to expand on this because I think, not, I think you have said the same things in different ways. She says the answer lies in an abundance of affluence.
We've become lazy.

We stopped paying attention. We've come to take for granted the institutions that hold up our affluent society.

It seems that when a society is as wealthy as ours and is insulated from day-to-day threats, the vigilance to maintain its institutions wilts. And she ends this piece.
Again, it's on UnHurd.

I recommend people check it out. We don't need social justice, just plain justice.
Victor, your thoughts about these themes that Ayan Hirsi Ali has raised in her piece.

I think she's right that when we look at indicators of societal collapse or decline, it's usually affluence and leisure that puts people into a sense of, I don't know, complacency and they don't understand that the basics of civilization have to be passed on one generation to the next.

And as Reagan used to always say about democracy and freedom, they can be lost in one generation.

So, and it starts at a very elemental level that when most people don't throw their trash out the window, when most people, if they're walking a dog, they don't let the dog crap on the sidewalk.

When you go to a supermarket, you just don't take your shopping cart and throw it against the wall, but you actually take an extra two minutes and put it in the shopping car stall.

Or you would never take the shopping cart and go down the street as we see them scattered all over the San Joaquin Valley here.

So all of these are the little broken windows theory of civilization that every aspect of your life, you get up in the morning and you say to yourself, did I contribute to civilization? Was I honest?

Was I legal? Was I considerate? Did I, in my work, whatever station you're at, did I contribute to the advance of civilization? Or did we do the opposite? Did you cheat on your income tax?

Did you speed? Did you go through a stop sign? Did you throw trash? Did you bully somebody?

And that was sort of inculcated and drilled into you in the old educational system, which we have found now oppressive. So part of it is a legacy of the 60s.
Let it all hang out, do your own thing.

And that 60s generation that came of age, each generational decade, they did a lot of damage. And now they're in their 60s and 70s and 80s.

And their institutions that they corrupted are now inhabited by people who never knew the old system of the 40s and 50s and early 60s. So it's been coarsened.

And it's now starting to reach a level when you get it. So what I'm getting at, Jack, it was fragile.
And then Joe Biden and his team came in with a sledgehammer. And they said, there is no border.

Who needs a border? That's just an ossified construct. And then they said, you know what? The military doesn't really need to be deterrent.

It can sort out white rage or white supremacy. And then we get Afghanistan, things like that.
And then it said, you know what? Carbon fuels are constructs. They're just, it doesn't really matter.

They're just polluters. So we can just cut back on pipeline.
And then all of a sudden, it started to snowball. And we found out how fragile the system is.

So that when we get up in the morning in California, to take this example that she's talking about, you have a $100 limit on gas. All the stations observe that.

And when you've got a 21-gallon tank, you're not going to fill up.

So nobody I know fills up at $5 a gallon.

And when you go, when you decide to go into San Francisco or Los Angeles, you say to yourself, I have two or three cars in my family or extended family, which is the worst?

Because I do not want to take my newer car because I'll either park, it'll be detached when it's parked, I'll get carjacked or something.

And then you say to yourself, when I go into a Walgreens or I go to a high-end Nordstrom's, you look around and you want to make sure that you're not going to be attacked.

And you do this, Jack, because you have the assumption that if somebody carjacks you

or somebody steals your wallet at Walgreens, two things are your fundamental assumptions. Number one, if you are injured, nobody cares, least of all the police and the DA.

And second, if you defend yourself, and if you were to do it lethally so, you're going to be worse off than the criminal because you have something to lose.

And under California's value, anybody that has something to lose is a target in their redistributive quality of result mentality.

You are culpable. That's how you wake up in the morning.
If you've worked really hard and you've saved money and you have a nice car or you live in a nice zip code, you are culpable.

Unless you're a far leftist at virtue signals and you get a medieval penance or exemption from the government or from BLM or Antifa or the university or whatever.

But it's not civilization that as we just knew it just two years ago even, but especially 20 or 30 years ago.

And boy, there's been people have written about Petronius, a Roman nobleman that wrote somewhere around in the age of Nero, say 64 or 65 AD, wrote a novel called The Satiricon.

We have a fragment fragment of it, large fragment, and it's pretty much what Aon Ali said, and that is that with affluence and leisure comes decadence. And the novel is all about

the obsession with elite food and the common criminality on the street and the deprecation of the legionnaire and the so-called police and sexual promiscuity and transgenderism and sexual ambiguity and gratuitous violence and sacrilege and blasphemy.

And it's trying to, the nobleman is trying to suggest to us that the old Italian yeoman culture of Virgil is gone and it's Mediterranean-wide now and it's a multiracial, very wealthy, rich, poor, no-middle-class empire now, and it requires a lot of discipline to run.

And unfortunately, when you have people like Nero, or earlier Caligula, you don't have any discipline.

So that's, I think she's trying to explain to everybody what's happening in california from an outsider's point of view who's moved here and she's just had two small children they have and i think they're very worried about the quality of schools they're very worried about the violence in the schools they're very worried that the state can mandate a young child that has very little chance of becoming seriously ill from COVID to wear a mask and socially isolate and be vaccinated with very powerful vaccinations.

So they're worried about all these things.

One thing that's happening is, just to finish, is that we're starting to see, and I'll be very curious to see the midterms, what you're starting to see that while the doctrineer leftists would never admit it, I think you'll see some people for the first time vote more conservatively and not talk about it.

They're not willing to talk about it. I think some of the Mexican-American community will talk about it.
And I think it'll be more evenly split now because they understand.

The subtext of all this this and what they understand is that the people around Gavin Newsome and Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein and Mark Zuckerberg and the Google Bee people and Lisa Jobs and all these very wealthy people and celebrities who Seth Rogan type people who promote this and celebrate it have a lot of money.

And they like to spend a lot of money on themselves.

And they live in very tony zip codes and they have very elaborate zip codes and they have drivers and they have security and they have beautiful cars.

And their lifestyle is exempt from the consequences of their ideology that falls on the rest of us. And people know that.
And so they really don't like them anymore. They really don't like them.

They're angry at them.

And so when Nancy Pelosi talks about, you know, fairness and we're here to help the underserved and the marginalized, you were sitting, then how did you and your husband make $200 million off your job the last 30 years?

Just explain that. Yeah.
Harry Reid should have paid more attention. Yeah, he should have.

He was an amateur. Right.
Well, along those lines, Victor, there's been a number of pieces out in the last week or so about Latinx. And I called it Latinx because it, you know, Sphinx.
Latinx.

Latinx Sphinx is how I would consider it. Anyway, the Latinos, Hispanics, who you just, you know, talked about getting fed up and predicting maybe how they'll vote in 2022.

Can anyone else, you know, politics downstream from culture?

And they are also, it seems, offended culturally by this imposition by white elitists, liberals with this terminology that turns out that they hate.

So there's a politico poll out, finds 2% of Hispanics prefer the term Latinx,

68% operant, 21% Latino or Latina, and 40% consider it offensive. And 30% said they are less likely to support a politician or group using it.
I find this fascinating.

And it's not just a little, you know, an anecdote. I think it bespeaks a larger cultural issue and actually maybe a larger political issue.

You know, whether you're from Ecuador or Puerto Rico, there's a movement going on here politically to the right, right, it seems. What are your thoughts?

It's a stupid little minor issue, but it really is a commentary on our sick society.

I mean, here you have a group of elite people in the law, politics, media, and academia who've come up on this, invented this Latinx word.

And I don't know quite why they're getting the X for the plural. I guess it's from some Nahutul or Aztec emphases in Aztec grammar where X was common for the plural.
I guess that's where it is.

But it's a very recent word.

And it's full of irony, Jack, because speaking to someone who's taught for 21 years in a foreign language department, I was often lectured by my Spanish professor that Romance languages were so much richer than

the kind of ossified,

stolid Anglo-Saxon Germanic tradition, because

like Latin and like Greek, they were so much more specific. So in the nominative plural or the accusative plural or just the plural in general, in a Romance language, you can distinguish gender.

And so you can say Latinos, Latinas.

But when you say Americans are deficient, supposedly white, Anglo-Saxon language does not distinguish between female Americans and male Americans because the S just attaches to the singular form of the noun.

But in a highly inflected language, these case endings change to reflect gender. And that was considered good, Jack, that it was rich, it was specific, it gave women their due.

Now we come back and say, well, it distinguishes people by gender, and gender is a construct. So we're going to create a new word because we don't like the romance language.

And we're going to add this IX, and that's going to mean that you can can say people are Latinos without distinguishing their gender. In other words, we really like what English does.

It's really, it's a much better language because it just says whites or Americans or whatever, and it doesn't distinguish between male and female in the plural. And we love that.

So there it is.

And the fact that

most

Mexican Americans who still speak Spanish like their language, and they have little contact with Stanford or Berkeley or USC or Sacramento, where these things originate, they're not impressed.

So likely when their freshman daughter comes home from UC Santa Cruz or from, you know, Stanford or from San Diego State and says, hey, mom, from now on, we have to call ourselves Latinx, not Latinos or Latinas.

And she said, what? We're not going to do that. That's silly.
What idiot taught you that? Shame on you.

And that's what the parents will say, and that's what they will do, because they know the people who invented this things are idiots, and they have no philological background.

They have no linguistic sense of case endings or the why words change their spelling to reflect either their use in a sentence or their number or gender. So that's where we are.

And it's another top-down effort. Another thing,

since we've talked about Newsom, his new thing is in the legislature, we're going to recycle all, what, organic matter now, food.

So, yeah, in California, we're headed toward we're going to have your waste is going to be separated, not just by cardboard or plastic or clippings

or landfill, but landfill will be separate from lettuce or rotten hamburger. Can you imagine keeping a bunch of food not in your garbage disposal out to the sewage system,

but a confined and hot summer California garage in a special, you know, organic matter, extra food waste container and what that's going to be. Bring on the raccoons, the rats, raccoons, worms, bug.

Everybody's going to be happy.

And of course, you know what's going to happen. The people who drafted the law are not going to follow it, just like they don't follow any of the mask laws.
So

we'll have a version of Gavin Newsom. He won't be at the French laundry without a mask,

but he'll be throwing his Big Mac in his garbage garbage can pretty clearly rather than take it into his nice little kitchen and put it in a nice little bag and keep it under the sink for another week or something.

Oh, Lordie,

it's never ending. Victor, we've got two more things to talk about on this episode of The Classicist, and that will be your recent articles from American Greatness.

But before we do that, I want to remind our listeners to visit victorhanson.com, the Blade of Perseus. And I don't want you to talk about him, please.

But you've got a lot of great original material you've put up in the last couple of days. There's a two-part series called Sorting Out the Strange Mess of Biden, NATO, Putin, Trump, and Ukraine.

You also got this wonderful piece. I know a lot of our listeners love to hear about Victor the farmer, Victor the naturalist.

I don't know if you want to wear that naturalist cap, but you write this beautiful piece about generations of red-tailed hawks that have lived on or near the forest.

I wrote that because we have hunters now and these red tails are coming into our yard and nesting.

So I thought, well, I got to be clear that I actually got the right description that this red tail was in the tree right next to me.

And then I walked out to get the mail and here's a red tail sitting on the gate looking right at me.

And I'm looking, I mean, like five feet away. And the guy doesn't move.
I thought, you better move or somebody's going to shoot you someday. And then he kind of takes off and goes around.

I go get the mail. I come back.
I look out the window. He's right back there.
So it was kind of reality.

Well, just don't start talking to it. Not while anyone's listening.
But that's VictorHanson.com.

So how do you read that story about the red-tailed hawks or your foreign policy piece or many other exclusive pieces? Subscribe, $5 a month, $50.

a year. And there's also links here to The Dying Citizen, which is still doing remarkably well, and other books you've published.
I've recommended in recent podcasts.

I think a great gift for folks who are military history buffs is the Second World Wars, your great book from a couple of years back. So you'll find links there.

That's VDH's Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com. So, Victor, let's talk about quickly, if you don't mind, this piece, woke got what it wanted and then what.

So, you know, you run through a list here at American greatness. The woke movement was giddy after January 2021.

The left controlled both houses of Congress, Biden in charge, sweeping through institutions with wokeness, et cetera.

But then you ask the question, so what did the people conclude 10 months out from the woke getting their wishes? What are people thinking about this?

Well, as someone who read a lot of news accounts following January 20th,

I mean, there was more ebulence than there was even with the coronation of the fundamentally changing the society, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. There was just giddiness.

And I talked to a lot of people and it was okay.

We finally, it's our turn and we're going to do what Obama only dreamed of. We have the Congress, House and Senate.
We have the presidency. We have Silicon Valley.
We have the media.

We have the university. We have K-12.
We have entertainment. We have sports.
We have Hollywood. We have Wall Street.

Okay. They had everything.

And we have the agenda. And good old Joe Biden did his job.
He carried us across the finish line. Bernie kept in the party.
So did Elizabeth Warren. We rounded, you know, we put a halter on Antifa.

We leashed in BLM. We got everybody on the team and the looting kind of petered out.
Crime, you know, that wasn't it. We got elected.
And now Joe Biden kept his... part of the bargain.

He handed over his administration to hardcore leftists. And they appointed a lot of nuts all over the administration.
Okay, so they got everything they wanted.

And they took their three issues, three issues, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, January 6th, January 6th, January 6th,

and racism, racism, racism, racism, racism. I could add a fourth, COVID, COVID, COVID.
And they were going off to the races to the utopian destination that we all had. But what they never thought was,

well, we've never really tried all this stuff before. No one's ever really tried it.
Do you really think we should just open the border and destroy immigration laws?

What happens if a couple of million people come across, especially if they're not vaccinated and they're not tested in a time of a pandemic?

We've never really got away with putting Anmore off and all new federal leasing and warning the frackers and the horizontal drillers they're going to not going to have the capital because we're going to pressure banks and lending agencies not to lend on fossil fuels.

We're going to regulate them. We're going to cancel pipelines.
And we've never quite done that before and you know we're going to borrow three

two trillion infrastructure three trillion probably eventually it'll be three trillion five trillion dollars we're going to print and it wasn't like obama and trump were thrifty so

we've never got up to over 30 trillion dollars in debt and you know we're going to get out of afghanistan we're just going to you know and We never quite done that quite, I think, since 1975.

And then it was, we're going to have, have, we're going to go full bore ahead. Merrick Garden's going to be looking at, you know,

everybody from Operation Veritas to parents at school board meetings to anybody connected with the Hunter's laptop is going to be investigated by the FBI.

And we're going to, we're just going to go full blast on the whole agenda. And we're going to print money under modern monetary theory, print more money, more prosperity, modern critical legal theory.

Consider all felonies, constructs of a white male, conservative establishment that have no bearing with reality or natural law, so don't really enforce them, let people out of jail.

And then critical race theory that be a racist to stop racism, et cetera. So they got their wish, Jack, and we're now in month 11 of it.
And guess what? Nobody wants it.

Nobody wants it, not because they're ideologues, because they can't afford it. It's six to seven, and now the actual consumer product prices are 9% per month.
And so it's wiped out.

It's costing $3,000 to $5,000 a year for most families. And they can't afford gas.
They can't afford rent. They can't afford to buy a steak.
They can't afford to buy, pretty soon it'll be a chicken.

They can't afford to buy a house.

And it's all propped up to the extent that it's propped up at all by non-existent interest rates that everybody knows have to go up or they're going to ruin the country.

And when they go up, we're going to have recession. And they all know that you can't have a border wide open.
And they know all this and they don't like it. And they're polling.

I can't believe the Republican Party is problematic as it is, is 10 points ahead of the Democrats, generically. Biden loses to Trump in a theoretical runoff.

He's got polls, if you look at the negative rather than just the positive, they're 55 to 57% negative in his honeymoon first year.

And so every one of those issues, especially the economy and the border, I mean, they have 60, 60% plus negative. So they got what they wanted.
And now what? Nobody wants what they want.

And so they're at a dilemma. So what do they do, Jack? Do they lie about it and say that's not really happening? They're doing that.
Jin Saki's a past master at that. People are not buying it.

Or do they start to call Mexico up and say, hey, please, Mexico, could you just go back to that agreement you made with Donald Trump and keep people there that were want to be refugees or hey mr border patrol people can you guys just quietly stop stop whipping people catching catch and release yeah

and hey mr mr auto company can you just make some more cars really fast and mr gas producer can you just quietly just pump the hell out of your oil field so we don't have to beg the russians and the saudis to produce more satanic oil that we hate and that's where they are so what are they doing now?

And they've kind of run out with Donald Trump. This January 6th investigation is going nowhere.
And racism, racism, racism. You look at BLM, it's lost.

The latest poll about BLM was a left-wing civitas poll commissioned by Daily Cause. It was like 48% negative, 47% positive.

But more importantly, the Harvard-Harris poll was 57% of Americans don't like BLM, don't approve of it.

I wonder why that is with the crime rate spiking and the endorsement of Jesse Smollett after he was found guilty.

BLM said, no, no, we're standing with a proud black man. He's not guilty.
And then the Rittenhouse was all about race, which wasn't.

And then the Brooks mass killing didn't have anything to do with race, which it did, except a couple of BLM people went off the reservation and said they were kind of giddy that it was the start of the revolution.

You know, and even the Arbery trial where the black jogger was jogging in a Georgia suburb and he was confronted by three would-be, I guess we would call them, volunteer security personnel who claimed that he was suspiciously involved in burglary or considering or pondering vigoria and they cut him off with their cars and one of them shot him lethally.

And an all 11 person, one white and one person black jury, we were told by BLM, this is just two systems of justice. And

they not only found the person who shot him guilty of murder, they found all three of them culpable for murder.

So all of these narratives haven't fit what BLM is doing other than confirmed what everybody knew from the beginning, that it was a racist organization that calibrates everything it says and does on the basis of race.

And we haven't even got on to Miss Quellar's. And we kind of pounded that to death.

I'm sorry, Jack, about the four houses and the Topunga Canyon security fence and living among toxic whiteness by choice. So the whole thing I'm getting at is the woke, they got what they wanted.

Nobody wants it. Now they're scared that their Trump racist January 6th issues are sort of are broken records and they got to get a new talking point, a new

crisis. And they've got one and that is, have you heard Hillary? In 2022 or 24, we're going to lose democracy.
We're going to get autocracy, especially if Donald Trump.

And then David Brooks wrote a big critique, remember? We went to a state and said, oh,

this is just a crisis. I've never seen anything like this.
And then we had Sam Tannenhouse. I guess he's going to be the William Buckley biographer.
And he said, this is unrecognizable.

This is, you know, autofoot. And then Anne Applebaum weighing in.
She's on the Pulitzer board now. This is terrible.
We've lost democracy.

And they're not talking, Jack, about weaponizing the FBI to go after parents or Operation Veritas or to run the Russian collusion collaboration hoax.

They're not talking about the weaponization of the CIA under John Brennan.

They're not talking about the interruption in the chain of command or the breaking of the law by the chairman of the joint chiefs.

They're not talking about violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by retired officers.

They're not talking about trying to subvert the Electoral College or the filibuster or the voting states' rights and voting national elections, the balloting rules.

They're not talking about all of that. They're talking about one thing, and that is they are terrified that the polls show lose, lose, lose.
And therefore, when they lose,

they feel democracy loses.

When the other side wins democratically, they don't like democracy. In fact, they never like democracy.
It's just something they hitch their wagon to for a while.

And if it pulls them the way they want to go, it's wonderful. But when the people decide, no, we don't like the wagon, we're going to go pull another wagon.
They say, this isn't democracy.

And they're racist.

Yeah, they're racist. It's a coup.
So that's all Hillary's talking.

Hillary sits there in her befuddlement and her dottage and her estate that she kind of, you know, cajoled from 20 years of selling her

donors, donors, donors to the Clinton Foundation. And the uranium one and all that.

All that grifting that she's an expert, she and her husband are experts at, $500,000 from oligarchs in Moscow, you know, as they got his wife to green light uranium purchase into North America.

So they sit with all their riches and they're not happy. They're bitter, angry people.
And the world has forgotten and moved on and they cannot stand the fact that nobody appreciates their genius.

And so how do they look at the world? Through narcissistic and egotistical lenses. If the world has rejected me, it's because the world is pathological and America is no longer democratic.

And it's just so predictable. And that's where they are now.
That's their new talking point. Well, by the way, she is a genius.

If you, I think we're approaching the 35th anniversary of her cattle futures

trading. And still, still impossible to replicate.

Ah, wait a minute.

As I remember that, Jack, now that you remind me, she was a devoted reader of the Wall Street Journal and she said she picked up a mastery of Wall Street investing by her reading the journal then she translated that newly found expertise into pay for Chelsea's college education yeah well thank you for correcting me and the subtext was I got a crony to take my money and screw over all the other accounts that reported losses so he could take that money and report me as gain and I could care less about these cookie baking moms and pops who didn't have a professional degree like I do.

Well, one last thing about democracy, and then we're going to move on to the final and talk about your other piece of American greatness.

But the people who are not enjoying democracy or enjoying life are the 500 plus people who have been murdered in Philadelphia this year. I think approaching 800 in Chicago.

Most major cities are experiencing record homicides. New York still has a long way to go from where it had been in the late, in the early 90s, even.

But the increase in homicide rates are astronomical.

And I wonder, I got to try and find, maybe I'll talk to Heather McDonald or see if we can find out how many people are dead today that wouldn't have been dead a year or two ago, but for the spike in crime, which is probably enough to fill a small city.

It's 1,000 or 2,000 African-Americans, I know. I think there were 8,600.

that were killed last year. And we're going to exceed that this year by about 1,000, as I understand.

But most major cities, I mean, I think there's 11 of them, 12 that have all-time records. Yeah.
12. And I think, is it 30% it's gone up? The murder rate has gone up.

And when Belacio said the crime hasn't gone up, what he's doing, of course, is saying, hmm, let's look at everything like IRS audits or state audits, I mean, or soft crime.

And we'll just put all that and lump it into the spiraling murder and manslaughter and burglary and theft and assault. And maybe we can find a way in Andrew Cuomo style math that we can

show that the crime rate's not that bad in the way that Andrew said that nobody really died of COVID, that was the recipient of new COVID infectious patients in their rest home. Yeah.

Hey, by the way, I just want to mention, I thought I read that the state of New York has ordered him to pay back the $5 million from his book deal.

I did some back of the envelope math and I looked at the sales and i think it was somewhere around forty thousand dollars a copy a copy wow so the thing is that our listeners know better than we do that if you're a governor you have zero time or at least you should have zero time and they know that nobody today even gets a million dollar unless you're you know you've got a sales record of millions of copies.

So here's a guy who has no record of selling anything and they gave him $5 million to write a book that he can't possibly write if he's still governor. And so, you know what's going to happen.

They gave him this because they wanted, who knows what corporation owns a subsidiary that signed his book deal or whatever the grift was, but there was some grift.

And he knew he was going to have staffers use state time and taxpayers' money to write this.

And then he knew that he would be considered a deep thinker and the guy who had the anti-Trump press conferences that would win him an Emmy Award. So it was corrupt, corrupt, corrupt from the get-go.

Well, Victor, did you know that the corrupt, since you just used that word, and mediocre heroes of the left are imploding? Well, they are, and we're going to talk about that right after this.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. The classicist recording on December 14th.
This is our last topic for this episode. Victor, you wrote a piece this past weekend for American Greatness.

Again, as I always encourage folks, go there and read the piece. This is a long and detailed essay.
It's called Cracked Icons. Victor, you talk about a lot of them icons.

I'd like to talk about Jesse Smollett, who's the subject of this piece, and BLM. But how about we pick one person out of these cracked icons?

And since we talked a lot about California, let's go to your favorite Congressman Adam Schiff, which you, i think he's called the shifter here i would have used another word myself uh i've been baptized because i did i used one bad word in my life on a podcast or radio and that was the f word with stammy i think and i didn't cut it out i have to i have to do penance jack that's all right so i'm everybody's i won't say the s word but just pay 50 bucks you know you know how the church used to work so victor talk about this adam shift the cracked icon well to talk about as an you have to get where he was an icon, and

the iconocistic adulation came from when the he was kind of a demure, kind of a nobody

in the Congress. And then Devin Nunes was kind of getting the headlines and pressing ahead with investigating this collusion hoax.
And then the Republicans lost the House in 2018.

And suddenly, Adam Schiff became the get-to guy for the whole whole Christopher Steele fake dossier.

And all of a sudden, if you go back and look at the Schiff,

you know, sort of had got graphy,

I mean that he was deified, where did it come from? It was weird. It was Adam Schiff was a bright potential screenwriter.
Adam Schiff was witty. Adam Schiff, this.
And it was this cult of Adam Schiff.

And he was on TV like 150 times a year, 2019 and 20. And he had a shtick where he would go under wraps and, you know, convene the House Intelligence Committee.

And they never leaked under Nunes, but under Schiff, they were leaking like crazy selectively. And then he would go on MSNBC or CNN and they'd say, we've heard a bombshell report.

We've heard that the walls are closing in on Don Jr.

We've heard that Michael Cohen is this and this. He was in Czech Republic.
We've heard that the Steele dossier and Adam Schiff, I can't tell. You know, I can't disclose that.

But I have sources that, and then with a wink and a nod and a furled brow and an anguished look, he would create these lies.

And the result of it, Jack, is people like John Brennan and James Clapper and James Comey were going into the public arena, especially on these cable TV shows and calling Trump treasonous and a Russian asset and a liar, and steel was worship.

And then they were going into his committee and being cross-examined by Republican congress people.

And they were saying, Do you have evidence that Donald Trump data? And they'd say, No.

Is Donald Trump treated? No. Can you please present the evidence to support what you said? I can't.
And then they'd go right back out and lie.

And of course, Adam Schiff would say, well, there's other information that I can't disclose. So it worked pretty well.
And the point was, is

the only thing that was in doubt was would he go the whole Juicy Smollett route? By that, I mean when Christopher Steele, and everybody who looked at that dossier, I read every word of it.

It was so full of lies. There's a Russian consulate in, I guess, Miami, and Michael Cohen can be documented overseas.
And

Michael Cohen's wife was Russian, his father-in-law was a big Russian. All these were lies.
And there was no evidence. They had these scare capitals.
It was faked out like an intelligence document.

Now we know that Hillary's employee in Russia, former employer or advisor in Russia, and a guy, a Ukrainian Russian at the Brookings Institute, were

feeding steel who hadn't been to, I don't think he'd been there in over a decade into Russia. So it was all lies.

But boy, he had it down perfect.

And the only question was when this thing blew up in his face and Robert Mueller Mueller came back saying sorry I can't find any collusion the whole thing was a joke basically

and when you added all these other things into the mix that Kevin Kleinsmith had forged a document and was indicted and convicted of a felony and the special prosecutor counsel fired Lisa Page and Peter Strzok

They erased somebody in the FBI, erased phone documents on their cell phones, phone data, that Hillary Clinton's so-called hard drive material had not been investigated by the FBI, but had been eye-clouded over to crowd strike, a kind of a weird relationship they'd had with Hillary.

When you put all that together, what would Adam Smith going to do? And would anybody hold him to account? So now he's got a book out and he's going around making the rounds.

And they look at the polls and they see how the Democrats are despised.

And so there's a few people in the media that want to save their reputations and they ask him things like, well, do you want to make a correction about the dossier?

Do you want to say something about an earlier statement you said that you had evidence? Is there anything that troubles you about the whistleblower?

And you sort of suggested under oath or at least face-to-face to cameras that you had had no contact with the whistleblower. You want to modify that? And it's kind of like saying to Juicy,

do you really want us to believe the noose and the bleach story and that you were a black Achilles who fought off two hectors with one hand with a sandwich and one hand with a cell phone and with a noose around your neck in subpolar weather?

And you really want to do that? And

he does. So Adam Schiff is standing by a story that's been completely discredited.
And he's basically the argument is like juicy. Well, all the details are fake, but the story is true.

So I had information that I cannot disclose that that convinced me Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians. Can't disclose them.

But the steel doll say, yes, that it was probably not as accurate as I said, but it didn't matter now. Before it was central to my case, it's irrelevant now.
And that's where he is.

And I don't know where he goes beyond that, except, you know, he got a little bit of extra helium when he got inflated about the two impeachment hearing. Yeah.

But that was about it to him. Well, you know, maybe I don't know.
He's a person that turns off even his supporters. He's sort of creepy.

Victor, I just want to let our listeners know this is how the peace ends.

You write the lesson of these fallen icons.

They were deified for larger reductionist and anti-Trump agendas, yet they were also always dispensable when their utility eroded due to their mediocrity of such a magnitude that even our American pravdas could no longer continue to manipulate them for advantage.

This is published in American Greatness. I'll just end with what I meant by the mediocrities.
Look at Don Brennan's career.

He was a guy that was central as an intelligence operative into whatever you think of it, but I guess you would call enhanced interrogation. Right.
And he was a conservative. And he said he was.

And he kissed off into,

well, he was a communist as a youth. And then you're right, though, to correct me.
This was his second iteration as a conservative from communist to conservative.

And that did pretty well for him as he went up through the Bush hierarchy. And then Obama came in and he reinvented himself as a kind of a wink and nod Muslim sympathizer.
And he began attacking Bush.

And he began attacking enhanced interrogations.

And he was almost going to be CIA director. And then they passed him over.

But then he stood in there and he, we don't know what was his relationship with the Petraeus resignation, but he had a hand in that. And that's a story that we can talk about sometime.

It's a very bizarre story, Petraeus' problems and how his testimonies and how he ended up suddenly resigning right after the election. But nonetheless,

he became CIA director even and then as CIA director, he lied under oath about collateral damage on drone assassination missions on the Afghanistan and border.

He lied under oath when his CIA was tapping into Senate staff or computers. He lied that they were not.

And then

when Trump came in, for a little moment, a brief moment, he thought he was going to go back to his Bush conservatives hoping for some little scrap.

of further government employee, but his fingerprints were all over the Russian collusion hoax during the campaign that he was fired.

So then he made an, you know, another iteration and went on as a pundit that did what Schiff did. His was instead of having a committee that was supposedly secret, he had a security clearance.

So every time he would get on television, he'd say, you know, they'd say, Director Brennan, is there anything you want to say about this?

Well, there's only certain things I can say, given, you know, I have a security clearance and my sources. However,

and we were supposed to have, you know, from the mouth of God, this internal truth coming out of this faker's mouth and so he did a lot of damage to the republic so did james comey so did uh james clapper so did andrew mckay so did robert mueller so did andrew wiseman so did kevin kleinsmith so did all of them so did peter or so did nellie or so did all of them and they've never so did peter strzzok and lisa page A lot of them lied, a lot of them were unethical, a lot of them fake documents, a lot of them didn't tell the truth under oath.

And they have a lot to answer for.

They tried to subvert and destroy a presidential campaign, transition, and presidency, and they still haven't atoned for it and they haven't been held accountable for it.

Well, maybe not in this lifetime, but I'm sure there's a special place and a hot place for all the people you've mentioned.

Victor, that's about all the time we have, except for a couple of general notes. One is personal here.

I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and I want want to invite our listeners to visit centerforcivilsociety.com.

American Philanthropic is dedicated to strengthening civil society. And folks, you have a weak civil society.
It just lets the aggrandizement of government happen. So check it out.

And then I also weekly write a email newsletter called Civil Thoughts, 12 suggestions for reading at civilthoughts.com. It'd be very kind if you check it out.
It's free and no obligations.

As we do, do we read a few of our reviews left at itunes and thanks again folks who do leave a rating uh really appreciate it the five-star average hangs in there i read three reviews today because they're all very quick well the first one is from john jason the best vdh that's what it's titled and it's this is very simple vdh is the go to g-o-a-t

us so greatest of all time rhyming with potus kind of mix in there thank you john jason another one just simply titled Victor Davis Hansen, says, This is from A Subscriber444, writes, Sammy Wink is delightful.

Exclamation point. And then thank you, A subscriber.
And finally, Crystaline400 leaves a comment.

Who is Sammy? We'd like to know about Sammy. What is her background? Why does Jack Fowler call her the great Sammy Wink? So, Victor, you can't answer this.
I can say that.

Sammy is highly educated if that matters. You know, I'm on record that degrees don't matter, but she has a PhD and she was trained in French literature and she's interested in Western Civ

and she knows how to, as you know, Jack, I don't make the topic. So you and Sammy entirely are in charge of the show.
You choreograph it, you create the questions. I'm just here to answer them.

And sometimes I don't do a good job, but probably. But the point I'm making is Sammy is quite accomplished.

yes and i think people will like her more and more as they listen to her oh she's terrific and i'll just say i am personally jealous of her world-class temperament and she is eminently friendly and the final thing that puts her on top of you know whatever pedestal is she is kind to stray dogs and that is a wonderful attribute to have victor thank you we're going to record another podcast and we'll talk about some of these other themes on the traditionalist.

I want to remind our listeners, Victor Davis-Hanson Show does have three weekly shows, the traditionalist, the classicist. I'm blessed to host them.
And then Sammy does do the culturalist.

So thank you, Victor, for the great thoughts you shared today. And thank you to our listeners for listening.

And we'll be back again in a couple of days with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. Thank you.
Thank everybody for listening again. I appreciate it.

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