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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the classicist.

We are recording on Saturday, November 20th in the year 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I'm also the author of Civil Thoughts, great weekly newsletter.

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Enough about me.

The namesake and host.

Not the host, the star, of this podcast is Victor Davis Hansen.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor writes twice a week for American Greatness.

And on the classicist, we try to get in a conversation about what he's written there.

He's written a great essay this past week.

It's titled Why the Left Always Projects.

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

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

I am a blessed man.

I get to host this.

I get to host the traditionalist.

But there's an even better host.

That's Sammy Wink, and she does the culturalist.

All of these are under the umbrella of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We hope you catch them all every week.

So, Victor, we have talked about projection before, but you've really focused on this in this new essay for American Greatness.

It's really, as usual, terrific.

Please, folks, go to American Greatness, the website, and check it out.

By the way, you also have a link to it on your website, victorvictorhanson.com.

Let me just read a short paragraph here.

You're right, Victor.

Projection is an innate human trait.

Perhaps it is hardwired as a survival mechanism into the human brain, dating back to our Neanderthal predecessors.

But in the early 21st century, projection has been honed and refined as a special trademark of the left, largely because of the growing contradictions, paradoxes, and hypocrisies that are inherent in the postmodern woke movement.

Victor, I think you nailed that.

We have racists.

The racists are accusing other people of racism.

The privileged are accusing other people of being privileged.

Why don't you talk about that particular point you made?

And anything else about this essay?

I think everybody who's listening in is kind of bewildered.

We mentioned it in a prior session, Jack, that think about it, Joe Biden, our president, is calling Kyle Bittenhouse a white supremacist, and that this is a white supremacy case, basically.

while he's

calling one of his assistants boy or referring to Satchel Page as that Negro pitcher.

And so it doesn't make sense.

But we have Hillary Clinton saying to Joe Biden, you should never under any circumstance concede that election.

And I was robbed.

And she wasn't, you know, she said it was jealous.

She said, quote, Donald Trump is an illegitimate president, i.e., he wasn't elected fairly.

And then, of course, she was saying that anybody who questions an election is somehow subversive and destroying democracy.

And I could go on, and I did in the article, I think it was 2,400 words.

But my point is this, why did they do that?

And the answer, I think, in part at least, is that this Democratic Party, people have not accurately assessed its economic, class, and racial components.

Because when you start to look at it, it's by zip code, by congressional district income level, or per capita, it's a party of the very wealthy and the very poor.

And the very wealthy tend to be mostly, not all, but mostly Asian and mostly white.

And they live mostly, not all, but along the coast.

And they do not necessarily put their kids a lot of the times in public schools.

And they don't go to PTA meetings with so-called poor people or people of color.

Now, it's easy for them to express that class hatred toward the deplorables, the dregs, the chumps.

the irredeemables, the clingers as they use that vocabulary.

What Peter Strzok said to Lisa Page in one of their illicit texts was the smelly people at Walmart.

But they have that same contempt for minorities as well.

And one of the ways that they square that circle is they are just fanatically calling other white people, i.e.

other white people not of their class who have no privilege, racist, white supremacists.

And that way they can say to a Joy Reed, or a Megan Markle or a Michelle Obama, look, I have been attacking those white people.

I hate them more than you do.

And therefore, I don't really have to be around a lot of black people or brown people.

And they're not.

They're segregationists.

When you look at the actual lives they live, the places they live, the neighborhoods they live in, the schools they put their kids in.

That's part of it, that they are wealthy exclusionists.

And the other part of it is it's kind of more innate to the left, but they feel that because they believe in equity or equality of result rather than mere opportunity or big government entitlements and redistributions, that therefore their aims are noble, noble, and they can lie and they can do almost anything as far as the means to achieve those ends are concerned.

And they're justified because they're superior moral beings.

And so they can call people racist.

They can call people democracies subversive to challenge the elections.

They can make fun of other people and say they're privileged when they have no class privileges.

Because you see, they're all doing this for us.

They're all doing this for a land that will someday have real equity.

Not for them, of course.

And so the Democratic Party is run by very elite, exclusive, segregationist people, largely white and Asian, who feel very at times guilty about it, but also they feel that they have a natural right.

to be that way because they're morally superior and they need, you know, a jet, a private jet, just to go talk about climate change if you're john kerry or if you're joe biden you know you can say to somebody you're not black because everybody knows he's not racist and that's how they operate and this projection is really weird the final thing very quickly pointed that out they know

what to call people because that's who they are So when they call somebody a white supremacist or they call somebody a racist or they call somebody a denialist, that's what they do.

So they're basically saying, you know, I don't feel comfortable with people that don't look like myself.

That's why I created this entire moral facade.

But I really know what that feeling is like.

So I'm going to project it on that person.

And I can do a very good job of it because I know it intimately well.

And so it's a very screwed up mentality on the elite left, but we should never take anything serious.

And as a general rule, when they accuse somebody of something,

then we should assume that that is really a self-confessional.

It's a mirror mirror into their own soul.

Yeah.

I couldn't help but think, Victor, this is maybe too much of a stretch, but when we had discussed the Rittenhouse, Carl Wittenhouse verdict on the traditionalist podcast, but

I kind of get the sense that the left's desire to use the courts in a certain way mirrors what happened in, say, to kill a mockingbird.

You know, okay, it's just that's a novel.

But there is a determination for an outcome that really hearkens to

a racist time in

a sort of place in America.

I have a piece coming out ironically on that topic on Monday.

And it basically starts with a premise that let's say, Jack, you and I are living in 1865 in May, and the Civil War has just been over, and some archangel comes to us.

and says, what do you think life will be like in 156 years?

And we say, what what do you mean?

Well, you know, we've had this terrible, bloody 700,000 person dead civil war, but let's just, and the union was, you know, for free speech and more racial tolerance and outlawed slavery.

And this is where all the colleges and universities are.

And this is where the commerce is and the cosmopolitan.

This is an agrarian, plantationist, racist, segregation place, economically backward, just two classes, not three, stuck in evangelical, the beginnings of what will become evangelical.

We say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But what will the united states look like

and we say well you know what we'd expect it's going to continue because we will we'll say i predict there'll be something like jim crow and reconstruction will fail okay what if the angel said to us ah but i'm talking about 2021

where in the united states will one drop of your racial ancestry start to be calibrated for admissions or hiring Where in the United States will people identify as either white or black or Latino, but not American?

In other words, they'll be racially obsessed.

Where states will have two classes?

One class of the very, very wealthy and maybe one party state, just like the old South, one party, no statewide officer, no

credible opposition majority in either house of their legislature.

Which states will be, will it be Illinois?

Will it be California?

Will it be in New York?

And will something like big tech be like big cotton cotton that runs the entire state with a monopoly?

And where will this superstition be, this,

you know, that you don't have any debate, just as you cannot talk about the fact that African Americans are not racially that different, if at all different in any aspect than any other race.

You can't talk about that in the antebellum South.

Maybe 156 years, the angel will tell us, you can't talk about climate change and you can't talk about culture can be changed.

And that if you give people this tools, the opportunities, they will not necessarily vote in a particularly predictable fashion.

But you can't talk about that.

That is taboo.

And so, where will people cancel people out?

Where will there be a ranked society where everybody knows their place in it?

And maybe instead of who your grandfather was or what plot of land it was, it'll be what letters after your name are stamped and what school did you go to.

And so, this is what I'm suggesting: is that maybe you're right, and that today's North is starting to resemble what used to be the old South, and the old South is

now the New South, and the New South is starting to resemble the Old North before the cancel culture.

And that is why

nobody has been able to make the argument that people are leaving states of the old Confederacy.

Like, is everybody, anybody going from Tennessee to to Illinois?

Is anybody from California going to Illinois?

They get lost.

That's it.

Yeah.

Is anybody from Oregon saying, I just got to get back to Illinois or New York?

No, everybody knows that the U-Haul pattern, and we know that from data, is leaving Illinois, New York, California, the big blue states, and going where?

To Tennessee, to Florida, to Texas, and maybe, maybe to Nevada, if it's only because of the proximity.

Yeah, and the taxes.

And so that is ironic that we had a civil war and yet the winners don't look like the winners anymore.

They look like the losers and the losers look like more like the winners.

In other words, when you go to a Tennessee or a Florida, it's live and let live.

We're not going to hunt you down for what you say.

We're not going to cancel you out.

We're not going to take your kids and try to indoctrinate them with some pseudo-creed.

And we're not going to care what color you are, what one quarter is this or one eighth this, or we don't do the Ward Churchill, the Elizabeth War, and the Rachel Dozo down here.

We just don't do it.

That's something you guys do up there.

That's, I think, the Sean King stuff.

And so that's ironic.

And it's happening, you know, and I even go to the point where Where do they have sanctuary cities?

That good South Carolina legacy of nullifying federal

started in the blue states.

Well, Victor, I'm just recovering from your introduction of an archangel into anything i greatly appreciate that

i don't know how many archangels maybe on a point of biblical exegesis was there only four of them i can we know four yeah four yeah

michael gabriel raphael and uriel i know uh and there i don't know what the other guys are where were they well it's there

is uh sometimes ask your ask your guardian angel he'll tell sometimes in my depression i think i'm seeing one of them i hope well you see leprechauns so maybe you see angels too so we'll talk about leprechauns later hey victor you just mentioned uh you know crazy academic so let's move on to this uh i'll put two things in an academic grab bag one is that yale has recently announced a seven billion dollar capital campaign for humanity.

That's the goal.

I don't know.

Yale's current endowment is somewhere in the $30 billion range.

So, you know, another $7 billion for what, probably just for virtue signaling.

And then this will annoy those listeners who hate to hear my voice, but let me just tell you this.

There is an online report.

It's posted online.

Byron York posted this.

It's a woman named Christina Nelson.

She's applying for her thesis at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and it's titled, They're Protecting Whiteness and Their Fragility is Showing How Feminist Praxis Disrupts White Supremacy and Neoliberal

Institutions.

So, this is one of these, you know,

just

word vomits of

wokeness.

But two things struck me about this thesis, and this is, I'm assuming this is the way now how quote-unquote intellectuals are moving up the academic food chain.

She begins her thesis with an acknowledgement.

I acknowledge the traditional ancestral unceded territories in Minnewacking, temporarily occupied by Milwaukee, of the Menominee, Miami, and Potawami, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So she's trying to check a box here.

I'm going for getting my advanced degree at a place that's on stolen land.

And then in her introduction, she writes, as a white first-generation college graduate who attended a mid-sized private university, my identities and experiences inspired this study.

My whiteness offers a level of inherent violence to this study because of the history of privilege and structural and overt acts of harm my ancestors have contributed to society.

This echoes my experience in identifying as an anti-racist racist who, as a white person and person is not within.

Hold on,

I think I've got some Pepsi still around somewhere from the COVID prevention days.

I need to fix that.

I'll end it there.

Can you?

This is so this is someone who's getting your, this is a master's thesis that begins with this kind of, you know, insanity.

So we have Yale giving its elite members grounds for proving their elitism by writing books.

I would say, yeah, I would say three things.

Okay.

First of all, you know, in a former incarnation, I was a historian of agrarianism, and I wrote a couple of modern books, but I wrote a large book called The Other Greeks.

And in that research, I was very interested in the question of how big land size was in the ancient Roman and Greek world, but particularly the ancient Greek world.

And it turned out...

that a lot of the research was done in Russia by a man named and in Eastern Europe.

Andrea was one of them,

Perchirka, I think his name was, Jan Perchurka.

And they had some, I think the journal was called VMI, and I can't read Russian, but they would have synopsis in English.

And then there was a really interesting Eastern Europe commie journal called Areine, Peace.

And they would have a lot of articles, and they were all on land tenure.

And although, but here's my point, they were all in service to the communist state.

So what you would do is you would read all this stuff, and the analysis was worthless for the most part, unless there was a few brave guys that tried to speak the truth in very coded language.

But most of, but actually, some of the evidence, which was always at odds with the conclusions, was fascinating.

I mean, they had epigraphic, they had archaeological.

So, you could go in and read these things and learn where the sources are for, you know, an ancient settlement in the Thracian Chersonesis or something, or how many

in an epigraphic document about a legacy or a will, you could see what was left to somebody and how big the farm might have been, et cetera, et cetera.

But my point is, all of that was nullified because of the state indoctrination campaign.

Or to just very briefly take another example, when you wanted, because I was very interested in the Messenians, the Helots, and the fertility of Messenia.

And I've written about that, but when you go back and actually look at surveys and everything in the English-speaking world up until now, they were all empirical and they were valuable.

But when you looked at Eastern Europeans, it was worthless, the modern stuff in the 70s and 80s, because it was all ideologically driven.

But here's the point I'm making.

There was a lot of things written in German universities from about 1928 to 1942.

The 28 stuff, 27 was all,

they could see where they were going with Hitler, wasn't in power yet, but there was this racial, and then after 33,

that was what all of these people in the universities were doing.

They were writing articles like the racial components of the Spartans, were Messenians racially inferior.

It was worthless.

But what academics do, because they're not autonomous, independent, self-reliant people for the most part, they just write this stuff.

So in the 80s in the United States, it was race, class, and gender.

And so you go in the ancient world and it was the poetics of masculinity and a cult of Apollo and Asia Minor, or it was sexual ambiguity among the Thracian women, or something like that.

And now it's wokeness.

And so they're taking all of their research and they're twisting it like a pretzel, and it's going to be worthless in 15 years, just like the Soviet, just like the Third Reich, just like the post-Foucodian, Lacan, Derrida stuff is.

And that's what academics do.

So we're wasting,

think of the millions of hours we're wasting that we're subsidizing this politically driven research by these half-educated academics who are not contributing to the corpus of scholarship.

It's just theory regurgitated for career advancement.

And it's all overseen

by these diversity, equity, and inclusion commissars.

And we used to be in the university, you know, all the faculty that were teaching, you know, not that much, and they had nine months of actual work and they were tenured, they'd go in the faculty lounge, which is their coffee room, and they would bitch bitch about administrators.

Oh, administrators bloat.

The last 30 years, I'm quoting an accurate statistic, 3% of the CSU faculty, largest university in the world, that was all increased.

3%.

And administrators went up 212%.

They get release time.

They're just insects preying on us.

That's what they would say.

And they don't say a word.

about this huge investment, multi-billion dollar investment in all these diversity coordinators, workshop, all of this stuff of people who don't teach.

They don't teach, and they're very highly paid.

They make more.

If you're a diversity inclusion, diversity, equity, inclusion, you make more than full professors.

So, this is what they're doing.

Number two, this thing is all tax exempt.

So, it's not just a bunch of wealthy people out of their good natures giving it to Yale.

They're doing this.

They're saying, I'm going to have to pay taxes otherwise.

So, I'm taking a lot of my income and I'm telling Yale.

Now, the smarter ones, and they're not that many of them, will say, I do not want this spent on, you know,

a woke thesis of the sort you just mentioned.

I want it to be for Western Civ or Shakespeare.

And then they'll try to warp it, of course, but they'll at least make the attempt.

But most of it will go to fuel what I just talked about.

And then Yale, who I think you're right, it's 31 billion.

And it's above Princeton.

I think Princeton's is 25 or 26.

Stanford had, I think it was the largest return jack on their endowment in history.

I think they had like a 38%

return.

And they're up to 38 billion.

I think they're up to number two behind Harvard.

And all of this money is tax exempt.

And the income of it is being used for these partisan agendas under the, quote, guise of scholarship.

And it's not.

And it's doing a lot of harm.

And it's a commissariat.

And so that's another thing that that's striking the third thing about it is we're talking about a nexus of the wealthiest people in the united states mostly in the corporate and technology and finance world who give to the breeding grounds or the training grounds of these universities where they recruit these people often to join them of similar class or wealth and it's a very inbred situation and we're getting back to this idea of projection so these guys are very liberal in Silicon Valley, and they're very liberal in Wall Street, and they're very liberal, the corporate CEOs.

And they give all this money that makes them feel so good to these universities, but it's all self-interested.

It's all self-interested.

You know, I know a lot of professors, unfortunately, and

they can't finish a sentence.

I'm being stereotyped, but what the hell?

Everybody knows that.

I don't, they can't finish.

Hey, Victor, did I tell you my grandson's at Sanford?

He's having a ball at Princeton.

She's doing wonderfully at Harvard.

When she finishes Harvard, we're expecting she's going to get that internship, blah, blah, blah.

And then I hear that from a lot of my corporate friends.

It's just like going out there and being branded by a cattle brand.

No people say to me, she's a classics major and she's having real trouble with the quality of reconstruction at Princeton because they dropped it.

Or no one says she's a math major, but we're worried about this.

No, No, it's they

got in thanks to the extra efforts we made, and they've been branded now.

And they, once you get in, they don't fill you out.

You're one of them, and they'll graduate you.

And we don't really care if they know that much or not.

We just care whether they got enough there to get into a graduate school and join us later on.

And then the idea that those areas have contempt for the working people, the people, you know, who when Stanford was making 40%

on their endowment this year and preaching about privilege and shaking their hand at the deplorables and saying, you know what?

I'm quoting literally from these, I get these Stanford Daily Report and I get these messages from all of the administrators.

And then you listen to the fact, you privilege and you're a white supremacist and you're, and they're just,

you know, they're just neck deep in money and cash.

40%.

What was the guy driving Amazon?

What was the guy out as a short order cook, you know, in Ann Arbor that was feeding university kids?

What was the guy who drives a taxi back and forth from JFK to New York?

What are they making?

And so

it's really disgusting.

It really is that these very, very wealthy people parade.

They're like, it reminds me of Marie Antoinette outside Versailles, dressed in her peasant garb with her little village and going around, you know, and leading the sheep and gardening and play acting for a while.

Then she went back into Versailles.

That's what they do.

This is all play act by academics and the corporate nexus that they are joined to.

It's very prevalent in the philanthropic world too, Victor.

You have the

largest philanthropies in America are the most woke ones.

They give barely the minimum by federal law between

the grants and administrative costs.

You're supposed to spend 5% of your assets because they're growing at 9% to 10%, many of them.

So they just balloon.

And then for many of them, the money is spent on political causes that are, you know, barely dressed as charities.

I don't want to be too negative, Zach, but I would have a, I always want to end in a positive note on this topic.

Why don't our donor class that are very, very generous, why don't when they either give money,

Why don't they give to foundations that say, we're here to help people's lives.

So we're the bridge building foundation so we're going to look at all the bridges in the united states and see where we can help because government is dysfunctional and they steal your money and they don't do it or why don't we say we're going to look at power plants or we're going to look at reservoirs or we're the act of fix it fix it philanthropy right why not just say you know what we're going to give

Carnegie built actual physical libraries and he put books in them.

Why don't we just do that?

Instead of funding these activists, crazy groups that just waste the money and cause people problems, why don't we just say, you know what, I want to find out what, why don't we have a prize?

Let's give $20 million a year to make the most efficient non-polluting engine.

Or how do we produce kilowatts at five cents a kilowatt cheaply and cleanly?

They don't do that.

There's a growing anger at the credentialed educated class and what they call the prestigious class.

And, you know, I see it all the time because I live in an area from which I'm speaking that is antithetical in every sense of the word to Palo Alto Stanford.

But when I see people, 10 years ago, people would come up to me and goes, wow, you work at Stanford or Hoover.

That's really good.

Not now.

People said, well, how often do you have to go over there?

Or you have any of those weird people come by?

I mean, They have respect in the sense they feel that it might be a wise investment if somebody were to get there, you know, and sort of like, you don't really want to buy buy a Lexus when you can buy a Honda.

But if you're in a job and you're a salesman, maybe buying a Lexus for the brand name is of value with your customers, that way the Honda doesn't exude success.

Well, that's how they view Stanford.

It's a brand name that may in a very dolorant sense.

But the idea that it's an enlightened place and it's a humane place and it's a tolerant place where a community of people for four years in their life are trying to get the nuts and bolts of analysis and inductive method and the facts and totems of Western philosophy, literature, science.

No, no, none of them.

It's a place for stewing and spewing.

So, Victor, you've talked about the idea of a bridge-building foundation.

I agree, segue maybe to the Republicans who voted for the infrastructure bill.

Now, that happened more than a week ago, and you and I last recorded a week ago.

I think we recorded before that vote took place.

You're a great political analyst, in my opinion.

So we have 13 Republicans in the House who made that possible.

I think it was an idiotic move personally,

giving Joe Biden this great victory and defying standard conservative principles about monster spending and spending that most Americans believe these kind of bills are just going to increase inflation that is torturing citizens.

So anyway, Victor, that's my two cents.

What do you make of the Republican votes for the infrastructure?

I'm not sure, Janet, because depending on which source one consulted, it was somewhere between 12 and 20% of the bill was actual infrastructure.

So everybody understood that.

And what the game was played is that you voted for this, and then you got a picture taken on a bridge or a bad road and you said, this is what I voted for.

And then you sold that to the people.

And everybody knew it was a farce, that most of it was social activism, entitlements, redistributed programs, climate change, wokeness, et cetera.

That's what the bill was.

It wasn't an infrastructure bill.

Okay.

So the Republicans are thinking three things, Jack.

They're thinking, let me look at the polls.

Oh my God,

they sold this thing as infrastructure.

I know what it's about, but 75% of West Virginia think it's real infrastructure.

75% of Indiana think it's, I don't want to, that was some.

And then some said to themselves, well, it's going to help my district because if I have to spend 10 bucks to get one buck, it's still worth it of infrastructure.

And that one duck will trickle down and I'll have a bridge or an aqueduct or a federal courthouse and I can put my name on it or something.

So, you know, it's this spoil system is always good.

And the other consideration was, I'm not going to talk about politics.

I don't want to be political.

And I say that because think of it, Jack, what did they do by voting for it?

They gave Joe Biden a life draft.

He was inept.

This could have been stopped.

It made good sense to stop it because it was not infrastructure, really.

It made good sense to stop it because in a time of inflationary pressures and huge budget deficits, he was lying about how much it was going to cost.

It's going to cost more than everybody said it was.

It made good sense, especially because following up on this infrastructure bill, there's this huge reconciliation budget bill.

It's even a bigger budget buster.

And what these Republicans did was going into a midterm cycle, they voted, not asking them, we're not asking them to vote for something that was noble and good and helpful,

voted for something that was cynical and

it was disingenuous.

And they voted for it.

And by voting for it, they gave Joe Biden resuscitation as we go into the next bill.

And so Joe Biden is, and the Democrats are, well, we did that.

We got that bipartisan vote.

Republicans voted for it, and we'll go right to the reconciliation bill.

And this is a big success.

And that's what they did.

And then they preened about it.

And I mean, the Democrats don't do that.

When they wanted to push through Obamacare, not one of them voted against it.

If you had a bill tomorrow and said, if the Republicans introduced a bill, if they won the House, and they said Joe Biden did not follow his oath of office, he did not enforce federal immigration law.

He deliberately nullified it.

He opened the border.

He forbid people.

That is an impeachable offense.

It's a violation of his oath of office, and we're going to impeach him.

There wouldn't, I mean, there wouldn't be one Democrat that would vote for that, not one.

And yet we saw, you know, with the Trump impeachment, we impeached a guy without a Supreme Court justice presiding after he, and then we tried him after he was a citizen.

We had had no special counsel, no report, no cross-examination, no witnesses.

And there were Republicans.

10 of them voted to impeach him and convict him.

So I think the Republicans are traditional to say, you know, I kind of follow the rules and I've got so many things.

My kids in college, I'm a member, an elder in the church.

I go to city council meetings.

I got my business I bill.

I just don't have time.

to get into politics and I'm just going to try to get along.

And that idea permeates into their representative.

And so they play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules.

And they think, well, I wouldn't just, in a partisan fashion, shoot down that infrastructure bill.

That wouldn't be good.

That would just be, you know,

nullifying something that would benefit us all.

Rather than, I know what these guys are doing.

They're pushing down our throats more and more and more and more inflationary pork and they're calling it infrastructure and they think that I'm going to fall for that.

And that's what they were doing.

And it worked.

And it gave them enormous momentum going into this awful reconciliation bill.

Well, Victor, we've got a little time left.

We're going to talk about Thanksgiving, but right after this important message.

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

We're recording on Saturday, November 20th.

I was writing for my little newsletter, Civil Thoughts,

and I realized Thanksgiving marks the 400th anniversary of the first 1621.

The Mayflower.

folks are in Plymouth.

They had survived the year through friendships they made with the natives, including

it's a miracle, this guy

Squanto, which no one is taught about anymore.

He was a Native American who was actually kidnapped on some British expedition voyage earlier in the 1600s, brought to Europe, sold into slavery in Spain, freed by some Spanish friars.

He got back to England.

He learned English.

He went back on another expedition.

He ends up back in America and he finds everyone in his tribe is dead from some disease.

And then here come the pilgrims in the Mayflower and they find some guy on shore who actually talks English and he helps them.

There's a remarkable story.

Anyway, it's a 400th anniversary.

And I'm just a little puzzled.

There's like no,

I'm not puzzled.

I get why, but there's no marking of a, you know, this particular announcement, 400 years means something.

No marking of that anniversary of the first Thanksgiving.

So I'm just saying that.

You don't have to comment on that at all, but I do

Maybe it was because it's associated, at least the idea of it, you know, to 1619 in Virginia.

And we've already lost 1619 for other purposes.

Yeah.

I don't know what it is, but most people don't know.

When you said the pilgrims, I don't think anybody knows who they are.

If you say Plymouth, nobody knows who they are.

If you talk about religion, nobody knows.

I mean, this is mostly a secular society, if not an atheistic or agnostic society.

and this was in sense you know a religious observation to thank the almighty for allowing them to survive one more year and the bounty of crops it's an ancient rite it goes back i think the 16th century in england the formal thanks that you know you put a seed in the ground you don't know what's going to happen or you see a blossom on a tree you have no idea that'll be a plum and yet it is and that's a mysterious project and it could end in one year and if it ends in one year you're that's why we have the whole, you know, Demeter in ancient Greece and Ceres, the goddess of grain.

And so nobody knows that anymore, Jack.

These are all vestigial ideas.

And for them, it's maybe there'll be a good football game and we want a turkey and we get time off work.

And what we're doing, if you look at it, I think analytically, this country is kind of living on the fumes.

of that generation that went, the last generation that was any damn good that went through the Depression and World War II and then built the country in the 50s and made it a superpower and then did a lot of reforming.

I mean, they embraced, when they were in their 50s, they embraced civil rights and women's rights.

But that generation was really unique.

And they, I can remember, my parents weren't devoutly religious.

I mean, they were sort of renegade Methodist, or my dad, I guess, was a renegade Lutheran.

but they did believe in Christianity and a higher power and that was inculcated to us.

And my grandparents were strong methodists but my point is this that we did know this and it was very solemn occasion and the same thing with christmas and the fourth of july and we were these rituals are just and they were very important

not just for their particular observance or the nature of the observance, but as civic unity as a place where we all had common bounds, despite our different religions and appearances and races and genders and all that crap.

But we were united, but we're a very different country now.

And we think we're so morally superior, we're so arrogant, we don't understand what they were trying to tell us.

They were saying we are a very radical egalitarian society.

We're increasingly multiracial.

We're radically democratic rather than constitutionally restricted in some ways as our Republican forefathers had imagined.

And we've got to to be very careful.

So let's double down on these rituals.

Let's double down on these holidays.

Let's make sure that we take a pause and understand what we're doing.

You know, we don't know anything about it.

Yeah, well,

not only we don't know anything about it, Jack, to the degree we do know anything about it, it's false knowledge.

We say they were a bunch of racists or they were awful.

You know, I had somebody write me the other day and say, oh, you said something about Kyle Wittenhouse was not, I don't know, white supremacists.

And you don't know that African American, black,

this was the nexus of slavery in history.

This was the biggest.

I said, who taught them that?

Who taught that guy that wrote me that?

I mean, in the history of slavery, there was 11 to 15 million people sent to the New World, but the word slave is Slav.

It's a corruption from Slavic people.

And it cobbled, it goes back to a Latin word that itself was used in the Balkan.

And so my point is, if you look at the number of people who were shipped, I'm getting off on a tangent, but it reflects this idea of complete ignorance.

The number of people who were shipped out of places like Venice, and they were shipped to the Muslim world, and most of the males were castrated.

And we have 16, 17 million, we believe.

There was no abolitionist movement.

There was endangered servitude and slavery in China.

There was no abolitionist movement.

There's never been an abolitionist movement outside the white Christian West.

That's where it started.

And immediately when people started to import African slaves to the New World, there was opposition to it.

And the British finally, when they did outlaw it in the early 19th, patrolled the seas to stop it.

That is unheard of in the New World.

That's unheard of in China.

It's unheard of in the Muslim world.

When Cortez got to the Aztec Empire, they were what?

They were sacrificing human beings that had been enslaved in war.

And so what I'm getting at is that we've got such a sea of false knowledge and ignorance.

And we're going to ask our people who are products of this bankrupt K-12 and even more flawed higher academia that we're going to meet in Thanksgiving because we all know what Thanksgiving is about.

It's a thanks to a higher power that allowed people from Europe.

to come here and found this country and then create an expansive and evolving idea of human rights and equality in such a way that no other country's ever tried it.

If you went into Stanford and said, I really want to thank our forefathers for what they did.

And that's why

they would think you were nuts.

To them, Thanksgiving is maybe turkey, but it's a couple of days off.

And it's another vestigial, racist, sexist, misogynist.

carryover from the past and you got to kind of put up with it for a little bit longer because the deplorables are crazy and they'll protest or they'll go to a school board meeting or something.

But you're right.

It's still, it's four, it is four days off.

That's and maybe it's vegan turkey for some of them.

I'm just curious, Victor, we don't get into this at any length because we only have a few minutes, but were there turkeys on the on the Hanson farm?

No, there were, but I've been writing, as you know, Child's Garden of Animal.

Right.

Try to do it each two weeks.

And yes, I did write about the great leprechaun scare that when I was 12 years old, a member of our student body ran out, and after recess, she looked out the window and said she saw a leprechaun in the vineyard.

And then the leprechauns were coming, and we all got scared.

This was right after, no surprise, a year or two that Darby O'Gill

and we all had seen it that night.

I think it was on a Monday, and we'd seen it on a preview on the, I mean, three years later, Disney was showing parts of it.

Remember the wonderful world of

Disney from the wonderful world of color, maybe it was called as well.

I'll sing it someday.

Yeah, so I mean,

we went out there and we couldn't see the leprechauns, but the more we couldn't see the leprechauns, the more they were everywhere.

I see one, I see one.

And then finally, our great, I love that guy, Mr.

Tao, he's 6'3, and he had a very deep voice.

There are no leprechauns.

Everybody, this is called mass hysteria.

And then just at that moment, this huge jackrabbit that everybody thought was a leprechaun, I think it had tubaremi, it just jumped right through a hole in the fence.

We were in a rural school and came right out of the vineyard and right through us and got trapped and boing, boing, boing and hit me.

And then he went out in the road.

I don't know what happened.

But everybody said, the leprechaun, there it is.

And it was one of the biggest jackrabbits.

I'm interested in this.

So there is such a thing as the great turkey attack.

And when I was about nine.

Wait, wait, this is an actual event?

Yes.

Yes.

I lived on a very impoverished area and on a farm where we had to deal with animals and nutty neighbors and do your thing out here.

There's no rules.

So I came from school.

We made the little colored turkeys and all this.

And we learned about the wild turkeys and all that.

And so I was walking down to my grandmother's house and I said to my mom, I saw a wild turkey.

And my dad laughed and said, there is no such thing.

There may be some in the foothills, but they do not exist.

I said, no, it's a big, big white turkey.

And said, wild turkeys are not that big and they're not white.

And I said, but I saw it.

And so I came home and the next day I said, there's another turkey.

We have turkeys.

We can get one for Thanksgiving.

And so my dad then got in the car.

We drove around and there was a big white turkey, Jack.

Huge.

And my dad laughed.

And so he drive and we went to the Forbidden Forest.

The Forbidden Forest was one acre, about every square mile, there was an acre of eucalyptus growth.

Oh, I remember, yeah, you're right.

Yeah, they came out here and there was no wood for construction.

My barn out here is made of eucalyptus rolls.

They never rotted, but they were very inadequate for construction or vine stakes.

So they became aboriginal, right?

These big things.

And they're everywhere today.

And the leaves fall down, they're full of oil, and they sterilize the soil.

So you can't get rid of it.

Even if you pull it out, the soil can't be planted unless it's replaced.

And they're impossible to get out and they're huge they're blue gums from australia that were introduced here in the 1880s because people needed firewood and there was no wood here in the flat valley so anyway our neighbor and there are secretive so there are menageries of coyotes and owls and eagles and hawks because they're refuges and even you know there was a visigil rattlesnake in those days once in a while so one of our neighbors had a huge acre of this and he thought because it was shady when it got to be 110 he put a mesh in the middle of it about i don't know eighth of an acre a mesh fencing and he was raising turkeys and of course they got out and you couldn't hear them i don't know why he wanted to be secret but my dad had heard about it or seen one himself so he's like victor i want to show you some so i got so scared we went all the way through into this guy's thing and there were a great horned owl and a gopher snake here and some kit foxes over there and we saw them and we got to the the great turkey secret pen and my dad would say look at the hole look at the hole they come in and out

and i said well maybe it's wild now no a big fat thing like that can waddle around he'd die in two seconds right so that's a long windy answer jack yes we have turkeys okay okay well the aforementioned piece um about the uh leprechaun before we leave i have to interrupt you you took offense to that you emailed me and said please,

did you say as an Irish Catholic, do not make fun of leprechauns?

I did, I did, I did say that.

Yes.

Yeah.

Oh, I know.

My wife's grandmother, who came over from Ireland, absolutely believed in it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

No, I want to tell you because there is a higher power and we're all connected and we're all being watched to see what we do in this earth.

By archangels, right?

Go ahead.

I believe it's the things of that sort.

So

today I get out thinking that you're going to talk about leprechauns

and the great leprechaun scare.

What do I do?

I get this little tabloid that says a very short person.

I won't use the word.

What's the word?

Brunt.

No, nidget.

Oh, a person.

Oh, oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Three feet, three feet six inches.

I think it was in Britain.

claimed that he was a leprechaun

and he was telling women that if they would sleep with him, he could show them where there was a pot of gold.

That's a true story.

Today, yes.

And he had, I think it was 11 women who fell for the roost that he, through these leprechaunish circumstances, had sex with.

And he had a picture of him.

He had red hair and a red beard and he had a twinkle in his eye.

And he had conned at least

over 10 women to have sex with him.

And then apparently they turned him in because after it was over, they wanted the leprechaun.

Yeah, there was no gold, right?

There was no rainbow.

There was was nothing.

And so there are leprechauns in a way.

You know,

James O'Keefe, who's being tormented by the FBI,

I'll make this quick.

His first stunt ever, he was a student at Rutgers.

He said, I'm going to play this administration.

And he went and he was living at Rutgers and they served for breakfast.

Lucky Charms.

Lucky Charms.

Yeah, Lucky Charms.

And he said,

I am so offended as an Irishman whose family died in in the 1850s in the famine so that you would serve with this character who belittles.

Rutgers pulled lucky charms for the breakfast menu.

It was just, he was, he was gaming them, but it's anyway, lots of fun with leprechauns.

They're everywhere and nowhere.

How's that?

Yeah.

Well, Victor, people can read that actual article about the leper if they subscribe.

to victorhanson.com.

So I suggest.

And I had, okay, I had actually 60 years, oh, 58 years later, somebody wrote me remembers the leprechaun scare.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, because they read it.

Yeah, Eric White School.

It's a rural school.

I'm living a mile and a half from it still.

And it was a very impoverished, but it was just a wonderful school.

The teachers were saintly.

They were such good.

And the students all came out of there very successful.

And it was a wonderful experience to go there.

But boy, we had.

a lot of mass.

I mentioned the article, other mass hysterios that you had.

I was thinking of this, the subscription to Victor's website for the exclusive material, which is copious and frequent, and again, it's exclusive to just there, is less than the subscription price to a magazine.

So, if Victor was a magazine, you'd subscribe.

And this is

five bucks, five bucks a month.

Give up a lot.

But also, I want to recommend for victorhansen.com/slash books, go there on his website.

And if you haven't purchased yet the dying citizen, I strongly encourage you to do that.

And also, if you scroll down that page a little bit, or just find it on Amazon, I want to recommend The Second World War is terrific, just absolutely terrific.

I think it was 2017, 2016 or 2017 book, over 100,000 copies have been sold.

Yeah, it'll make a perfect gift.

Christmas is coming up.

And if you've got someone in

your family that loves military history, particularly Second World War wars, I would highly recommend this.

Now, for those who are kind enough to go to iTunes and leave a rating and a five-star rating, we're most appreciative of the ratings.

It is an average of five.

I think it's the only major podcast that has this ranking.

It's nothing to do with me, anything to do with Victor.

Some people leave.

comments and this one's a little long but it is terrific but we'll close out with this and it's by djb 012183 that's who it's from it's It's titled, I credit you, and it's to Victor.

I credit you and my ability to battle the unhinged leftists surrounding me on all sides in my family.

I'm a 38-year-old lifelong conservative iron worker in Minnesota who is frequently doing the things you talk about, walking a beam or joist, welding, maintaining one of our four vehicles that are not newer than 2008 while listening to your podcast.

I actually started my post-high school life at the University of Kentucky because that's what you did where I grew up and did wind up with a degree in psychology after a Van Wilder type stint there, but ultimately found the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute in Orlando and finally the Ironworkers Apprenticeship in St.

Paul, Minnesota, which made me a far greater contributor to society, especially through income tax, than had I become a Piddley psych tech or some other underpaid or

overeducated schmuck with a BA.

My wife has taken to giving me a look every time she knows I'm going to source something because she knows it will be Victor Davis Hansen and then tells me, you're obsessed.

But with that obsession has come the ease with which I can handle my family's liberal nonsense, so much so that over the Labor Day weekend, my brother, the only other righty in the family, turned to me while our father had walked away and told me, you're good.

The point in all this is that a Neanderthal ironworker who drives an 03 UConn XL, 98 Silverado, and an 03 Mercury Marauder, and regularly lights himself on fire at work, can easily debate and win arguments against the plethora of fancy degrees behind the names of my family members solely due to this podcast and your writings.

Thank you, VDH, for being amazing.

Also, please make more appearances.

on Gutfeld.

That's pretty cool.

It is very nice.

I would adjust to one thing he wrote.

The reason he wins arguments is not because he's listening to me, although I'm very appreciative that he is listening to me, is that the skills he has

in those physical jobs, they're not rote jobs, as everybody thinks.

And the ability to be with people and be in the real physical world gives you advantages that are greater.

than the lack of a degree, advanced degree, in comparison to the other people who have advanced degrees, but they're completely sheltered.

So they're hothouse plants that when somebody opens the window of the porch, they die.

I mean, what made Abraham Lincoln what he was was not, it was self-taught, autodidactic intellectual work, but it was also the idea that he had been a practical lawyer.

But he wasn't just a lawyer.

He was a guy out there with his axe or farming.

He was a physical specimen.

Damn, he took, he took cargo down the Mississippi River a couple of times.

He did.

And I think that's what makes the listener so unique is that he understands that he has confidence.

You never can get confidence in the world unless you are familiar with and you can deal with the muscular class and be a part of it, at least for part of your life.

There's something about that.

And every time I'm in academia and I see wonderful people, I find out upon examination that they either came from the lower middle classes or they still work on their car or they do landscape their home themselves or they would do this remote.

You know what I'm saying?

And

that is absolutely essential.

It's very classical.

It's what the Greeks told us, that that was the Olympic idea.

You had to have the physicality and an intellectual side, that if you had won too much, you were brutish, or you were, I don't want to use that archaic word, a feet, but I will.

The high heel fits hilarious.

One of the nice things that my mother, and I give her great credit, and she had a BA and a JD from Stanford, very rare in the 1940s, is she always told me, no matter how well you ever get educated, when I came back with a PhD, she drilled it into me.

Don't ever think you're better than anybody.

You're not.

You're not.

And you're going to go do the same things you did before you went to college.

And

you're going to do this.

And the best people in the world were the muscular classes.

She always said that.

They're practical.

They'll always have common sense.

Mama always.

Yeah, she was.

She loved them.

She never was floyd.

She became the first female, I think second or first in the state appellate court bench and Fresno County Superior Court bench.

But she really told all of us that.

Don't ever think you're better than anybody because some silly letters after your name.

Be proud that you did the work, you got educated, you graduated.

We want you to do that, but don't ever separate yourself on the basis of perceptions.

That was good advice.

I just want to say we've been doing this.

Victor and I have been doing podcasts now for about two years, and I am very self-aware that any number of other people people could be in my shoes.

I am grateful to be able to talk to you a couple of times a week, Victor.

Grateful, thankful, truly thankful for our friendship.

It's a great blessing, undeserved, but it's real.

And so I'm thankful for that.

And I'm thankful that our listeners do listen.

We have more and more, and the show has gone over very well with them.

So thanks for listening.

Thanks for sharing, letting others know about the Victor Davis Hanson podcast.

Happy Thanksgiving, and we'll be back again soon.

And thank you jack and thank all the listeners have a happy thanksgiving i promise jack i will not disparage replica from ireland anymore poor angel

i love i love angels yeah especially california angaloy in greek wonderful creatures thank everybody bye-bye

and we're back live during a flex alert dialed in on the thermostat oh we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m folks and that's the end of the third time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Clutch move by the home team.

What's the game plan from here on out?

Laundry?

Not today.

Dishwasher?

Sidelined.

What a performance by Team California.

The power truly is ours.

During a flex alert, pre-cool, power down, and let's beat the heat together.