The Classicist: What They Won't Talk About

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

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

We are recording on Veterans Day, November 11th, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I am the author of Civil Thoughts Newsletter.

You can find that at civilthoughts.com.

The namesake of the show is Victor Davis Hanson.

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.

He's also the best-selling author of the dying citizen and we're going to talk first

about a great piece victor has written for american greatness it's called trickle-down bidenism and we'll get to that right after this important message

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

Victor, before we talk about this trickle-down Bidenism piece, you know, I promised on our last podcast, which was the traditionalist, that I'd ask you to talk about this really important online course.

that you've recorded at Hillsdale when you were there a couple months ago about the dying citizen.

Will you tell our listeners about this course and then we'll get into this American Greatness piece?

Well, thanks.

Yeah, when I was teaching in my annual billet at Hillsdale, I recorded a class version of the book and it's called American Citizenship and Its Decline.

And it has a 45 minutes to an hour.

The first class is on all of these things that we talk about, these crises to the American Republic.

And then I suggest, as the book does,

that there's some pre-civilizational or organic forces that are warping America.

And one of them is this insidious decline of the middle class, its viability economically, culturally, socially.

And you cannot, historically, we know that, you cannot have a constitutional government without a middle class.

If you have a feudal system like in California between a few lords and then all the rest are peasants outside the keep, it will not work, just as California doesn't work.

And that's one of the the reasons it doesn't work.

And then I have another organic force, and of course that's the open borders.

No nation, no civilization has ever existed with open borders, because you have to have a sacred space where you can inculcate ideas and customs and traditions, music, art, so that people have a commonality.

And that's especially true in our multiracial, multi-ethnic.

country.

And so the third force is tribalism.

That's a very ancient idea.

And throughout history, people always contrast the nation-state civilization with tribalism.

Tribalism is at war with civilization.

That's what the Huns were, the Oscars, the Viscoths, the Vandals who overran the Danube and the Rhine.

They were tribal people.

Tribal people make decisions among their tribal councils or decisions about whether to go to war based on kin or blood ties or superficial appearances.

They do not, it's what the Middle East, to be frank, runs on, that people would favor their first cousin at least over a person of superior merit.

So you cannot have this idea we're all going to give up our primary American identity and then revert back to being black or Latino or white or transgendered or gay.

It's not going to work.

We know that from Yugoslavia, we know that from Rwanda, we know that from Iraq.

And but then of course has, after those four initial classes, it has three about what the top-down is doing.

That is the forces that are not organic, but they're contrived.

And we've just been talking about in some of our podcasts, Jack, about the so-called permanent state, the deep state, the administrative state.

These are their Anthony Fauci's, the James Comeys.

the Andrew McCabes, the Mark Milleys.

These are people who are in charge of particular government agencies, but they've overreached and have expanded well beyond their purview.

And they are judge, jury, and executioners, and they're completely exempt from oversight.

So if you're James Clapper and you lie under oath, then you're not going to go to jail like any of our listeners would who lied to the IRS if they were so stupid to do that.

Instead, they're going to say it's the least untruthful answer.

And then I have a sixth chapter, and that is the evolutionaries.

We've talked about these people.

These are the academics.

These are the lawyers.

These are the politicians, and these are the ones that tell us, you know, all of your ancestors were primitive and human nature is improving.

Woodrow Wilson showed us that, that we're progressing to a utopia, and with greater food and nutrition and counseling and head start, we're going to change human nature.

And therefore, we've got to get rid of these ossified, racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynist.

institutions and we'll start with a constitution.

Let's get rid of the electoral college.

Let's get rid of the idea that the states are responsible primarily for balloting in national elections.

Let's get rid of the custom of 180 years of the filibuster.

Let's get rid of a 150-year nine-person court.

Let's get rid of 60 years of 50 states.

Let's get rid of two senators per state.

It's not fair, so they tell us.

And that is very dangerous because a lot of these radical reforms were never intended to be enacted on the vote of one person in the Senate.

They were constitutional amendments in some cases, but they're ramming us through.

We'll see about their midterms, but we're very close right now.

If Joe Manchin and Senema were to vote for any of these things, they would fundamentally alter the way we do things.

And finally, globalism, and I try to say that, you know, we misuse that word.

It's cosmopolitism, the ancient Greek word meaning for you, you think you're a citizen of the world.

It's not just anymore harmonization of market capitalism or the westernization of consumer capitalism where everybody wears Levi's and tennis shoes and sneakers and they watch Michael Jordan on TV

or X-Men comic books.

It's more than that.

It's becoming much more than that.

It is the intertwining of cell phones and computers and internet into a global technologically interconnected community.

And the third stage and the most frightening, and it's mostly the product of our, again, our bi-coastal elites who had 8 billion person market for their particular skills in a way that farmers and assemblers and manufacturers and

loggers and miners didn't.

But nevertheless,

their vision is a council of elders, Plato's utopian.

guardians.

And we see it in the Great Reset with Davos, where they want to have a uniform tax system.

Corporations would all pay the same to punish countries like Ireland.

We see it with the International Criminal Court that thinks they have jurisdiction to go out the U.S.

military.

We see it with Anthony Blinken inviting in the U.N.

to adjudicate whether we are racist.

Iran, North Korea, China, are we racist?

Do we figure human rights societies?

And so it's called the American Citizenship and Its Decline.

And you can buy the book as a...

comping text that makes clear.

It's about seven or eight hours long.

It was initially going to be restricted to about 21,000 people.

And you go on the Hillsdale College website and you can click onto it.

It's free.

And now I think they've taken off the caps.

If everybody wants to go

as many people as they want, they've got more than 21,000 so far.

Yeah, that's going to be quite impactful.

Also, folks want to buy the dying citizen, I guess you can buy it through the course, but you want it before the course at your local bookstore or via Amazon.

Go to victorhanson.com.

There's a link for the book there.

Let's talk about the new essay you've written for American Greatness.

It's called Trickle Down Bidenism.

Encourage our listeners to visit amgreatness.com and you'll find the piece there.

Victor, we've talked about this on other podcasts.

What is this inflation about?

What are the empty shelves about?

And it's being laughed off and away by the administration as, you know, you're ordering your expensive exercise equipment.

That's what this is really about.

Or, oh, you know, late Christmas shoppers are going to be the people affected.

Ha, ha, ha.

Now,

this is a great piece you've written, but here's one aspect of it that the real realities of what's been going on with the trickle-down Bidenism.

And it's a piece you've written about farmers, which is something you know much about since you are one yourself.

You wrote, farmers are not procrastinating, but they still aren't always paid.

Some here, their almond containers are stuck at Asian ports abroad, rotting for lack of longshoremen.

And months after shipping, the grower is getting nothing for his crop.

Other payments freeze because California crops can't get onto ships to cross the Pacific from Los Angeles to Long Beach.

Growers are not whining about late-arriving Pelotons.

Vicki, you also wrote here about skyrocketing medical bills, looking at your own family, these outrageous deductible costs.

I mean, this is madness going on, and it's not about Peloton machines.

I think people's attitude, Jack, has been over the last two or three years as they saw this woke movement.

gain steam.

It's kind of, I think I wrote actually an article called Monastery of the Mind.

And their attitude was, this is so bizarre.

These people are so crazy.

I just can't deal with them.

So, and for some, it means I'm going to go to Idaho or Utah or Tennessee or somewhere either that has a reasonable tax code and reasonable services in exchange or that's isolated.

I can get away from society.

For some, it's kind of like I'm going to go get a trunk of food and ammunition and I'm going to have Fortress Smith or Fortress Jones in my house when they come for me.

And some

it was, I just disconnect.

This is the monastery of the mind.

I just don't go any games.

If you told me what LeBron's doing, I could care less.

I don't want to watch any more Emmys, Tony's, Grammys.

I just, I don't want to be lectured to anymore.

I don't, I just, when, if I do watch the Super Bowl, that's probably the only football game I watch.

This is not myself.

I don't watch it anymore, but other people say this.

But I just tune out the Super Bowl extravaganza halftime.

It's just a Roman circus, a satiric con.

I don't want to watch it.

And then they say, I don't watch network news.

I don't do certain things.

And I disconnect.

Okay.

But now I think in doing that and saying, I'm going to move out of this state or I'm going to do this or I'm going to do this, the left wants you to do that.

Remember, as we keep saying, we drill it into our listeners, they control all the institutions and this pan opticon of sorts.

So what we have to do is we saw from the board members' dictatorial treatment of mothers that were worried about the racist racist content of the books that were force-fed down their children's throat, you've got to speak up.

And when you speak up, guess what?

A thug and a bully like McAuliffe implodes.

And when you speak up, Merrick Garland shows his real colors, that he's not good old Merrick Garland, the poor guy who was robbed of the Supreme Court.

He was always a moderate, he is a functionary.

And he's a partisan, and he's vindictive, and he's mean.

And so he's non-apologetic about sicking the FBI on citizens.

And so I think what I'm saying is you've got to get galvanized because this thing is getting out of control.

And if you don't get galvanized and you don't speak out and you don't say, don't cancel that person, or you don't object,

then they're going to destroy your culture.

They're going to destroy your customs.

They're going to destroy your traditions.

They're going to do just what the Jacobins say.

It's going to be year one.

Our year one is 1619.

And they're going to change names.

They're going to change commemoratives, memorabilia, everything would be changed.

And this comes at a time when who are these people?

Are they, you know, are these the lower middle classes?

No.

This is the Lido deck, and these are people fighting over the spoils of market capitalism.

They're Joy Reed making sure that she gets a better time slot than somebody else.

Or it's the dean of equity, inclusion, and diversity saying, you know, I want the same title as the provost at Harvard or Stanford.

Or it's the orthodontist that has African-American kids and the upper-middle class saying, I'm going to say these people are racist, so they drop the SAT scores if that helps them.

It's a war on Asian people that want their kids that really work hard and they do better than all other groups, and yet we're going to punish them for their excellence.

So it's coming from the very wealthy and the very connected for, as I said, the spoils of capitalism.

It's the virtue signaling CEO of American Airlines or

Coca-Cola or Disney or these people who are very privileged, like Nancy Pelosi or Diane Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, they all live in very beautiful enclaves or usually have estates that are walled.

They have chauffeurs, they fly on private jets, or the people who go to Davos or Glasgow, and they lecture us like Barack Obama did, and said, you know what, you people are going to have to tighten your belts.

And it's not going to be very affluent and leisured day more for you gas-guzzling middle-classers.

And even me, you know, I'm speaking that, you know, I can get by.

I have the means, but I'm going to, it'll affect me.

I said, okay, Brock, affect you.

Just close down Martha's Vineyard and live in the Calarama mansion.

That's enough.

And Bernie, just sell off one of your three houses.

And Joe, just, you know, don't bill us for your security fence.

You've got three homes.

You don't need a beach home, a mansion, and then your Washington.

That's too much, according to you.

And John, Carrie, just junk that citation or whatever your wife has given you to fly all over and leave this big trail of smoke behind you.

And I'll sell them.

Yeah, shut down that big electricity bill, Al.

Or don't sell off failed cable stations to carbon spewing

gutter who finances anti-Semitic Al Jazeera that goes broke when they

buys your piece of crap merchandise and then it goes broke with it and you come out with what 50 million and you try to accelerate the sale so in John Kerry fashion you can beat the taxes which you support so wholeheartedly that's who they are yeah they just can't say it's over we lost I'm just isolated no no you've got to get back into the arena you got to fight absolutely absolutely yeah there's some of that fighting going I'm going to stay on your article just note that parents in Loudoun County in Virginia, one of the hotbeds of the recent gubernatorial election, seemed to be in a position to recall some of the school board members.

And actually, in San Francisco, school board members seem to be up for recall, or at least there's an effort underway that's actually being backed by the mayor because the insanity has gotten so bad.

But, Victor, I want to stay on your piece because another section of your essay talks about the re-tribalizing of America.

And this is one of the consequences of trickle-down Bidenism.

It's the over,

I don't know, immersion of race for all of us.

We just, it's all the time, everywhere, and it does affect us.

And here's what you wrote.

When I go into the local large national discount retail stores, I noticed that in the early morning hours, one group of Americans shop.

And by 10 a.m., they were replaced by quite another.

Another strange new development.

Someone of your own race, a total stranger, will abruptly greet you with enthusiasm as if some new tie, some previously unrecognized bond now exists between you at a time when apparently the color of your skin fixation is supposedly the new normal.

Victor, would you talk some more about this?

Well, you got to remember what's going on.

You've had a out-of-touch, wealthy white liberal elite.

They live in the Bay Area, or maybe in a broader sense, from La Jolla to Seattle, and they live from Boston down to Washington.

And they inhabit the corporate boardroom and professional sports, as we've talked about, academia.

And we see them most visibly in the media and on the news.

And they are in an echo chamber.

They represent a minority of Americans.

And they say things every single day in the university and on air that are lies.

And they're racist.

And they say things that are absolutely incredible.

And when they see the census, they say, we're glad that the white people are dwindling or this Larry Elder is a white supremacist or

Winsom Sears.

is a black mouth being uttered or spouting out white as if she's some monster.

And they're racist.

They're racist.

They're racist.

And they get away with it because the majority of the country says, I don't want to be called racist.

If I say anything, anything, they'll come after me.

And they're everywhere.

If I go get a communique, when I will go open my computer in the morning, I will get a communique from somebody either at Stanford or where I work, and they will say, you know, this is not Columbus Day, this is Indigenous Peoples' Day.

And I want to say to them, well, then why did the Tlax Callans join the Aztecs and destroy an empire of four million people?

And I know that horses and metals and superior gunpowdered weapons and European infantry tactics and the idea you kill your enemy rather than take them captive to sacrifice them gave Cortez's 2,500 men advantages, but 2,500 men cannot really take out an empire of 4 million.

The point is, why did all these indigenous people try to destroy the Aztec?

Because they were doing what?

Enslaving, cannibalizing, and practicing mass-scale Auschwitz-like human sacrifice.

And so this idea that every white person is bad historically and every non-white person is good is historically bankrupt.

So people have to say that.

And I think people are getting very angry and they don't understand what they're doing.

I live in an area where I would say that when I go into town, of every 10 people I see at the store, at the gas station,

Go do your business at the bank, you know, go to the drugstore, whatever it is, I would would say on average two out of ten are so-called white the rest are either asian but mostly mexican-american i don't even care but i've noticed something and that is the two people that are the minority white now are talking hi how are you doing yeah everything going well for you and what they're saying is that this culture hates us and says these things about us and calls us racist and has collective guilt And they practice the entire white supremacy ideology that was there in the South in the 60s that King and other people fought, the Bull Conner, the Lester Maddox, the George Wallace playbook.

And that's what they're doing.

So when you have a guy like this Dyson who keeps talking about white, white, white, white, white, white, white, and you want to say, well, what does it mean?

Tell me what it means.

How are you, your Vanderbilt six-figure professorship was discriminatory?

You're backing this up with data and statistics or when Pete Buttigig says we're going to stop the race well tell me exactly where you tried once and it failed right with your exegesis about the racist New York system and so I think people are starting to re-tribalize it's kind of scary and I get a lot of people you know and I'll say to them I don't have any solidarity just because I'm white.

I don't.

But what happens in Yugoslavia and Rwanda when that happens, people will revert back to their primitive allegiances, as sick as that is.

And that's what they're causing.

And I think it's going to end badly for everybody if they keep doing it.

And I think people have to say, not, oh, that's insensitive.

They have to say, you are a racist, racist.

You are judging people by the color of their skin.

You are saying white people.

What does that mean?

Does that mean?

all 200 million white people, 240 are all the same.

Yeah.

Does that mean Barack Obama?

Yeah.

Does that mean very white Mike Eric Dyson?

He looks, he's whiter than a lot of Italian people I know.

Let's go.

If you want to talk about skin color, skin color, skin color, then let's talk about the skin color of everybody and put that on the skin color chart.

And let's see if a person from the Punjab or the person from, you know, the Arab world or Cyprus, are they always as white as you think they are?

Are you always as dark as you think they are?

I understand all of the historical baggage in race, but you know what?

This is 2021 and everybody's sick of it because it's a primitive, destructive, hateful creed.

And I'm getting really tired of going to a university and seeing all these people with ties and suits or academic garb on and with all these little letters after their name and then spouting this hateful race and saying things like, I don't want to see on Columbus Day, I don't want to get an official message and say, remember, this is Indigenous Peoples' Day, and our

university was built.

Okay, if Leland Stanford really did that, then you take away the name, you coward.

Why don't you say Leland Stanford, you know, 150 years ago brought in Asian laborers and didn't treat them very well?

Same way that Asians didn't treat very many laborers in Asia.

And if they had the ability and they had the shipping, they would probably brought conquered peoples, which they did from all over the Pacific into places like Japan to build their industrial complex, like Korea, treated Koreans much worse than anybody treated Japanese in the United States.

Okay, so then why don't you change the name of Stanford University?

Yeah, that ain't gonna happen.

That brand name is...

Oh, I mean, they got away with no more Wilson School or Earl Warren School, respectively at Princeton or at Bolt Hall.

Maybe they'll get rid of Bolt.

I guess they're in the process of doing that.

They did, I guess.

It's now UC Berkeley Law School.

Okay, but they always stop, don't they?

They always stop at a golden moment.

And

they went overreached, as you pointed out, in San Francisco.

They're facing recall.

There's not very many people in the

San Francisco school district.

And we know that very wealthy techies who are very liberal and talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, they put their kids where there is no diversity, no equity, and no inclusion.

They go to

minimal school, Sacred Heart, Castellea, they go to private prep schools.

And then the birth rate is just about

1.1 in San Francisco Bay Area.

So the new lifestyle is to not get married to, if at all, until you're 40 or 35, not have kids, if at all, one,

and not worry about the public schools.

They're shrinking and they're filthy, dirty, the bathrooms are dirty, the infrastructure is dirty, and the school board knows it, and they're $100 million in debt.

And what are they doing?

They're Soviet commissars.

Instead of spending the money on making sure that children have a hygienic, humane bathroom and water that doesn't make them sick at a drinking fountain and classroom that can inspire and help learning.

They're talking about changing names and the costly process of virtue signaling and performance art.

All of this is built out of a sense of their own unhappiness and their own sense of inferiority, apparently, because confident people don't do these things.

They say, you know what, I want the best school for my children.

I want a sparkling, clean school.

I'm going to make this.

Who's the architect?

How do we improve it?

I want my kids to have the best SAT scores.

I want tutoring.

We're from a marginalized community, let's say, of Latinos.

So I want the best English teachers I can get to teach grammar and syntax and diagram sentences.

I want math.

I want my students to out-excel anybody.

And you know what?

It could even be so blunt and insensitive to say, whatever the Asian American community is doing, I want to emulate that.

But they don't, they being anybody else.

And I'm talking about white people too, especially white people.

So

I think these people are so privileged.

They're so entitled.

And it's 2021.

And I'm not talking like Barack Obama saying you're leader and you're going to give it up, but I'm saying you're so entitled, you've got to be able to keep it.

And the only way you're going to keep it is to be more competitive and more adroit at what you do than the competition abroad, whether that's the Asian Tigers or China or the EU or whoever it is.

But when you've got a big country that's fat, is that what we are?

We're fat and we're slothful and we're waiting for all these supply chains and we can't even get the crap to come to us.

And I don't mean crap.

It's very valuable stuff.

But we should be making a lot of this ourselves.

We wouldn't be in this buying.

Well, Victor, all this is happening too at a time when America just has made great strides when it comes to rate.

It raises the issue.

2020 or the year 2000, even go back 10 years, was a far, far cry from 1965, 1970.

And in my own life, my own house, and as you know, I have a bunch of kids.

And any night of the week, there were 12, 15 kids at my house from cross-country and basketball teams.

Black, white, Asian, rich, poor, Muslim, gay, straight.

It was, you know, a true melting pot at the house of the publisher of the right-wing National Review.

And this is what race in America had become.

You know,

there's always a union, you know, with a perfect, you know, more perfect union, but it's such a lie that what is being voiced in all of us is in the face of these great strides.

It's all a lie.

I went to a city school on the edge of town.

It was 95% Hispanic.

Many of them were here illegally in the 1960s.

We had eight teachers, and they were advocates.

And their message, again, was we are going to be the best school in this whole district.

And we are going to teach kids that English is their first language now.

And they're going to be better at English than the alternative in other schools that are largely white.

And they succeeded.

And they were not brutal people.

They were kind and compassionate people.

I'm getting sick and tired of hearing people rewrite history.

And I went to that school and I can tell you that if you're in a minority, and I don't care who the majority is, the majority will attack the minority.

It's not white people doing that.

It's just demographics.

And so I spent most of my time, a lot of it, from the first grade up until the eighth grade, being called a gringo and fighting.

for my survival and a lot of people did and most of the people who helped me were Hispanic against other Hispanics.

But that's what people do.

It's a very brutal system.

But those teachers did not encourage that.

They tried to create an educated population.

And I can tell you that when I graduated from a very poor school, a rural school, a school that didn't have any of the opportunities of people I later went to college that came from, we were in the process we had.

Civil rights had been passed in 1965.

We were the great society.

Lyndon Johnson was president when I enrolled in that class in 1967

and 68.

And I can tell you that we had affirmative action.

And there were people in my school, this is talking 1971, who had below a B average and they did not have highest test scores and they got into good schools.

And there were people in my class in high school that did not.

And that was because of their race.

Now, I'm not talking this year.

I'm talking 50 years ago.

So, most of my life has been lived with that.

I haven't been too vocal about it.

But this idea it was always unfair is just an absolute lie.

When I was in a graduate program, 1975 at Stanford University, the very, very competitive, very selective PhD in classical language was very old-fashioned.

And there were four people in there.

There was a Vietnam veteran from Special Forces who had been severely wounded, brilliant guy.

There was another person from the steel mills of Cleveland, equally poor.

There was me, a middle-class guy from a farm.

And then there was one person from the East Coast.

All of them were white males.

Okay, you know what we were told by the chairman?

He called us in and he said, I want to tell somebody.

There's been some the Baki case.

We are not legally liable, but I want to tell you that none of you, not one of you, is going to get a job.

You got that?

You're not going to get a job.

So we would like you to stay.

We have financial support for four years, but do not come back to us because we are hiring women and minorities here and we're going to do it there.

So what happened?

The four of us went there and the person from the steel mills dropped out.

He said, I can't do this.

There's no job.

The person who graduated from the Vietnam veteran, brilliant linguist, he said, there's no jobs.

Nobody would hire him.

So he went to Stanford Law School.

And me, I said, I'm lucky.

I have a farm.

So I applied, I think, 17 different places.

I had a nice interview in 1980 with a major military academy.

And they said, we really like the idea you're doing research on military history.

Nobody does that in the ancient world.

But, you know, could we talk to you after this was over?

There's no reason to go on with the interview.

And I said, okay.

And the guy came up to me and he said, you have a great record, but we're not going to hire you.

because you're not a woman.

We have to hire a woman.

And I said, well, that's not fair.

It doesn't matter.

You're not going to get this job.

We want to warn you that.

And so that was the way it was.

So I farmed for five years and there was no jobs.

And then I went up and I created a job.

I just said, I'll teach Latin for $350 a month and build a program.

But this idea that this racist system has been entrenched is not true.

And then just to finish this rant, Jack, I taught for 21 years minority students.

And I've mentioned this before, but this was what got me really disillusioned with the whole system.

And that is, I had had brilliant Mexican-American students.

I had brilliant Southeast Asian students.

I had brilliant black students.

And our idea was just what I had been brought up with.

We will get you an MA.

And that will make up for the lack of competitiveness of the CSU versus, you know, Oberlin or, you know, Brown or Wesleyan or all the supposedly good undergraduates or Stanford.

But you'll have to stay an extra year to get an MA.

And I will tutor you.

I will tutor you in Greek composition.

I will tutor you in Latin composition.

I will tutor you in epigraphy.

I will tutor you in numismatics.

I will tutor you in comparative linguistics if I have to, but I will make you competitive.

And we sent over 50 to the Ivy League.

And then this happened.

We have a lot of very poor white kids, middle class and white, and they were just as good.

Some of them were brilliant.

And they would go and I'd say, they'd say, well, I'd like to go to Harvard.

I'd like to go to Yale.

I'd like to go to Berkeley.

And I'd say, okay, here's the story.

And I would talk to these chairmen.

I knew them.

They were classicists.

I would call them up.

I would talk to people.

And they would say, off the record, we're not going to take any people like that from Frisco.

If we're going to take a white male and get punished for it, it's going to be a friend of ours from Harvard or Stanford or Yale.

We do not want anybody from CSU.

And then they would give me a list of second-tier schools.

In the same breath, they said, but...

If you have anybody who's Hispanic or Latino or woman or Asian, we'll look at them.

No, that was in the 80s.

And so where did these people get get this idea that suddenly we woke up in 2020 and it was this racist society?

We just said to ourselves, we're going to write off a whole group of people from the lower middle class that happened to be white because of the sins of pretty much wealthy white people in the South 150 years ago that had nothing to do with.

And then corporations and universities that had quotas against Jews and all sorts of stuff were very illiberal.

And these people had nothing to do with with it.

And we're just telling them, we are racist and we're going to practice racism to stop racism.

So I get really angry when I hear this Kendi,

this Madoff character called Kendi, when he tells everybody that this is getting out of hand.

No, it's not out of hand.

And if you start to evaluate certain people and you look at their publications and the peer-reviewed publications, if that even exists anymore, you start looking at merit.

It's very skeptical, some of these guys.

And they they have been beneficiaries.

And for them to start spouting this racist diatribe, oh, it's so unfair.

And I've had this because of endemic systemic.

If racism is so bad, you do not need adjectives.

You do not need structural.

You do not need systemic.

You do not need implicit.

You can just say racism.

But they add these adjectives because it's not overt.

And maybe there is some implicit, but it's not very common.

And there is a lot of common racism.

And that's against the white working class.

They have no future, a lot of those kids, if they want to go into the profession.

They just don't.

And they're going to be very surprised because, as we know, the big secret on these blue chip universities is that we are beyond now proportional representation based on disparate impact.

We're on repertory.

representation and they won't talk about it but if they were to be transparent you will see that white males in the fall class at some not all universities that are blue chip are not letting in white males proportionate to their population so if they're 35 percent of the population they're going to probably be 13 or 15 percent of the population right and a lot of that will be legacy too so oh a legacy and minor sports you know the lacrosse player who's the soccer player not soccer's minor but a lot of sports that attract so-called white people, football, baseball, etc.

And so when you get the legacy and the alumni kids that buy their way in, you're not going to get anybody from the lower middle classes.

And these are people who lecture us on diversity, diversity, diversity.

There's going to be no diversity.

There's going to be a bunch of privileged white and Asian kids, and then there's going to be largely minorities.

And there's not going to be any white males from the lower classes.

And that's by intent because they hate the white middle class.

They hate it.

That's why they've created these words, clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs that Biden and Obama use.

So, yeah,

I think we've got to really take a look at the 60s and say from 65 to 70, when this all started, it was well meant.

And then it was institutionalized.

And, you know, it was what?

35 years ago that Jesse Jackson was yelling, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go.

I wrote Who Killed Homer with John Heath in 1998.

So that was 23 years ago.

Bonfire of the Humanities with Bruce Thornton and John Heath in 1999, 22 years ago.

This is not new.

Only thing that's new is that people are emboldened and they're doing things that no one ever dreamed of by this cancel.

And they have a technology now that is very conducive to lynch mobs and cancel culture.

Well, Victor, let's talk quickly about one other thing.

And I do mean quickly, because if I don't, then Sammy Winka is going to be mad at me.

But it's about Facebook.

And we'll get to it right after this important message.

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

Victor, make of this what you will.

There's a new poll out to social media.

Majority of Americans believe Facebook is making society worse.

And here's a little piece by Brittany Bernstein and on National Review's website, and it's in other places.

76% of adults think Facebook is making American society worse.

This is a new CNN poll.

Even those who identified themselves as frequent Facebook users said 70% to 14%

the site damages rather than helps society.

Among those who believe Facebook is harming society, 55% believe it is the way some people use Facebook that is more at fault, while 45% said it's more due to the way the site is run.

So here's the big kahuna of social media.

And, you know, a lot of, obviously, there's some level of, I don't know, it's hypocrisy or whatever going on here because a lot of people are using it and using it while they are troubled by it.

I think I'd like to quantify that why they're saying that.

There was an assumption, going back to classical observers of the Paulus, that you needed a face-to-face society.

That is, that people stuck in their homes or stuck in their tribal enclaves or their multi-generational compounds had images, stereotypes develop about other people, but you needed civic unity.

So what did we do?

We had the Masons, we had the Lions Club, we had the Elks, we had the PTA, we had

civil society, and the idea was to get people out of their homes.

Walnut, my grandmother was a member of Eastern Star, the Walnut Improvement Club.

What they were doing is the raisin grower wives or the raisin growers, et cetera.

And they got people out of their homes and they met people face to face and they interacted.

And then they dropped their suspicions.

Or when you had a neighbor who would steal water from you or he would borrow your vineyard wagon and not turn it in, then you met the person in a social context and you dropped those that anger.

But when you're anonymous, you're creating the Wild West lynch mob of anonymity of those people that are way back in that mob selling, let's break into jail and kill that person.

And it's cheap, and they do it anonymously.

So it encourages the worst elements of human nature.

One.

Two, then you have 20-something ignoramuses or 30-something

that are left-wing products of a bankrupt educational system that are appointed censors.

And their job is to do what?

On social media, it is to ban people, it is to warn them, it is to use this enormous power of communications to drop people, to censor, to reorder the order of Google searches so they reflect a common ideological agenda.

And so they're warping the technology for political purposes.

And then three, we used to have something called antitrust laws, but we know now that if you question the system or you bring in an alternate like parlor, they'll crush it.

Or they'll, like YouTube, they'll buy it out or Snapchat.

So they have so much capital, so much power.

And then four, what do they do with this money?

What do they do with this money?

They use it for quote-unquote philanthropy that is always political, always political.

Absolutely.

So Mark Zuckerberg puts what?

$415

million

in

fuels.

Basically, he went into key precincts of key swing states and appropriated the role of the registrars at the local and state level.

He just said, these are my guys.

They're experts in harvesting ballots and mail-in ballots and non-election day voting.

And we're going to put drop boxes.

We're going to train people.

Here's all this money.

And that's what he did.

And if anybody else had done that, that would have been dark money.

So what I'm getting at is they've destroyed the face-to-face society essential to constitutional government.

They have destroyed the idea of free speech and free exchange of ideas.

They've created lynch mob censors that are cowardly.

They've got enormous amounts of money that have broken any decent idea of anti-monopoly, antitrust legislation, and they're highly political and they're warping our political system.

When Donald Trump was yelling and yelling about computers, old Dominion, all he had to do was take a deep breath and say, I lost this election in April or March when all of this money from Silicon Valley fueled legal challenges, either that were settled in court or bureaucratically against the rules and laws of the state legislatures of swing states.

And they fueled enhancements to the process of balloting.

That's where the real, as Molly Himley pointed out in her book, great.

So that's what they've done.

They're a pernicious influence, Jack.

They really are.

And

I hope they're broken up.

We have genuine competition.

They're smaller scale.

And we have conservative Facebooks and we have liberal Facebooks and we have moderate Facebooks and we have apolitical Facebooks.

And they're not vertically integrated where they try to buy up every single.

And these are very liberal people.

And that should warn all of our listeners.

Every time somebody was worried about cosmic justice and humanity and equality and equity at the cosmic level, and then you see them in the restaurant and they don't tip well or they're rude to

a waitress or they're mean-spirited or they're arrogant, keep that in mind.

There may be a connection.

That one person awfulness as a human being is often, you know, the circle is squared by his cosmic.

justice.

I talk about that in the Dying Citizen, that a lot of figures in literature, especially in Dickens, was really onto that in his novels about all of these Victorian save the world, save the Zulus, stop the caste, India, all noble causes, but in London, they didn't want to get near the poor or do we?

Right.

Well, Victor, there's this great difference between charity and philanthropy.

And Bill Gates will try to fund these projects in Africa, pick a project.

Of course, while they do that, it disrupts the local economy and has so many unintended consequences.

And that's philanthropy.

And charity is the guy starving in front of the Gates Foundation offices who they won't give a sandwich to.

So, and as you mentioned before, this Zuckerberg money dump is using tax-exempt dollars, which are supposed to be not at all for political purposes, explicitly for partisan political purposes.

So, we should talk about that again at length on another podcast, but we just have to get a little business conducted here because we're at the end of our time.

Speaking of Facebook, there is a club on Facebook.

It's the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.

Would like to urge those who are on Facebook, you know, go there.

And often you'll find, or always you'll find links to things Victor has done, not only current, but back in the past.

And it's a great group of people.

VictorHanson.com, website.

It has a tremendous amount of exclusive content.

It's $5 a month, $50 for the year.

As a former magazine publisher, I can tell you there is more original content produced on that website in the course of a month than you will find in a monthly magazine, which might charge you $10.

That's not the greatest sell marketing pitch in the world, but it's true.

It's a lot of volume and a lot of great content at a very, very low price.

So I recommend that folks do that.

Just do once, do five bucks to stick your toe in the water to see how that goes.

For me, civilsociety.com, that's where my newsletter is out of Jack Fowler.

And also the center for civil society.com where we at American Philanthropic are trying to fight to strengthen civil society the very things Victor you were just talking about I think that's about all I have to say Victor anything left other than to say thank you uh it's going to be Veterans Day and everybody should remember today the 11th day of the 11th month the 11th hour which we used to know as Armistice Day came out of World War I and then it expanded to commemorate all our veterans who have died for us.

And remember that just because our educational system has failed us, we, the successors of all these people who were wounded and died, and had their lives warped and, in some cases, changed, even ruined, at places like Shiloh, Gettysburg, and First Manassas,

San Juan Hill, Bella Wood, the Argonne Forest, Midway,

D-Day,

Fillets Gap, etc., etc.

These were Choison Reservoir, Way,

First Gulf War.

They all did something.

And we don't just, you know, suddenly say in the 233rd year of our republic, oh, by the way, we're just going to reject all of our history and we're going to do this.

And these people were this group or they were that group.

No, no.

We owe them.

and we are resting on the shoulders of giants.

And if you want to look in the mirror at this generation, you should should really take a complete inventory of yourself and what you've accomplished.

And then you compare yourself to the depression generation and the people who defeated fascism and Nazism and go back to World War I and see what they did or the civil war that cost 700,000 lives.

And so I think we all should cast away our presentism.

that we're the greatest generation in history and compare ourselves to the people who fought for us and that we owe them a lot more than we've ever acknowledged.

Yeah, Victor, while we were recording this show, which I note began at 11:11 Eastern Time, I got an email from Jim Buckley, the former senator who's 99, who was at Guadalcanal.

You know, he's very humble about it.

But for all the things Jim Buckley has done in his life, and he's one of the few Americans that served in all branches of government, the fact that he was there at this epoch.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Victor, thanks again for so much wisdom sharing.

Folks, purchase The Dying Citizen and maybe sign up for that Hillsdale course.

Go to Hillsdale's website.

Thanks so much for listening.

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

Thank you, everybody, for listening.