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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

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

We're recording on Friday, November 26th, the year 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Victor Davis-Hansen, the namesake and star is the Martin and Ely Anderson Sr.

Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

On The Classicist, we try to talk about Victor's writings and American greatness, and we are darn intent on doing that today and also talking about some foreign policy struggles in China and Russia.

Maybe we'll lead off with that right after this important message.

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

Victor, just want to lump these together.

We have tensions between Russia and the Ukraine, and then tensions with Communist China and Taiwan.

On the latter, exacerbated in the last day or two, and I don't mean that necessarily in a bad way, but a delegation, four Democrat House members and one Republican, went to taiwan and met with the president of taiwan uh china red china is taking this as an affront warning america don't get involved and we have in the ukraine requests from the president of ukraine for help because hey putin is about to cause trouble victor what are your broad thoughts on both of these areas of tension well i could cut to the quick and say that the official nato communique to Vladimir Putin, who's got, I think, 100,000 troops masked on the Ukrainian border, be very careful.

This will not stand.

It doesn't cut much ice with Putin.

All Putin is doing is getting out his calculator and saying, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, and that analysis will cover the range from political influence, his own narcissism and megalomania, the cost, the benefits.

Is this a good idea to go swallow Ukraine?

And if we were to swallow Ukraine and put puppets in power, like we did Crimea and eastern Ukraine, is this a good paradigm for the Baltic states and reclaiming, that's his ultimate aim, is to reclaim the Soviet republics.

But he hasn't been able to do that because Russia is a mess and it doesn't, you know, it doesn't pencil out so far.

So it won't be anything about NATO deterrence.

He doesn't have any fear of NATO.

And then the second observation is that this and other instances of aggression throughout the globe have been accelerated by Afghanistan.

When they look at the United States and they think, wow, they left their NATO partners.

What an alliance is that.

They just skedaddled out of Afghanistan.

They left billions of equipment.

They turned over a $300 million remodeled Baglam Air Affairs Base.

Wow, they gave a billion-dollar embassy and they just left.

And then they had press conferences bragging about how their logistics flight and surrender was so brilliantly organized.

And then they let a bunch of people come in without a vaccination and no betting.

What a bunch of clowns.

So they're looking at that and they're saying, I just don't think the Biden administration in particular and in general the U.S.

military is up to this.

That could be a very bad calculation.

That's what Putin is very tentative about.

And,

you know, we don't hear James Clapper now, who called Trump a Russian asset, saying to the public, or John Brennan, who said he was treasonous because he was soft on Russia, anybody saying, Joe Biden, Joe Biden,

you're losing deterrence.

You're creating a sense by your inaction that Putin is taking advantage of.

And just as a little side note, Jack, remember when everybody yelled collusion, what was the real story?

Donald Trump, whether you like him or not, flooded the market with cheap oil and crashed the oil price.

And that hurt Putin, whose main source of foreign exchange is oil and natural gas.

Two, he got out of an asymmetrical missile deal.

People don't ever mention that, but Putin was furious about that.

Three, when there were mercenary soldiers in Syria and they charged a U.S.

base, can you imagine if they did that today with Biden?

U.S.

military killed them all, just wiped them out.

Nobody said a word on Russia.

They were kind of terrified of it.

Four, for all the Ukrainian, Ukrainian, Ukrainian, you know, hysterias that led to the first impeachment, Donald Trump did sell Ukraine offensive weapons.

Who didn't do that?

Barack Obama.

Who put higher sanctions on Russian oligarchs?

So the point is that if you take away all of the politically driven left-wing distortions and disinformation, you're left with the reality that Putin didn't do this stuff, not because he liked Trump, because he was afraid that Trump was erratic, unpredictable, and could be decisive, whether it was killing Baghdadi or Soleimani or standing down North Korea.

And he didn't want to do it.

Now he has none of those fears.

And Afghanistan has been a force multiplied.

There's a third element, and that is we don't know the level of collusion

or mutual dependence or communication between

China and Russia.

And you might want to throw in Iran or North Korea, but believe me, they all believe in the second front theory and third front theory of strategy.

So in China's way of thinking, Every day they promise, promise, promise they're going to pressure, pressure, pressure Taiwan.

They like the idea that Putin is doing the same thing with Ukraine.

They like the idea that North Korean nuts are still talking again,

again, about their nuclear arsenal and testing they're going to do.

They like the idea the Iranians have disclosed that they have enriched uranium to a point where should they choose to go nuclear, they can do it in a matter of weeks, months, if not weeks.

All of these are interrelated, not in the sense that they all get in a room and say, you do that, you do that, but they each look at what's happening in the world, vis-a-vis Afghanistan and Joe Biden, and they say to themselves, if I were to act right now, the U.S.

is so distracted at home and doesn't have enough military strength to match its strategic obligations abroad that if another power and another power were to do that, it would be advantageous to us.

So we're going to see some stuff.

I have a feeling in the next year that's pretty scary because one of these powers is going to move.

I don't think they're going to move quite on Taiwan, but I think the Chinese are going to start to fly routinely into their space, which could set off an incident, or they're going to start to harass ships coming in and out of Taiwanese ports.

or Putin is going to move a little bit here, a little bit there in Ukraine, or start flying routinely over Baltic airspace, or Iran's gonna sort of let it be known they're gonna have a nuclear weapon.

And it's gonna be very dangerous because our military is not funded up to its strategic obligations.

And two, there's a sense abroad that the military's main interest is not battle efficacy, battle readiness, deterrence.

Its main interest is sort of a commissariat, a cannibalization of its own.

And it's a social justice conglomerate now.

And I think people feel rightly or wrongly that it doesn't have the same level of deterrence it had in the past.

Again, deterrence, in part at least, is based on perceptions.

So, if some military officer is listening to this and says, oh, Victor, you don't know what you're talking about.

I can tell you, I just got back from a Marine deployment.

We got the best troop.

It doesn't matter.

It matters on what the perception is.

What General Milley says, what Secretary Austin does, what Joe Biden funds.

That's what people look at.

And when they look at the social turmoil within the United States, they think this is a postmodern superpower with pre-modern responsibilities.

And

it's not going to last.

And I think the main calculation is.

Do you push it over the cliff or do you let it fall over on its own?

And I don't think that's a correct assessment of where we are, but that's their observation where we are, which makes it very dangerous.

Victor, I want to recommend to our listeners, as we do from time to time, to check out Strategica, which is the Hoover Institution online publication that you oversee.

And this was from late June.

There was a significant issue number 73, a significant issue on U.S.

defense of Taiwan.

Our listeners should visit it.

There's about a dozen pieces there.

I will say, I'm not sure any of these pieces would be written in a different light because between when this was published and we're speaking today, Afghanistan happened, as you just mentioned.

And I think that truly puts everything in a

military

or military history working group.

We just had two weeks ago, and this session was devoted to two themes, civilian military relations

and

Afghanistan and the fallout.

And we have members, you know, that are very prominent in the United States.

We have generals, we have admirals, we have historians, we have analysts.

And I think I'm not exaggerating by saying the consensus was

that Afghanistan has hurt U.S.

military readiness and deterrence.

And most of the arguments that went on is why haven't any generals resigned, especially those who told us as late as July that in their assessment it was a sustainable project.

And then they blamed Biden and said, we told them there were problems.

And then Biden blamed them and said, no, they didn't.

But nobody in that blame gaming has come forward and saying, I was in charge of the Baglam Air Force Base.

I was in charge of the security around the airfield.

I was

in charge of the report about military survivability, and I'm wrong.

And I have to be, I want to be reassigned.

I screwed up.

None, none, none.

And that was the worst military humiliation.

I think back till 1975 when we left the embassy in Saigon.

Well, Victor, we've talked about the lack of shame.

It cuts across all aspects of

society.

And right, watching what happened in Afghanistan in real time, you thought, oh my gosh, heads are going to roll.

Now, you know, there are more important things to worry about, but right, not a single head.

has rolled.

And hey, after Pearl Harbor had rolled, and I only because I lived in Fredericksburg, I remember General Burnside, who was a calamitous Union general, wanted to lead yet an additional charge against the Confederates so he could die because he was so ashamed of what he had already done.

Lincoln went through McClellan.

He went through Burnside.

He went through Hooker.

He went through a lot of them.

He went.

through Halleck.

Halleck had a battlefield command for a while until he was kicked upstairs.

And then he found two guys that fought, Grant and Sherman.

And

we used to do the same thing in World War II.

We would relieve people

and

not as many as we should, but we did relieve people or reassign them when they proved to be mediocrities.

And that's how we got Curtis LeMay finally in the head of the Pacific bombing campaign.

because General Hansel just couldn't do it.

He was a wonderful man, four-star general, but he couldn't get the B-29 program to work.

And so we had a tradition of doing that.

But today,

these generals are such creatures of the Washington Beltway and the military-industrial intelligence investigatory complex that we don't really worry about whether they're efficient on the battlefield.

And the result is that when you look at Iraq and when you look at Afghanistan and when you look at Syria and when you look at Libya, you don't really see a lot of impressive military victories.

Well, Victor, this is a perfect segue, as they say, into a piece you've just written for American Greatness called Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization.

And you talk in this piece about the military, but I'd like us maybe, and we've talked about that before on previous podcasts, maybe we could focus a little bit instead, and you wear your California hat a little bit about the criminal justice system.

You know, Americans, particularly conservatives, are all about law-abiding citizens.

And if somebody is convicted wrongly, they deserve what they get.

And here's what you wrote.

The American criminal justice system also used to earn the respect of conservatives.

Prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, big city mayors were seen as custodians of the public order.

They were entrusted to keep the peace, to prevent and investigate crime, and to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Again,

Not so much now.

After 120 days of mostly unchecked riot, arson, looting, and violent protests in the summer of 2020, the public lost confidence in their public safety agencies.

District attorneys in several major cities, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St.

Louis, have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.

Final paragraph here.

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity.

Mass looting goes unpunished.

Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Victor, we've seen

now these scenes of just rampant looting of typically of high-end stores, but we all have heard stories, people going into the local CBS and they're just walking out with 400, however much value underneath the threshold for being prosecuted.

It seems to be,

like many things, a California thing that is now spreading to other places in the nation.

Chicago has become a hotbed for this kind of lunacy.

So Victor, if you'd like to talk about that and

the main theme of this piece, which is published

two days ago, the 24th, in American Greatness, Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization.

Well, here in California, remember how it started, Jack?

It was...

primarily, not all, but primarily confined to low-end stores.

I don't mean low-end status, but price-wide.

And by that, I mean it was Walgreens

and ride-aids in San Francisco in often marginal neighborhoods, not all, but often.

And as long as it was confined to that, and we had those infamous videos where an African-American suspect rides his bicycle in and with a trash bag and puts stuff in, and nobody does a thing, and he rides back out.

then nobody was upset.

So then people, and this is all in the context of the aftermath of George Floyd.

And as we've seen from both Kenosha

and Waukesha, and this is in Wisconsin now, but with the Rittenhouse trial and with the mass murdering last Sunday, what we've seen is that the whole criminal justice system in the aftermath of George Floyd has been racialized and polarized, but not the way the left thinks in a very sick way, in a very different manner, which we get to later.

But in that context, a lot of these thieves said, why are we wasting our time,

you know, stealing, you know, clariton and electric toothbrush when we can go out and get the high-end stuff and then, you know, sell it, you know, at Swap Meets and online and I don't mean swap meets, poor people swap meets, but go to places.

that have money and sell it.

And so they're now going to places like Walnut Creek.

If anybody's been to Walnut Creek, you know what I'm talking about.

High-end areas of San Jose.

I think there was one even in Palo Alto.

And they're attacking wealthy, mostly white and Asian people stuff.

And

Apple was sort of, wow, we wouldn't do this to Apple.

Lisa Jobs, she was one of the big donors that helped Mark Zuckerberg in the 2020 election.

No, they're going to do it everywhere.

And it's going to be very interesting, Jack, because suddenly, Gavin Newsom is angry.

Believe it or not, he's just announced yesterday, this will not stand.

And what he's getting is not the regional manager of Rite Aid and said, I'm going to have to shut down my drugstore because you won't enforce it.

Well, that's too bad.

No, no, there's your Louis Vuitton manager.

These are Nordstrom.

These are Apple.

And they're calling him up.

I said, what the F are you doing?

They're in Walnut Creek now.

Next thing you know, they'll be in pacific heights next thing they'll be in hillsborough or woodside stop it you know we're wealthy white people stop it and so he will stop it and you're starting to see there's special task forces that will stop it but why did it start it started because

of disinformation on the side of the left.

As soon as George Floyd was killed, and we won't even, I don't have time and you don't have time and our listeners don't want to hear it about all of the conflicting narratives about his death.

But nevertheless, after that, there was a lot of misinformation that police are routinely harvesting young black males who come in contact.

No, 11 million arrests a year, 25, I think in 2019, 25 people were killed that were unarmed in police custody or encounters with the police, and about half were African American.

More disproportionate in terms of the population, but surely not disproportionate in the number number of African Americans who have these encounters with the police, which were about half of the 11 million.

Okay, from that we went into

everybody is attacking African Americans, and the data doesn't show that.

Not hate crimes, African Americans disproportionately the attacker.

Rare interracial crimes, African Americans disproportionately more likely to commit an interracial crime than to suffer one.

General violent crime, African African Americans far more disproportionate.

And that was the truth, but nobody had the guts to say that.

So then it was defund the police, defund the police, and then we went in the full BLM agenda.

And of course, we have all the distortion.

So if I could just make one other point, we have kenosha that has nothing to do with race because

all the violence both ways was among so-called white people,

except for one, three Three white suspects, looting, I should say, suspects, in the midst of looting or arson or protest, whatever you want to call it, charged a 17-year-old who was armed.

One of them tried to grab his gun, we are told.

Another one pointed a gun in his face.

Another one hit him with a skateboard.

And then an African-American came out.

from nowhere and tried to kick him in the head.

All four of those had arrest records.

All four were the aggressors, and it had nothing to do with race because the two people who died were white.

The shooter was white and the person wounded was white.

That became racial.

That was Kenosha.

Then we had Waukeesha and we had an African-American male who had 20-year arrest record, including using his car to try to kill somebody.

And he was routinely let out two days, in fact, for trying to charge somebody with his car and kill them.

Two days before he killed six people and wounded over 60.

And I can tell you, I watched that thing almost in live reporting.

And the first thing was he was just fleeing.

He got confused.

And then I looked at the tape and I thought, well, he's not very confused because it is true that at first he tries to find a pathway which won't slow him down, meaning bodies will slow him down if they got caught under his fender.

But pretty soon he's trying to deliberately kill mostly old and young people.

It was disgusting.

And what happens when you look at the reporting?

It has nothing to do with race.

That's what we were told.

In fact, it's called on page 17 of these papers, page 22, a car collision.

Car collision in Waukesha, car hits somebody as if they're on autopilot or their drones.

There's nobody else.

SUV kills.

SUV kills.

Yeah.

And then you look at his rap and you say,

well, we can't find anything about Kyle Rittenhouse suggesting he was a white nationalist as Joe Biden accused him, a white supremacist.

But you know what, Daryl Brooks, you don't have to look far.

I want you to hit white people.

I don't, I got Hitler on my,

I hate Jews.

I got Hitler on my little social media.

Hit the white guy, knock him out, da, da, da, da, da, da, BLM.

And you know what?

It's suppressed.

That thing is going to die, just like the shooting of the Republican playing baseball.

And then we have a third city, Tale of Three Cities, Brunswick in Georgia, suburb.

And we had three white people

who saw,

they said, a suspect, and then they went after him.

And notice that, unlike the suspects of Mr.

Rittenhouse, who was being chased down, one of whom had a gun, Mr.

Arberry didn't have a gun.

And so three people went there and it led to his death.

I don't have all the facts, but I always try to give the benefit of the doubt to the jury verdict, whether it's Rittenhouse or the Arbery case.

And guess what?

A jury of 12, including 11 white people, I think probably gave the correct verdict.

They convicted these people of shooting him without cause, murder.

Because after all, if you see somebody jogging in a neighborhood and you don't have evidence that he has stolen goods in his possession, or you're not sure that he's stole, or he's not armed, or he's not doing something illegally, and you drive up next to him.

And the next thing you know, you pull out a shotgun and point it at him.

What's he going to do?

If he's running, he's not going to get far when you're in a car.

So,

you know, what you do?

He tries to defend himself, just like Rittenhouse did, only they shoot him.

And so, my point is, Jack, it was a good verdict, quote unquote, as much as an ignorant person like me in Selma, California can judge that without full array of evidence.

And I'll be perfectly willing to apologize if on appeal they're reversed because there was some fossil

misbehavior.

But for right now, I I look at Kenosha and I say, no race there.

Race, race, race, race.

Let's leverage it for racial hatred and political advantages.

And we go to Waukesha.

There is a racial angle there.

A African-American with a long rap sheet should have been in jail, but in the aftermath of the George Floyd climate, they let him out on a $1,000 bail.

Two days later, he did the same thing again at a magnitude of 1,000 and deliberately ran over people, mostly white, and he has a long record of racial hatred in his own words.

And nothing, nobody mentions it.

And then we go over to the third count, and it kind of puts the other two cities in context because it shows you that most people are not racialized.

They look at the evidence and they looked at the evidence and they convicted.

a white jury convicted three white people of shooting without cause an African-American.

I will suggest that in all these cases, or at least at Kenosha, there were protesters outside that courthouse trying to affect the verdict, and there was as well in Brunswick.

But nobody is going to do that, believe me, with Mr.

Brooks.

I don't think you're going to see a bunch of armed Kenosha people outside milling around when Mr.

Brooks goes on trial.

So what I'm getting at is there's a larger, there's the media narrative and then there's a reality.

And the more that the left pushes these on realities and makes these wrong charges and these insidious race, race, race, race, race themes out of everything, the more people are going to get angry.

The more they're going to get angry.

They're going to say, you don't say a word when there is a racial component, as in Waukesha.

You say a word when there is none in Kenosha.

And then you don't mention much about Brunswick when there may be a racial component in the sense that white people unjustly shot a black man, but white people then justly held them to count with, you know, what?

They are all three subject to life sentences.

But again, it reflects this whole climate we're in since 2020.

And you can't have people in a multiracial democracy, white or black, or any tribe, going on television as someone like Joy Reed does every night and picking one particular tribal group and saying that all 250 million people are the same.

White supremacy, white privilege.

When I heard Millie say that, white rage, I thought, who are you talking about?

The 73, 74% of white males who die of all the deaths in Iraq, are they who you're talking about?

So it's not good to just to say all black people, all white people, but that's what's happened.

And it's not going to end well.

And the Democratic Party is digging and digging and digging.

And the more they get deeper and deeper in it, the more they dig.

And they're going to be, I have a feeling that we're going to watch something in two, if things continue as they are, we're going to see something in 2020 that this country hasn't seen since 1938.

I'm not talking 40 or 50 seats.

You could see 60 or 70 seats in the House and five to seven or ten Senate seats changing hands if people are this angry.

And the Democrats don't seem to get it.

I say that, Jack, not just out of, I don't know, bluster of braggadaccio, but because right after this happened, AOC said that she was going to introduce legislation because bail was too high.

This was after they gave a convicted felon who just tried to attempted murder, they let him out on a $1,000 bail, and he went out and murdered again.

And she's worried that that was too high.

And I was really shocked to see the GoFundMe people finally say, you know what, remember, they wouldn't let anybody raise money for Kyle Rittenhouse, even though it was a clear, pretty clear case from the outset of self-defense.

Well, remember, then the cop lost his job because he ate 25 bucks early on before the show.

Finally, they said you can't put it on for Mr.

Brooks because there were people trying to raise money for it and say it was a racist act.

So it's not going to work where we're headed.

No multiracial, consensual society in history has ever worked that emphasized race.

Not Rwanda, not former Yugoslavia, not any country in the Middle East.

It doesn't work.

Not really in India either, not really in Brazil.

So we are the exception.

And yet we've, it's like everybody got up and said, you know what?

That Brazilian model is really good.

I think Yugoslavia worked just great.

Let's go back and emulate that.

And that's where we're headed.

The left, and it's the left that's doing it.

I hear people on the right say, let's just...

all get along.

Can't we just get along?

Why do we just cool it?

And I say to myself, well,

who's saying that an SUV guided itself on its own on autopilot and killed six people?

That's an amoral thing to write.

Who's doing that?

And

I don't know what to say, you know.

Victor, we had on a previous podcast over a year ago, we had Shelby Steele on.

He was talking about the documentary he made with his son, What Killed Michael Brown.

And a lot, a core of it was, of course, much of it was about how Michael Brown, you know, attacked this police officer and was a justified killing.

But Shelby got very deeply into what has happened to Black communities in America.

And the bottom line was,

and I think this is more and more people are seeing this from what you've just discussed, is that the issue of race is really about white liberals seeking power.

It's become more and more barefaced, and I think even barefaced to a lot of members of the American Black community who who just see this as exploitation yeah another thing you can see is that when you see african americans in the media and in print i'm not just saying this as someone who's more conservative than liberal but when you see them talk about these issues they are disinterested they are rational because they know that there's nobody from their side Some conservative is not going to say, we're going to disown you, Tom Soule, for saying that.

People on the left know that.

The CNN host knows that.

The provost of diversity and inclusion, they stray from the orthodoxy and they're going to get slapped down.

And they're going to get slapped down by wealthy white people that are left wing.

And so that creates sort of a banal, here we go again, commissariat.

And at least people on the right are thinking f for themselves because they know there's not going to be the same degree of punitive action taken against them from people who might agree with them but not agree them in every aspect whereas in the left you have you have to be orthodox all the way down the line so when people say well why does jory reed talk about race race race and make stuff up and all this crap and i'm thinking well she's making i don't know two three five million dollars a year to do exactly that

if she were to stray she'd be off there in two seconds yeah and that's how the left thinks remember they feel that they are so noble and so moral and so morally superior to everybody that any means necessary to achieve their goals is absolutely justified.

If you want to say that an SUV was on auto fighter without a driver, basically, and went out and killed a bunch of people, you're doing that to ensure that people don't demonize poor African-American Mr.

Brooks.

That's why, and that's noble.

So that's okay.

If you want to say Rittenhouse, bada, gun, lie,

it was illegal, lie.

He was illegal in carrying it, lie.

And then he went to a foreign city that he had no experience with, lie.

And then he said, is what the Daily Mail said, or not the Daily Mail.

One of them said, the Independent, that he killed two black men.

Well, those are noble lies.

Those are lies that are considered in service to a noble objective.

Right.

There's no hypocrisy there because it's noble.

Well, Victor, this leads right into another essay you've written for American Greatness called The New Blue Confederacy.

It's a terrific piece, and we're going to get into it right after this message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

The classicist recording on Friday, November 26th.

Victor, last time we were talking, we got into this a little bit.

And you mentioned that you had a fuller piece coming up, and it had to do with my view of how the Rittenhouse trial kind of reminded me in a weird way of Atticus Finch, et cetera.

I can't even remember the book title now.

I was getting old.

Tigland Mockingbird.

Tiger Mockingbird.

Yeah.

I mean, clearly, the powers that be expected a verdict, and there better have been that verdict.

Maybe they'll go through the rigmarole of a trial.

But that was the expectation of the media of the Rittenhouse trial that this guy had better be guilty.

And it kind of echoed this Jim Crow southern stand from earlier in our own lifetimes.

And you said you were actually writing a piece about that.

And that is the New Blue Confederacy.

It's on American Greatness.

I want to recommend to our listeners, visit American Greatness, because that's where you'll find much of Victor's stuff.

And this is a fulsome piece, but let me just read one section of it.

Essentially, you go back in a time machine in one piece.

What if somebody asked the question in 1865 of these following questions?

Who do you think an America in 2021 would be doing X, Y, or Z?

That's a terrific aspect of this essay.

Here's another part, though.

Silicon Valley emulates the power of old King Cotton, a monopoly that owns state government, one that destroys competition, censors and smears its critics, and pours its money into elections, not just to choose obsequious candidates, but to alter the very systems of balloting to ensure proper results.

Like the good old boy, old South, California is a one-party boss man state.

Democrats in southern fashion control all statewide offices, supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, and 75% of the congressional delegation.

Victor, to call Silicon Valley the embodiment of old King Cotton, I think is a pretty tough charge.

Would you elaborate on that?

And then let's get into the other aspect of the essay that I...

Yeah, I got a lot of criticism for this, both from people where I work and the general public because they saw the word confederacy and slavery so they said well we don't have slaves but what i was getting at is that whether you're an antebellum or post-bellum south after the south reformed it took them a long time but eventually they created a middle class and they gave in to federal law George Wallace was removed from the University of Alabama in 1963 and that idea of nullification that had been deeply embedded within Southern culture was over with.

And they diversified their economy, and they developed a middle class, and they began to make race less essential to their culture.

And

they decided that they should diversify their industries.

In other words, they became like the North had told them to be like.

But the North gradually became like the old South.

And they were the winners of the civil war but they began to emulate the values of the losers and the losers emulated the values of the and that's why today jack if you're a californian and you're liberal you're not going to move to illinois you're not going to move to new york probably not going to move to vermont or michigan where are you going to you're not going to move to seattle Some people who are very left might like the Sturman Draing of Portland or something, but they go to Oregon only because the income tax rate, I think, is 5% versus R13.

But where are they going?

They're going to Idaho.

They are going to Nevada, but they're also going to Florida.

They're going to Texas.

They're going to Tennessee.

Hell, they're going to Alabama.

And so they're going to the old South.

Now, why are they doing that?

And they feel that, first of all, there is a middle class.

And in a place like California, it's wealthy or poor, period.

And they're squeezing people out.

And they're they're going because they are a diversified economy.

In California, there's a war on construction.

There is a war on transportation.

There is a war on agriculture.

There is a successful war on timber.

There is a war on mining.

There's a war on, you know, finance and insurance that are starting to move out of state.

So when we say we are the fifth biggest economy in the world, it's because we're the largest state with 40 million people and we're losing population.

The census is stripping us, I think, this year of three congressional districts.

But most importantly, we have a $6 trillion market capitalized Silicon Valley.

And by that, I mean Apple and Google and Twitter and Facebook and all of that stuff.

Take that one big cotton economy away and we're nothing.

And those people run the state.

When the left says

we need some help on this election, they go to Mark Zuckerberg and he gives them $400 million or rounds it up.

When Gavin Newsom is in trouble, he thinks during the California recall, they get $100 million ready, lined up for him.

And that's a quid pro quo.

So there are certain concessions given to Silicon Valley, just like Big Cotton pretty much ran.

If you're leaving the Obama administration, and believe me, when you leave the Biden administration and you've done yeoman service for the left, they will hire you in a makeup job in California in the Bay Area.

That's what they do.

It's big cotton, and people come out of there that run things.

If you want to nullify a law the way that South Carolina did 1833,

or, you know, it started the Civil War by saying, you know what, we're not going to abide by a federal law.

We're going to say that, you know, Fort Sumner belongs to us.

Then

you look at the sanctuary movement.

Where is it?

It's in Blue States.

I'm living in a sanctuary county that says that federal immigration laws shall not apply in Fresno County.

Federal immigration law should not apply in the state of California.

It will not be enforced as intended.

We nullify that.

Remember, the left has a very weird idea.

They don't say to Idaho or Wyoming, don't you dare nullify the Endangered Species Act or federal gun registration in that little town or we're going to go after you.

No, no, the nullification people believe that only they have the more, more, just like South Carolinians did.

And so I think, wow, that's a Confederate idea, just like big cotton, big tech is a Confederate idea, just like no middle class is a Confederate idea.

And guess what?

They are fixated on race.

I've been to every state in the United States, and I can tell you, whether I was lecturing or a visiting professor, if you're in a blue state, it's race, race, race, race, race all the time.

And that's why a lot of African Americans are leaving Chicago.

They don't want to see their streets being shot in the streets of Chicago and then have race race.

It wasn't the shooter's fault, or we don't dare tell the police who the shooter's fault, who did it.

And racial tensions are higher in blue states than they are in Tennessee, or they are in many southern cities.

That's another thing that no one would have ever believed in.

I could go on, but it's really striking how the left, from sanctuary cities to destroying the middle class to having these one industry, big economies that are basically international global tech, to the fixation on race and racial discrimination, Jack.

If you had said after the Civil War in 1865, a little archangel, get back to my fixations on the archangel came down because we want to warn you,

if Mark or somebody said, we want to warn you that you better be careful because in 160 some years

in you, the victors, you're going to be seeing things that you won't believe, that people are going to be discriminating on the basis of race.

They're going to be picking their roommates in advance, saying, I don't want that person.

He doesn't look like me sharing my room.

I don't want that person going on to a particular place on campus.

He doesn't share my race.

I don't want to be in a graduation line with that person.

And that's all going to be basically in blue states.

And that's where it started.

So go through the gamut of Confederate values and ask where they're the strongest.

And it's in the North.

Yeah, Victor, I have to say, I lived that growing, as you can tell by my accent, growing up in New York City in the Bronx.

And

race, it choked you.

It was constant.

It was just all the time oppressive.

And when I first got married, I moved, Sharon and I moved to Spotsylvania.

Actually, we had a house on the top of Marie's Heights in Fredericksburg.

And I thought, wow, these are the Yahoos.

These are the racist Yahoos we've heard tell.

And boy, oh, boy, they were

nice day in California.

It was during the Obama administration that really took off.

All my children went to the public schools, and all of them were decided minorities.

They went to schools.

Maybe my daughter who went to a charter public school, but my first two, my third and late daughter, but my first two children went to Selma public schools, just like I had, just like my parents had, just like my grandparents had.

And I can tell you that although it was 90% Hispanic, it wasn't racially obsessed.

And it is now.

And most of the schools are now.

And I taught at Cal State Fresno, and I can tell you when I left, it was racially obsessed, separate this, separate this, separate that.

Maybe they have a very good president now.

It may be changing, who is a Hispanic whom I have a lot of respect for.

And then the question is, Jack, why is that?

Why is that?

And human nature being what it is, I would say that just as there was an entitled group of southerners who had enormous power and enormous money and had a niche in the global economy of the era, i.e., nobody can produce cotton like we can with this cheap labor, supposedly cheap labor, and we have the cotton gin and we can export it to the mills in England, and we're wealthier per cotton than anybody had ever seen in the history of civilization.

Those cotton barons before really the Industrial Revolution took hold, were wealthier than northern people, but they were only about 5%, 3% of the population of the South, just like like California.

But they rule things.

So anytime you take a small number of people and they are of a particular ideological bent, then you get the following.

And you get the following, the same things are lining up here in California and New York and Illinois.

It's the same thing.

There are very, very wealthy people through globalization.

And they have particular ideological ideas that, no surprise, benefit their own economic interest.

And they will change the law or they will change the culture to reflect that and mostly to demonize people they don't like and that's what they're doing they'll say oh we're trying to improve racial relations i'll believe it when i see them in their lives put their children in schools that are public and multiracial go to the public schools you know go certain places And

quit your job and give it to a black man.

Yeah, yeah.

And I always said that to,

I can remember the first year I didn't have tenure.

And I remember the philosophy department came and he said to me, well, we're going to hire an ancient philosopher, but we're going to get a person of color.

And I said, so let me get this straight.

You're going to hire on race.

Oh, no, we need diversity.

I said, well, you guys got nine guys in your department.

And with the exception of one white woman, they're eight men and they're all white guys.

And you know what?

You all were higher in the 70s and you were ABD higher.

In other words, you didn't even have to have your dissertation.

When I look at the level of publication, it's very mediocre.

So you're going to take your generation's privilege when most of the PhDs were all white and you came out here without even finishing your dissertation and lollygagged around without publishing.

And now in your 60s or late 50s, you're going to tell a young generation

of so-called white people, they're going to be judged not on what they publish.

I have no problem saying we don't want to hire a white guy if he doesn't have his dissertation finished like you and doesn't have any publications like you.

But you're going to tell a guy with a completed dissertation and a publication record, we're not going to hire you.

If you really believe that, why don't you resign?

You know, a guy told me, he was the chairman of the philosophy department, I won't mention him, but he said, oh, that is reductionism to the point of chaos.

We have accumulated wisdom.

You would wipe out our whole department.

We can't do that.

And of course, you know what it was about.

I want a virtue signal because I'm a mediocrity.

And actually, I had some sympathy for the marginalized so-called community because they were saying to me, these people are mediocre.

And they were.

They were a bunch of mediocre white guys that were hired in the boom of the 60s that should never have been in academia and should never have been hired.

Not that there were other groups.

The whole generation was mediocre and they really blew up the universities in terms of blew them up like a balloon and they needed bodies.

And we'll never see that was a one-time example in the history of higher education.

We'll never see it again with that baby boomer money and that baby boomer population boom and the idea, that baby boomer idea that education is the pathway to moral virtue and economic security.

And they just, we're going to make UC Irvine bam, we're going to make uc santa cruz bam we're going to open cal state this and cal state that we're going to open another 10 jcs and where are the phd well they're not there they're not well then we're going to open you know fresno tech will open a doctorate program or something that's what the idea was and so these people never never ever look in the mirror and say to themselves I'm a mediocrity and I'm going to not hire somebody who's better than me and I'll make an excuse.

It's because of these ways.

Victor, that does not mean, though, that you're not a chaos reductionist, and you know it, admit it.

So

everything to chaos.

Yeah, that's the piece.

I got a lot of flack this week, Jack, because of that Blue Confederacy.

I got a lot of emails, and I had a lot of rumors that people were angry, and a couple of people called me.

Yeah, the truth hurts.

I mean,

I can see why this stings.

But folks who are listening, it's the new blue confederacy.

It is on American greatness.

This is really a profoundly important piece.

Please check it out and go ahead and share it.

That's about all the time, Victor.

We have a few.

Can I say one thing before we get it?

It's your show.

You can say what I'm doing.

Okay, so you and I talked for what, was it 20 minutes last week about Scott Atlas?

Yes.

Well, he sent me an advanced copy of his book, A Plague on Our House.

Takes no prisoners, right?

Yeah, and I read the whole thing, and it's a first person,

it's not designed to be a scientific dissection of the COVID epidemic, pandemic, but it is a four-month autopsy of how he got into the Trump advisory role and how he had to deal with Fauci and Burks and Redfield and all the major players that contributed to the Trump policy.

And I would suggest people read it because he doesn't, as you said, he does not pull punches.

And what is scary is that some of the people are still there and they're advising the Biden administration.

And when you see that these decisions were not made on scientific data, i.e., this is the data on mass, this is the data on vaccinations, this is the data on the history of efficacy of vaccinations vis-a-vis coronavirus.

And Scott is very, very blunt.

Right.

And he doesn't, as I said, he doesn't try to hide the truth.

And I've known him a long time.

He's obsessed with reading scientific, that's what he does.

He's a researcher and he's a public policy intellectual, but it's all based on hours and hours of day of reading scientific data.

And so he would go into these meetings and there would be functionary A, functionary B, and functionary C, and they'd have their finger in the air and saying, what's the consensus in the group or what do the politicians want?

And he would just, no, no, you're wrong.

Here's the article.

Here's the citation.

Did you read it?

And it didn't take long for people to say, who is this guy?

Who will rid us of this?

Where did he come from?

And oh, he came from Stanford.

Well, can't Stanford get rid of him for us?

Well, yeah, but the two most famous epidemiologists and immunologists in public policy are from Stanford, and they agree with him.

And so

it was very ironic to see the reaction.

And now, here we're in COVID, and Joe Biden gave us that precedent that if you're the president of the United States and people die under your watch, it was absurd.

He's no more culpable than Trump was, but he said you were.

So he just said Trump was guilty for killing 350,000 people in that awful 2020, January 2020.

And then I came along, and the subtext was: Trump's Operation Warp Speed came along, and he got 18 million people vaccinated.

And I claimed it as my own, even though Camilla Harris and I said that we didn't want a vaccination with his fingerprints on it.

But never mind, nobody will remember that.

And then we took it over and said, we created it.

And I'm not exaggerating, audience.

Joe Biden said not one person was vaccinated until I came into office.

And then he was just gliding high by July 4th.

And some people were cautioning Joe, and they said, Joe, be careful.

You've done two things.

You set the president that the president is always responsible.

And we're not sure that this thing is over with.

Oh, no, the vaccination, 96%, Moderna said, 95% Pfizer.

Ha ha ha.

I've sold it.

Remember, he said, I'm not going to war,

I'm not going to war on the lockdown.

I'm going to war of you know, the people.

I'm going to war on the virus.

I'm going to kill the virus.

Little J know that a coronavirus A mutates, and B, maybe one that had a gain of engineering function added on to it might mutate even more.

And C,

there are very few vaccinations that work consistently, like, you know, smallpox or whooping cough on coronaviruses.

So Karma listened to him and said, wow, I'm just saying that because more people have died under the Biden watch.

And people had said it was Scott Atlas and Donald Trump that did this.

It wasn't.

And the odd thing was that their idea that was overruled, but their idea was we've got to live with this awful plague.

We've got to protect, use all of our resources to focus on the vulnerable people who die.

And we can't dilute those resources by, you know, worrying about a 14-year-old kid who's not going to get it when we could have to worry about a 63-year-old person that we don't have enough resources to protect.

And

there is such a thing called natural immunity, and it's probably as good, if not better, than vaccinated.

And these vaccinations were not the answer.

We better look at therapeutics as well.

And you look at Sweden now versus some of its neighbors who trashed it.

And you look at the Florida or Texas model that are no worse than New York, better than New York, and not that much worse than California, but with the added benefit that they didn't ruin their economies or have high unemployment or shut down their medical facilities.

Here in California, if you want to go to a specialist and I've gone to two of them, they're backed up.

And basically it's people who haven't had a PSA or a mammogram or they've had cancer.

And no one talks about that.

Well, this was the other aspect of Scott Atlas.

It wasn't just the science on the specific pathogen, but it was the broader context of the societal consequences of choosing Plan A, Plan B, plan A.

Day one.

He said, I don't want to kill people.

He said that.

I don't want this policy to kill people by increased substance abuse, increased spousal abuse, increased familial abuse, quarantine suicides.

missed cancer screenings, missed operations, missed everything.

And we are going to do that if we lock this whole economy down.

And this is a coronavirus, and this is the history of coronaviruses.

And we can survive this if we concentrate on the people who do not survive at a rate of 99.8, like everybody else under 60, 99.8, 99.7, some there in that vicinity.

But not so much if you're over 60, maybe 95% or 94%.

But we've got to protect those because, you know, 6% of those people is a lot, even if they have comorbidities, they're not just dying of COVID, and nobody listened.

In fact, they did the opposite, didn't they?

Andrew Cuomo got an Emmy for what?

Having, I don't know, a press conference where he said, Ah, we don't need those hospital ships that Trump gave to us.

We don't need that Javits center.

No, we'll just take our patients and send them into the rest home industry that gave so much to my campaign and get rid of them, get them out, clear out our ERs and intensive care ICUs and give it over to the rest.

Oh, they died.

Well, we'll just fix the figures and reduce that so it doesn't look so bad.

I'm on TV.

I got this.

And that's who they glorified.

I can remember, Jack, in finishing, that when Joe Biden was nominated, you remember that spate of news articles that said, oh, it's too bad in a way that he promised in advance that a black woman would be vice president because now we've lost the chance to have Andrew Cuomo.

Right.

What a great VP he would have been.

And given Joe's abilities, he might have been our president.

Oh, it's so sad.

It's some film noir type.

Well, Victor, that book is called, we're just talking about Scott Atlas, A Plague Upon Our House, My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America.

It's not being published until December 7th, but people can find it on Amazon and pre-order.

I'm going to bet with myself that something's going to happen.

They're going to try and stifle this book in some way.

They will.

I'm speaking to somebody who on the second day of the Dying citizen, saw it closed and supposedly quote unquote out of stock and sold out when it wasn't.

Well, I don't know if it was criminal, but kind of borders on it.

Peter Navarro is now going public.

They did with his book that he feels that it was denied proper New York Times bestseller representation.

I think mine was on it for four weeks, but I know that the next two weeks it sold more copies than those that were, I think, as I said, six to 15.

Right.

It would have been number seven, but there's a formula that has nothing to do with actual sales and what the formula is.

Well, as we tend to do at the end of our programs, we thank folks who are listening.

I do recommend you visit victorhanson.com, subscribe.

There is a great series that Victor has.

I'm not sure if it's just three parts or it's going to continue, but it's called The Real Fascism.

That's an example of the original content that you could only read at Victorhanson.com.

And you can only read it if you have a subscription.

It's five bucks a month or $50 a year, well worth it.

My analysis has been, and I've said it before, if you take everything you write, original content in one month, and made it into a magazine, it would be more like a book than it would be a magazine.

So it's pretty low price for great writing.

You'll also find a link there for The Dying Citizen and prowl around and the website and you'll find his other books and some of them make terrific gifts.

For those folks who have left reviews and ratings on iTunes, thanks very much.

It remains a five-star average-rated podcast.

And here's one, one person left.

A lot of people have left nice comments, but here's one by Shaky Sharms or Shaky's Harms.

I'm not sure how

it's all one word.

It's titled, Your View of Things.

Quote, I look forward to your podcast every week.

They are informative and how you do a breakdown of the topics of current events.

So discouraging where our country is going by self-destruction, and the future seems bleak at times, but listening to you, Victor, with calm voice, gives me some hope.

So thank you, shaky sharms, shaky harms.

We appreciate your taking the time to leave that comment.

Folks, check out Victor's writing at VictorHanson.com, also at American Greatness.

Thank you all.

Oh, me.

Yeah, civilthoughts.com.

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We will be back again in a few days with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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