The Classicist: Blue State Blues

43m

Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss policy failures in blue states, media bias with no bounds, and blaming racism as an elite conceit.

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Transcript

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

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

We are recording on Friday.

December 3rd, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I am the author of Civil Thoughts, the weekly email newsletter you can find at civilthoughts.com.

That's published by American Philanthropic.

Who cares about me?

Let's talk about the namesake of the show, Victor Davis Hansen, 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's latest book, The Dying Citizen, is a bestseller.

You can find that.

a link to it, how to buy it, at victorhanson.com.

We're going to talk a little more about that towards the end of the show.

At the beginning of the show, however, we're going to talk about some new polling that's come out about

the inability of some Americans, and that's a lot of them, to get off the couch and go back to work.

And we'll talk about that right after this message.

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we're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Classicist.

That's one of the three weekly podcasts that we do.

I also do the traditionalists and Sammy Wink does the culturalist.

We thank all who listen.

So Victor, again, we're recording on Friday the 3rd, and there is news out today.

The jobs and the monthly jobs report, I think, I don't have the numbers in front of me.

I think it's a 250,000 new jobs, but it was well below maybe 350 to 400,000 less than what was expected.

I think the stock market is responding very poorly.

This coincides with the new poll that has come out that finds that half of unemployed Americans, and I believe these are folks who had jobs, who lost their jobs because of the lockdowns half of them are not actively seeking new jobs and this in the face of an economy that has so we're told 10 million unfilled jobs victor something's going on with the psyche the character of americans when it comes to work what are your thoughts about this

a lot of bay area places in curing california compared to the interior and it's pretty much locked down.

I don't mean completely locked down, but when you go to see restaurants, you can't go inside.

I went to the Stanford Treasury Union, and they asked you to order your Starbucks online, and the doors were locked in the morning.

And finally, I found an open door, and they let me order.

I wasn't supposed to, I suppose.

But my point is that part of it is there's a certain profile of Americans who,

even with a booster or two

shots, is terrified of the virus.

So they're not going out of their homes.

And then there's another half that, as you inferred, finds out that, you know, life's not so bad at home.

You just kind of hang out.

And if you don't, you know, you eat and you watch TV or play video games.

And if you get a check from the government or the state, federal or local or regional, what do you really want to go out and work for and make marginally more money?

You don't.

And so, and a lot of people, it's not just young people that we, you know, we character that live in their parents' basement, but there's a lot of people in their late 50s and they kind of think, well, I have a 401k.

I'm getting close to retirement.

Why do I

work?

I know that I'm 68.

And my wife and I were saying the other day, and we kind of said, can you think of 10 people we know your age or younger that aren't working?

And I think we came up with 25 names.

She was trying to tell me maybe you should stop and retire.

But the point I'm making is that there was a lot of people we knew that just, they were on the cusp of retirement.

They say, this is a good time just to relax.

And so

I think that explains a lot of things, Jack.

It explains the supply crisis that we don't have enough experienced workers that onload ships or to build cars or whatever it is.

And it explains why the left is so nonchalant about the open border.

I think a lot of it, they feel that corporate America wants that border open to get cheap labor.

And it's not a very good situation because it dovetails in or it is a contributor to

the other malaise.

And that is we're pumping less oil and gas.

We're building less stuff.

There is a pent up demand for greater expenditure to satisfy the appetites.

And the bodies aren't there to make the stuff.

And that's the problem.

I shouldn't say that, Jack.

The bodies are there to make the stuff, but the bodies who want to make the stuff are not there.

And at some point, someone, I don't know when we're going to get to that point.

Someone, we're going to have a national candidate.

I don't know if it'll be

again, or somebody's going to say, listen,

staying in home when you're able-bodied is lazy.

Lazy.

You hear what I said?

Lazy.

You've got to go out and work.

And we're not going to send checks to people who are able-bodied and who will not work.

We don't care what the pretense is.

If you're not able-bodied or you're ill, then we're going to be as generous as possible.

But we cannot be generous to you unless other people work to create the cash and capital and labor and investment that allows us to divert it to you.

So if you're able-bodied, that is selfish and it is lazy.

And I think the same thing, that whole temperament, is we're going to see a lot of people be much more blunt about crime.

And they're going to say, if you smash into a store and you loot it, you are a thief.

That's not brick and mortar.

That's not a property crime.

It's just a little misdemeanor.

No, that is undermining the fabric of society.

If a store owner cannot be sure that his product is safe and that he gets money for his labor and investment and capital by selling it, then you don't have civilization.

And so many people are going to wake up and say that.

And then what I'm getting at is the limits of the left-wing blue state model are now upon us.

And it's starting to create a general systems collapse.

People are not working.

Gas is unaffordable.

People can't turn their thermostats where they would like as it gets cold as winter approaches.

They don't feel safe.

I was just talking to somebody at Stanford campus.

They've had a lot of a lot of violence in and around the campus.

And at the University of Chicago, they've had a lot of violence.

Johns Hopkins, they've had a lot of violence.

The big thing that people on campus are not talking about, I think it was called the McCaffrey Law

about that tragic death of a woman on an East Coast campus.

I don't know if it was Loyola or Temple or where it was, but the law says that you have to report the nature of the crime and give, if you know a general description of the suspect, you have to inform the campus community.

And I think Trump fined millions of dollars for universities who wouldn't do that.

And they finally admitted that they were defying the law and they had to give descriptions.

And now I've noticed from the two or three universities that send me faculty-like warnings about crime, they don't include a description of the suspect, every single one of them, not one.

And you can't tell me they don't have some descriptions.

So what I'm getting at is that people are going to get angry about this, just like they are with donors, and they're going to say, I cannot cannot put my child at one of these Blue State big cities, prestigious blue chip university, because it's too dangerous.

And I can't get my car serviced because nobody wants to change the oil.

And they're staying home.

And so finally, that will hit the Blue State

left-wing mind.

And you're already seeing these mayors and city council.

I think...

Oakland is offering bonuses for people who join the police department.

Walnut Creek is offering bonuses to hire more.

I think they're going to hire five new police officers after Nordstrom was looted.

So you can only be liberal for so long.

And finally, your safety net, your cocoon, your wall, the barbarians are at the gates, and it's going to get you too.

You've got to choose.

And I think it's a time for choosing and they're going to, we'll see what they do.

Victor, this jibes pretty well with a piece you just wrote for American Greatness.

And I recommend to our listeners to visit American Greatness because there's always two pieces each week that Victor writes.

This is called the third worldizing America.

And at one point in this piece, Victor, you mentioned that over from the last 40 to 50 years, you've been practically everywhere around the globe.

You've been to a lot of, you've lived overseas, you've traveled a ton.

And as I recall, you even had some radical surgery in less than glamorous places.

But you've seen it.

So you have a sense of what it means to be, what the third world means, and you

see great signs of that here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

What are the similarities between the third world?

Why is America third worldizing?

Well, let's define third world.

That's a term that was used in the Cold War.

You were neither in the communist bloc nor you were in the free bloc, but you were the battleground of ideas, and that was mostly Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Okay.

If one were to go, if I were to go to Mexico, which I've been to several times, or if I've gone to Egypt or Libya or Algeria or Morocco, or I've gone to maybe I've gone to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, et cetera, but there is special case because of oil.

But I remember distinctly going to

Lebanon outside of Beirut when it was nice.

I think after 1973, it was no longer nice.

nice.

And Syria, okay.

And, you know, rural Turkey in the 1970s and 80s out by Ankara.

And when one goes there, here's what you're, and even Naples, Naples, and I was, I lived in Greece in 1973, four.

You could call it a third world country.

Here's what you encounter.

The power goes off without warning.

And you don't know why or when it will come on.

There is crime everywhere.

If somebody steals your wallet, they shrug.

The police shrug.

What are you saying?

I mean, everybody steals wallets.

Why are you upset?

If you get ill, I got malaria in Egypt.

I got a ruptured appendix in Libya.

I had a severed tendon in Greece.

I had a severed ureter in Greece.

My point is that when you go into an emergency room or wherever you go, it's like Donkey's Inferno.

It really is.

And when you're in these places, you notice that people are with donkeys or pulling wagons of firewood.

And then right next to it, there's a huge seaside estate with a huge wall.

I mean, I can remember that distinctly in places like Libya, of all places, communist, supposedly.

And it was true throughout the Middle East.

Okay.

America was different.

And when you saw impoverished people, Jack, they were living on the street.

I'd never seen a homeless person before until I went overseas, not

And now

California's got

brownouts all the time, power failures.

They just go out.

They go out so much that when I do the Fox appearances from my barn, they came in and put a perfectly sustainable battery system and all the camera and sound because they just assumed that you'd go off the air.

It was that common.

And I have a place in the mountains.

I get them, they're required by law now to send you a notice if they're planned, not if they're not planned, but they're equally disruptive.

I live in a community that if I go to the emergency room, it's not safe.

I had a terrible bike accident in 2014, severe concussion, 150 stitches in my face, knocked out all four of my teeth.

severe back injury.

When I went into the community emergency valley, what we call UC Med Center, it's a wonderful hospital, but a policeman was there and he said, Mr.

Hansen, I want to warn you that the person over there tried to rob a car,

broke the window, and severed an artery.

So he's in a gang, and the guy over there is in a different gang.

So we're going to be here.

It's not directed at you.

And so what I'm getting at is that, and then homelessness, nothing to say.

And when I wrote that article, Jack, I took a picture.

It's in American Greatness of right around the corner of

appliances, garbage, mattresses, just thrown right outside, just like the third world.

When I went to Mexico, the first thing I noticed when you cross the border, there's trash everywhere.

And when I went to Greece, the first thing I noticed in 73 was that people just threw trash out, just like they did in America until the 1960s.

And so that's what I'm talking about.

And I can't tell the difference now between that and America.

We have more homeless than they do, and they're in worse shape.

They defecate, they urinate, they fornicate, they inject drugs right in front of people, right in front of children.

And don't go to an emergency room in a big city.

You're not going to get in there.

And if you do, it's going to be, you're going to be.

I had an anaphlexis episode because of a histocytosis problem in Tucson.

And boy, I got great care, but there was a person next to me who was a druggie and he was vomiting all over the floor next to me.

And he was violent.

And that's what you encounter now in an American emergency room.

And do not go out with your girlfriend and hold hands and say you're going to walk around Chicago at night or New York or Baltimore or San Francisco or Los Angeles.

And I wrote about this because somebody who's a pretty well-known YouTuber, unbeknownst to me, I just used the name because it was a media story, said that he had been broken into his car and his children's things were taken.

And the actor Seth Rogan said, Oh,

what a kind of a wife.

You know, I've had my car broken in 15 times.

Stop.

There is the third world.

Seth Rogan with two Hollywood estates with security cameras and a wall thinks it's no big deal to live in the third world when other people get things stolen because he has the monies that that either doesn't affect him or it makes him not want to care.

And yet the other person is not that way.

And so that's what a third world is.

It's all the pathologies that I delineated with the addition that the wealthy, the wealthy are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology.

They live in the states and they have the money to navigate around a crooked justice system.

So we're going to see very quickly as a third world wave starts to lap up in Portland and Seattle and areas in San Francisco where they thought it's not going to affect me.

Well, it is going to affect you.

And when you start seeing Walnut Creek hiring more police officers, or you start to see a very prominent couple attacked two days ago in Beverly Hills and a very well-known woman, 81 African-American, killed by somebody who was out on parole, and they found him in the middle of another

attack or theft in Beverly Hills of all places, then there is no escape from it.

It's everywhere, this criminality, this third worldization, this inability to get adequate health care, this inability to count on power that's secure.

Wait to the, in California, when this, if this drought were to continue and it looks like it is, and we have no rain and no rain and no rain and no rain.

They were stealing water trucks last year, but when the stuff of life, water is not there, and you've got 40 million people who in a lunatic bin run by postal elites that let water out to the ocean when they had it and don't believe in

dams and aqueducts, you're going to have rioting here, I think, because you're going to start to see lawns in places like, I don't know, Palaver's Estates or Hillsboro or Athens.

They're not going to be alive.

And you're not going to have people

having water in restaurants.

You're not going to have people

from the Highway 41 out to the coast ranges.

If you've got a domestic well, you better be careful because you're going to drop 20, 30, 40 feet this summer.

So this society doesn't have a margin of error anymore because we violated certain principles of civilization.

You always have a secure border.

You always check people and make them follow the law that visit your country.

You do not revert to tribalism.

How you appear is secondary, not essential to who you are.

You always, always

keep up the infrastructure you inherited.

And then you equally build new infrastructure.

And you do not make incentives for non-participation greater than for participation.

And there are such a thing as sin and crime and bad seeds.

And when you,

you know, by fiat or edict, say that doesn't exist, then you're going to pay a price.

So the bill is coming due, and they never come due in good times.

It's just, you know, it's like the French army.

You know, Churchill in 1940 in April said, you know, we always got the bulwark of Europe, the French army that never broke at Verdun.

And everybody thought, well, yeah, but they've been teaching socialism in the schools for 20 years, and it's against the rules to mention the word Verdun in a French school that's considered too warlike.

And the French, the bulwark of Europe collapsed in seven weeks.

Was that true?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Well, Victor, we've discussed these matters before, but what you brought up about Seth Rogan and that mindset.

He's a real lefty.

I think

he's got to be a symbol here for a lot of this.

He stepped into it.

And

this, you talk about, you know, what happens if there's a lack of water?

I can't imagine what could happen in California next year.

Lack of water, continued madness with the

lockdowns, add a horrible fire season.

But the people who are left who say they care for people, Seth Frogan and others, they don't give a rat's petute about.

I don't think it's indifference, I think it's actual disdain and hatred of others.

Who's so they don't get any water?

Tough noogies.

I think it's a real disdain.

When they're going into an estate in Beverly Hills, somebody who's out on parole for violent acts, and he's going in and breaking through a security system with a security guard, and he murders an 81-year-old African-American innocent woman in Beverly Hills, then he can do it anywhere.

And the left knows that, and the wealthy know that.

The system they created, they created this monster Frankenstein, and now it's attacking a creator.

And they understand that.

And they understand that I just drove down I-5.

And I watched with curiosity this huge machine they have take an almond orchard and with its mechanical jaws eat it.

And then it spits out chips.

And there must have been a thousand acres of almond orchards that have been devoured.

And that's because somebody said, I cannot afford water.

There is no water, but I'm going to take a chance.

And maybe it's going to rain in October and November and snow.

And it didn't.

And they are pulling out almond orchards, as you wouldn't believe.

And these are $10,000 to $12,000 an acre investment.

And at one time, just five years ago, they were netting the owners five and six, seven thousand dollars an acre.

I can envision that we're going to see if this keeps up the drought, but more importantly, the reaction or the non-reaction to the drought, where every time we get a snow melt, we let it go out to the ocean or we don't build another dam.

I can imagine where you're going to have a million acres taken out of production at least.

I bet you're going to have to drive salad in Connecticut.

Yeah,

you can drive 50 miles.

You'll be able to drive 50 miles and see farmhouses that are abandoned unless they want to go down 1,000, 1,500 feet for water and get brackish water to pick a shower or to drink.

And we saw that with a fire already in the Sierra.

We had the two worst fires in history.

So if you don't have

fire protection and you don't have tankers that are based in strategically located areas and you don't have a philosophy that says you thin out the forest, but rather you let the dead trees crumble into mulch or something for worms.

If you don't do all that stuff, then nature bites you.

And it doesn't care who you are.

It doesn't care how it doesn't care that you're woke.

It doesn't care what your race is.

It doesn't care what your ideology is.

And these people don't understand that on the left.

They have really sold us a bill of goods that we don't want gas and oil.

And we're not going to have a pipeline.

We're not going to have ANWAR.

We're not going to have federal leases.

But we are going to beg the Russians and the Saudis.

And we're going going to say please please give us the satanic fuel that we hate well no they're not going to do it because they hate your guts and they hate your hypocrisy so don't ask them for stuff that you won't produce

and then all of a sudden you know the college student the soccer mom

the leftist professor wow Gas is 540 a gallon?

I can't afford that.

And that's what it was yesterday on the coast when I drove.

So it's going to hit them.

And we'll see.

I've already seen it when I was in New York.

And you saw it.

You see it all the time there, that people are afraid to go out.

And they look over their shoulder, and the streets are not, they're not crowded.

And the city looks dirty, and there's trash everywhere.

Well, it looks dirty because it is dirty.

It's an eyesore.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more major bite at a big piece you've written, and we'll talk about that right after this message.

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

I'm Jack Fowler.

We're recording on December 3rd, Friday, December 3rd.

Victor, you have a big essay, as you do every week, for American Greatness.

This is called A Tale of Two Cities, Kenosha.

And

I have to say it right.

We got some notes from our

Waukeshaw.

I think that's it.

No, that's right.

We were saying in Iowa in particular, we're saying Waukesha.

It's Waukeshaw.

Yeah.

Our apologies to the good people of the Badger state who might have been hurt by that.

But Victor, there is a tale of two cities.

Well, one wasn't a criminal incident.

One was posed as a criminal incident.

And the other was a criminal incident that all of a sudden has fallen out of the headlines.

Would you like to talk about this essay, Victor?

Yeah, very carefully, is that this was a kind of a showdown of the media.

It really shows how they operate.

And they don't report the news, as you know, and they don't report it.

If they did report it, they wouldn't report it fairly.

What they do instead is they get up in the morning, the young journalist, 40-something, I don't know, out of Columbia Journal for the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, wherever, and they scan

reports, AP,

Reuters, and if they see a news item and they find out that it can be useful for their larger agenda, then they exaggerate.

And if they see another one that's not,

then, and who, and remember, these are already pre-selected.

It's not like AP isn't warped.

So there's not very many they see they don't like.

And then they do the necessary, make the necessary adjustments.

So with the, well,

Kenosha,

all of a sudden we found out that a 17-year-old boy had an illegal weapon, not,

that he shouldn't, it was illegal for him to carry it, not, that he translated, transported it across state lines, lines, plural, not.

That he lived in Aurora, Illinois, and he went to a foreign place.

No, not.

His father was there.

And then he shot three heroes gratuitously.

No, he didn't didn't shoot them gratuitously.

They were trying to kill him.

He was there to, maybe in a misguided fashion, maybe not, to stop the violence.

And

it was self-defense, and a jury of his peers agreed with that.

And the three people who hit him, and the one for four people attacked him, three of them were felons.

One had a lengthy arrest record.

That was the truth.

And out of that white-on-white violence, we got that it was a racial incident and once again showed how racist America was.

So we heard Rittenhouse, Rittenhouse, Rittenhouse.

48 hours later, Daryl Brooks let out, what, two or three days earlier after trying to run down a woman and her child and kill them and with a 20-year, 45-page arrest record.

and with a sizable social media trail of anti-white racism and hatred, praise of BLM, anger at Bittenhouse, et cetera, et cetera, anti-Semitism.

He gets into

his

car

and he goes right through barricades and then, like he's a bowling ball, he tries to knock down every mostly white pin person he can, just like a bowling pin.

He knocks them down, kills six, and wounds over, I guess, 62 of them so far.

And guess what?

These same journals look at that and oh my God,

nothing there for us.

It doesn't advance the narrative, the agenda.

But these awful right-wing people are talking.

I mean, IEJAC, they don't care that people were killed.

They don't care that young kids were killed.

So they turned this into, you know,

sort of a love bug herbie on steroids.

Just the car was alive.

It was just the headlines: car crash kills six.

SUV responsible for 62 injured, as if Mr.

Brooks never existed because he is a long race for their narrative.

And then, why all this is happening, i.e., what is happening?

A violent act that has nothing to do with black people.

It's white-on-white violence and an interracial violence that is said to be racist, and an interracial

black-on-white violence that does have a lot to do with race.

The one does that doesn't, and the one that does, doesn't.

And then there's this backdrop of America is racist, racist, racist.

And we have the Aubury trial where I think most people felt that the three white self-appointed security monitors of their neighborhood were acting improperly to drive up.

to a jogging African-American and ask him what he was doing and point a gun at him.

And then there was an altercation and he was killed.

We have some videos of it.

He doesn't seem to have had a record of doing anything illegal in the neighborhood.

And a jury of 11 whites and one African-American found that to be true.

And all of a sudden, the jury system works, we're told.

Well, it works.

But it didn't work in Rittenhouse.

And I don't know what will happen.

But I will tell you this.

We were told the greatest threat to America are proud boys and white supremacy.

I didn't see any.

I know that the President of the United States defamed Rittenhouse, but I didn't see any outside that courthouse.

I didn't see any protesting in Waukesha.

I didn't see any in support of those three white vigilantes, if that's what they're called.

I did see Jesse J.

I saw the whole Black Lives Matter movement.

I saw some armed.

And so at some point, And now, Jack, we're into the juicy smollett moment, and he's back.

And he's got a really brilliant,

I shouldn't say brilliant, but

now that the idea that no one in America believes that you walk out at two in the morning to get a subway sandwich and you're attacked in left-wing Chicago in freezing weather by two people

with MAGA hats that are white, but they apparently have hoods, but you can tell they are white.

And they attack you and call you the N-word and the homophobic.

And then they make fun of Empire, which we know all MAGA supporters supporters all love.

And then they throw bleach, which usually freezes at the temperature that was recorded that night, but defying the laws of chemistry, it didn't.

And then somehow they manage, A, to put a noose around his neck and yet to be beaten off and driven away while Juicy has his cell phone in one hand and the sandwich in the other.

Well, nobody could quite play.

It was a hot Italian role.

Yes, he couldn't quite play that.

And then it broke down that he wrote a a check like an idiot to these Nigerian brother, Nigerian-born brothers, and whom he knew, who worked on his set.

And we hear that he was angry about his role being diminished and the ratings going down and he wanted some buzz.

And we have tapes of them buying the hats and the bleach and the rope in a hardware store.

So then he came around and came up with, wow,

hmm, what can I say?

Well, I know what I'll say:

that

these two people attacked me and I thought they were white, and they had mega hots on.

They were probably trying to cover up the idea that they were Nigerian and knew me because we had a beef about their lack of performance on the set, maybe.

And so they dressed up.

What was I to think?

Of course I thought they were mega people.

I didn't know they were Nigerians.

I had no idea.

And that's where we are.

And the idiots idiots like kamala harris and nancy pelosi and all the rest that swallow juzi's uh narrative it'll be very interesting to see how far they're if they have any shame left or they'll buy this new one that uh and then of course we had the da that let him off entirely so these big cities don't function and we're into this race, race, race, race, race, race, race.

And it's not going to end well.

It's not going to end well.

Anytime anybody of any race starts to predicate their views or treatment of another person based on their race, you've got, it's not going to work well.

Yeah, here's what you wrote, Victor, on that.

You wrote, the regional Milwaukee BLM activist Vaughan Mays quickly alleged that the Rittenhouse acquittal had earned a homicidal payback in Waukesha.

And then you wrote, a low-level Democrat functionary tweeted that the dead children of Waukesha were proper karma for the written house walking free.

Quote, I'm sad anyone dies.

I just believe in karma.

And this came around quick on the citizens of Wisconsin.

And finally, back on that BLM activist, Von Mays, he further elaborated.

He said that Brooks was an insurrectionist whose violence had jump-started a supposed revolution, his apparent euphemism for mass murder.

Quote, but it sounds possible that the revolution has started in Wisconsin.

It started with this Christmas parade.

I love that.

It sounds possible that the revolution has started.

Why didn't that BLM guy just say what he felt?

I'm glad that a black man killed six whites who deserved it, even though they were innocent and hadn't done nothing.

And I'm really glad they injured 62 of them.

And it's starting.

We're going to see more of this.

And

I don't think we're going to see a lot more of it because I think a lot of people are getting very angry about it.

And I think people in the African-American, where was Al Sharpton?

Where was Jesse Jackson?

Where was Professor Kendi?

Where were the CNN?

Where was Jory Reed?

Where are all these people deploying that violence?

And by their silence, they're basically saying, we don't care.

They're white.

We don't care.

It's payback.

And once you start establishing the principle that because of the sins of the father, the grandfather, the great-grandfather, not the father, then the present generation pays.

You can apply that to anything and justify any violence as payback.

And even though you may have not suffered any discrimination or racism in your lifetime, and you know, we're getting to the point now of absurdity.

So, if you are a 21-year-old white guy and you're on a forklift in Bakersfield, and I was down in Bakersfield a lot this last year, and I saw a lot of people like that,

and

you grew up

and born in 2000, you grew up in the 35th year of affirmative action.

And you were not going to get, as a white working person, any type of help in getting into school.

You're not eligible for affirmative action.

You're not eligible for set-asides, repertory action, and missions.

And you probably have a non-white girlfriend.

And most, you know, it's the San Joaquin Valley is about 35% white, 40%.

So it's not like you're living in a segregated community and you're not making very much money.

And yet you are going to be told that you are a white oppressor.

Jory Reed will say to everybody, that guy is a white oppressor.

Whom is he oppressing?

And what would you please list the benefits he has?

What, insidious racism on his part?

He gets what?

I don't know.

He gets to cut in line at the subway thing at lunch.

He gets...

20 minutes off the forklift.

I don't know.

But I know the type of work that the white working class does that are young, and half of them don't go to college.

And

in terms of sheer numbers, they are the greatest group of poor people in the United States.

In terms of income advance over the last four years, they're not doing as well as so-called marginalized people.

But to continue and continue to say that these people are culpable and racist, and

the Waukesha people deserved it, as this Mays person implied.

And And maybe Brooks will or will not.

We don't know.

He looks like he's pretty careful not to.

He doesn't seem as bold as this obnoxious, lethal, racist diatribes on

videos and Facebooks were.

But that's not sustainable.

It's not sustainable.

And that it's a top-down Italy.

You know what this is?

This is on the Lido deck of a ship, and it's grandees fighting over, I want Joey Reed's spot.

No, no, you're racist.

I'll take it.

Or that diversity, equity, inclusion administrator shouldn't be vice provost.

I was waiting in line for that vice provost ship.

No, it's time for repertory.

This is, I want to get into Harvard, but I had to go to Yale.

This is unfair.

This is what it's all about.

It's about the top classes fighting among each other, white versus non-white, but it has nothing to do with class.

Nothing to do with class.

OPA is about as oppressed as I don't know what.

The Obamas have never, the Obama kids have never faced oppression in their entire lives.

And Michelle Obama, for every time she says something, it's bitterness and anger about, you know, unfair America.

And I read her undergraduate thesis, and I can tell you, as a person who supervised maybe 200 theses in my life, that thesis should have been thrown out.

Right.

Victor,

wasn't she making $350,000 a year for some

pre-being Mrs.

Obama?

Yeah, she was Mrs.

Obama.

He was just a state senator.

It was a staggering.

It was worse than that.

It was something like $150,000 when he was a minor House state legislature representative.

And then when he became a U.S.

senator, she got suddenly, people appreciated her job.

And she made $350,000.

And what was her job?

It was some type of community relations expert at the University of Chicago Hospital, which a lot of cynics on the right said was basically a way to interact with the community and to turn people away that would otherwise not be wanted at the University of Chicago.

So what I'm getting at is that in the end, there's an ancient law.

And whether you were a white racist in Mississippi, or you're a black nationalist today, the law applies to you.

And that is any time

you go down the tribal road and you start to say that I am superior to that person or that person is wrong because they're part of a group and you don't judge or treat people as individuals.

Bad things happen to the society, but eventually bad things happen to you.

And what we're seeing in the theme today, Jack, just to finish, is that I don't know what we would call it, nemesis or paybacks a bitch or karma, not what this crazy woman.

What I'm saying is the wealthy classes created this revolution and now their sinecures in the universities and in the corporate world are challenged because

they are subject to affirmative action on steroids and their haunts where they felt absolutely secure and safe and they lectured everybody about defunding, they're not.

They're not anymore.

And you even have to, at some point, you got to find gas for your Mercedes.

You really do, or your BMW.

And it's starting to affect them.

And we'll see how the upper, upper middle, upper, upper middle class, not the very wealthy yet, but the upper and upper middle class.

And I think the deplorable class thinks, you know what?

I can live with it.

Right.

I'm armed.

I work with my hands.

I fix things.

My pump goes out.

I fix it.

I'm out here in rural America.

I can deal with it.

But you people, you people are dependent on everybody.

And you're not able to do anything with your hands.

You can't protect yourself.

You're very vulnerable.

That system you wanted so badly for everybody, we're all going to cram into buses and mass transit, and then we're going to be taken by unionized drivers to a high-rise where we're all going to live in the city.

And that's going to be ecologically sound, where the architects of that system live at, you know, Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket.

Well, you're going to be very vulnerable in that system

and other people are not so we'll see but we are seeing so

yeah all right

we just have a few more minutes we have to wrap up so uh thanks for that victor i want to recommend to our listeners to visit your website victorhanson.com and there's a tremendous amount of original content there.

For example, don't talk about it, Victor.

You know, talk, I just don't give anything away.

But right now, for example, there's a three-part series you've just published there.

You can only read it if you're a subscriber.

And that's so damn reasonable.

It's not funny.

Five bucks a month or $50 a year.

But this series under Eeyore's cabinet feature is called Learning from Months of Chaos.

And part three.

of that series was just published today.

And that's regular content on your website.

So I'm going to recommend folks that they visit and enjoy because you're not going to read that anywhere else.

So many of our listeners go to iTunes and they leave five-star reviews.

That is the average we have.

It's tremendous.

We're very grateful to our listeners who do that and particularly grateful to our listeners who also take the time to write a little comment.

We do read the comments.

I'll try to take to heart those who tell me to shut.

Fowler, shut up.

We need to hear more of Hansen Buck.

But here's one by Gus in Dayton, and it's called The Voice of Sanity.

This was put up earlier this week.

In these dark times, when the idiocy, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and dogma of the left unrelentingly bombards us through social media, network talk shows, and liberal newspapers, I find the podcast of VDH to be a refuge of calm logic and reasonable solutions.

VDH recognizes that the tenets of cancel culture undermine the safety and well-being of the unprivileged and vulnerable it purports to represent, while at the same time threatening free enterprise, civic comedy, the rule of law, and constitutional authority.

With so many writings and frequent podcast broadcasts, the sagacious and intelligent VDH must be a very busy man indeed.

I'm exhausted just listening to his brilliant insights, Victor.

You exhaust people.

Bravo.

I think I was going to say, Mrs.

Hansen does very well.

Bravo and thank you.

Hey, thank you, Bill.

You're exhausting, Victor.

Well, I'm not going to comment.

Mom's always right.

So, so, so, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Get the dying citizen if you haven't yet.

You'll find a link on victorhansen.com.

Look, explore further in the website.

You'll find some of Victor's other timeless books.

They make great gifts.

That's about it.

Thanks, folks, for listening, and we will be back in a few more days with yet another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thanks so much.

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