The Classicist: Revolutionary Methods

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the classicist.

I am the host.

My name is Jack Fowler, but the namesake and star of the show is Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Dying Citizen.

More about Victor, more about his website, victorhanson.com.

Coming up, we have a number of issues to talk about.

Today, we're recording on Friday, October 5th, a few days after the election.

Much of the election material Victor discussed on the episode of The Traditionalist.

But today on the classicist, we'll talk about a few cultural matters, including who won the Cold War?

Is it even over?

Let's get to that and other matters right after this important message.

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We're back with the Classicist.

This is one of the three programs under the umbrella of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

The other is the Traditionalist.

And then there's the Culturalist, which is hosted by the great Sammy wink we hope and encourage you to listen to uh to all today's uh program victor let's start off by talking about a really big important juicy detailed piece you wrote this earlier this week for american greatness it's titled who eventually won the cold war victor there's a couple things we'll get into on this but why don't you just talk briefly at first about like what what prompted you to write this piece and the implication you get from reading it is, well, maybe the Cold War ended.

As you said, it ended 30 years ago, but I don't know.

Is it really over?

Yeah, I was thinking, there's a lot of catalysts, but I'll go for it.

I was thinking, how did we win the Cold War?

I mean, the Soviet Union had about 50 million people, usually throughout the Cold War, more than we did.

It had 40% more territory.

China had the same amount of territory, but it had about a billion people at that time.

And yet we defeated both of them.

And we never had to go to war.

And the answer was we had an open and free society.

And we had a lot of unorthodox people.

And they were came from all walks of life.

They did not fit the aristocratic, go to the Ivy League necessarily, and then say the right things.

You had a guy like Steve Jobs.

It was kind of an oddball.

You had a geek like Bill.

Gates.

You had a weirdo in Nebraska like Warren Buffett.

You had a guy like Ross Perot, but that was the idea.

You wanted as many different weird people that brought into the conversation a lot of different experiences.

And they could say whatever they want.

And that open and unfettered manner of research was in dire contrast to the cultural revolution that was going on in China, where they were putting dunce caps on intellectuals or beating them up if they wore glasses or killing them or in the Soviet Union where you had commissars that were checking everybody's ideology or snitches that were overhearing people and going back through their history or trotskizizing changing names and toppling statues and accusing each other of counter-revolution and it turned out that it really had an effect on the efficacy of the economy, of the military, of the political stability of those societies.

That's how we won.

So I'm thinking they kind of learned from that because Putin the other day gave a very, very weird scary speech i mean the guy is a brilliant evil propagandist and what he said was whoa i i can't believe it you criticize us but you remind me of the bolsheviks and we had they destroyed our society for 50 years and what did they do they

they ratted each other out they went back and looked at everybody's history to try to destroy somebody's life they turned one area of ideological part of russia against the other they were racist they did this.

I don't know.

I mean, I'm just a simple person.

We kind of believe there's two genders and, you know, you've got to be tolerant.

And it was, it was, but it was all couched in keep doing it because we just love it.

Right.

Because you are like what we were and we lost the Cold War.

That was the text, subtext.

And then we had the Chinese model take on it, and theirs was kind of,

ah,

I like this idea of what the Americans are doing because we are, according to their own definition, victims as being non-white.

So Wuhan Liban laboratory,

virology enhancement, travel, racist, racist, racist.

How dare you call us this?

Spy being arrested at American universities, spy being arrested in Silicon Racist, racist, racist.

And they...

they were so adept at it that people, you know, in Hollywood, if you're a villain, you're you got a bald head with an orthodox cross tattooed to your back or face and you have that horrible russian accent that's and if you're chinese chinese government and says you know we don't want to portray chinese negatively no we don't want dark people in our movies for your for our market so they were very adept at it so i was trying to suggest that after we won the war, this woke culture kind of blended the Soviet commissariat together with the cultural revolution.

And so what the result is, if you go to a university today and you say any of the following, I'm not sure

that climate change to the degree that it exists is caused really by man-made activity.

And if it is caused by man-made activity, given the role of China and Russia and India, I don't know whether in a cost-to-benefit analysis, you can do much in the United States without wrecking the economy.

If you say that, you will be ostracized.

You will not be able to publish and you will be a pariah.

If you say at where I work, there are only two genders.

And if you can construct your own gender, then you can construct your own race.

You can say, I'm Black tomorrow.

Like, why do we

out Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren and we don't out people who change their gender?

Why can't Elizabeth Warren say, I have, I want affirmative action because now I'm a Native American?

She did, and we laughed at her.

What's the difference?

And so if I said that at a university publicly and I had something

that I wanted, I wanted a job at, say, as a professor in a classics department, I couldn't do it.

And so you can't say things.

And we go back through people's lives.

We go back eight, nine, 10 years, 11 years and find out if they ever said or did anything.

And we go after them.

We go into the bathroom after U.S.

senators, into the bathroom and scream in their faces as if we're the young red guard of Mao's era.

These young people that are doing that, going to people's homes, screaming at them, they're Maoist.

They're red guards.

And what do they want?

They want no dissent.

They want no tolerance.

And

you can't question anything.

If you say that diversity, equity, and inclusion czars, provosts, deans, are commissariat, that is,

they're not not going to produce anything.

They're not going to raise test scores.

They're not going to improve the ability to teach grammar or analysis or logic.

They're simply going to look over the shoulder of everybody and say, I'm watching you.

And if you

deviate from orthodoxy one iota, I'm getting paid and advanced and promoted despite that.

So you can do two things.

You can either deviate and make me more important than ever when I call you out and destroy you, or you can be obsequious and toadish and

show obeyance to me, and I'll let you slide.

And that's what it is.

It's no different than the cultural revolution.

So, we won the Cold War by being the antithesis of all that.

And the Soviets and the Chinese are oppressing us again because they feel that we adopted all of their worst traits.

And they, to the extent dictatorships can, they try to open their societies a little bit vis-a-vis the Soviet or the Maoist system.

Well, Victor, the word war is in the phrase Cold War.

And some of this, what you've written about, and we've talked about this on previous podcasts, but it touches on the possibility of action.

actual war, the wokeism of General Milley and

the U.S.

military

affecting,

he's calling up China to warn them

about something that really won't happen, but nevertheless sends a sign of weakness.

And it's interesting, more than interesting, it's almost kind of frightening that the culture war could actually lead to actual war.

Absolutely.

And something's got to happen

to moderate this tension.

And I'll be a little controversial here, Jack.

I don't see

I see some conservatives, you know, that want to go back in somebody's past.

When they say, I don't want critical race theory, they're not not saying I don't want theories, you know, tried out.

They just say, I don't want racism tried out on my kid because that's what it is.

But they're not getting into your face.

They're not saying to everybody, we're going to do it this way or the highway.

You know, when they did riot in January 6th, and when they were condemned, they paid a price.

When the left did it for 120 days and looted and burned, killed 28 people and 1,000 police people were injured.

They didn't pay a price for that.

Very few people were incarcerated.

Very few people are in jail now for that.

So what I'm getting at is that it's you can't play kumbaya and say both sides, both sides, both sides.

This is an assault on the left.

It's a Jacobin assault on the left on the origins,

the growth, the maturity, and the future of America.

And these people do not like it.

And I don't know whether that's sincere because they seem to be very wealthy people.

And they seem to be smart enough to know they would not be very wealthy people in China or Russia or even in confiscatory Europe, although we're getting close to Europe now.

So you think they would have a little bit of gratitude or they're totally cynical.

And by that, I mean they're going to find a way.

that the consequences of their own ideology never apply to themselves.

So when Dyson goes on there and screams and yells, he goes back and somebody says, great job, Professor Dyson.

I'm going to promote you.

And that's why he does it.

He doesn't really believe that crazy idea.

Or Joy Reed, you know, who is a complete homophobic zealot, has a whole history of being homophobic.

She just moused this stuff because it led to career rewards.

And so, yeah, we're having a civil war now, but it's one-sided.

And what was interesting about Virginia was it was a message to the country.

Well, I think I've used the term monastery of the mind.

It's not enough anymore to turn off the NBA.

It's not enough not to go watch a Hollywood motion picture first release.

It's not enough

to

not go to an NBA game.

It's not enough to not to watch network news.

It's not enough to tune out the Emmys and the Grammys and the Tonys and the Oscars.

That's not enough anymore.

Not enough to go out into Utah, Badlands, or up to Wyoming or deep into the Smoky Mountains and just say, I'm done with this crazy place because they will come for you.

It's ubiquitous in this technological interconnected age of global communications, et cetera, and surveillance.

And they run all of the institutions.

So if you're in a blue state, if you're in a purple state, you're going to have to stay and fight.

And that's why I really admire those parents in Virginia.

They didn't just say, you can't deal with these people.

They're Marxists.

They're Maoist.

They're nuts.

They lie.

They're not transparent.

They draft letters to the government to get the FBI on me as if they use terms like domestic terrorists of me.

But they said, do your worst and we'll do our best.

We'll see who wins because this is not your state.

It's my state.

I think we're going to have to get that attitude.

I agree.

You know, Victor, the level of mendacity, just picked on Virginia

for our next

topic, critical race theory.

So I'm interested, and I will hope our listeners are interested in your take on this spin, or it's really a BS line that there's no such thing as critical race theory.

Of course there's not.

We've seen on the MSNBC hosts and speakers, the education secretary on some, I don't think he was on the view of,

yeah, no, there's no such thing.

That's maybe something taught in college.

Terry McAuliffe running for governor, same thing.

Of course, evidence comes out that when he was governor, he explicitly uh demanded that the virginia department of education uh teach quote critical race theory end quote so but we have this line of with bs and it's to me if we could lump this in with another mantra that's emerging out there i think i read somewhere there juan williams was giving this line out the other day that now parental rights quote unquote parental rights is code for white supremacy you know everything it's just like everything is race it's inescapable inescapable from the left.

They just have to categorize everything under that.

So anyway, Victor, your thoughts on that line.

There's no such thing as critical race theory and on this spin of parental rights is really a white racism.

Yeah, I mean, if you go to my website, I have a little piece on, I try to do it, words don't matter section.

And I have 20 terms that they have taken and they don't mean anything what they say they mean.

And so,

but by that, I mean they're always changing the language.

So, when Juan Williams says that about parents, he's just an Orwellian.

And what he's trying to do is to take a perfectly good word and then to load it up so people don't use it.

And that's why they do it.

And remember, if you and I had this conversation nine months ago, all we heard was critical waste theory, critical waste theory, critical waste theory.

It was in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots.

And this subtext was:

if you don't go down this road, there's going to be more riots and more violence.

And we're going to take over this country.

And Joe Biden has won the election.

And Bernie Sanders' agenda is being implemented.

And it's BLM, BLM, BLM.

It's time to cash in.

And so everybody said, okay.

And then they were boasting.

Kendi was, you know, $20,000, a half hour.

Critical race theory.

It was the, they weren't.

ashamed of it.

If you go back, a lot of people have done it.

Look at what those people were saying in January and February.

They were pushing critical waste theory openly down people's throats.

They were happy about it.

I saw it where I work.

We had all of the elements of critical waste theory.

That was a new.

And then all of a sudden, blue states, blue states, not Oklahoma, not Texas, not Montana, not North Dakota, said, no more, this stuff threatens civilization.

This is Yugoslavia.

This is Rwanda.

This is Iraq.

This will destroy this country.

These are racists, these people.

These are no different than Milosevic.

These people want to destroy people on the basis of their race.

This can't work.

Whatever your republic, we're going to stop it, even here, where they have all of the levers of power and money and influence.

And they did.

And so now all of a sudden they're thinking, because remember, they're revolutionaries.

They never stop, but they always change strategy.

Hmm.

Well, now we have to say that the people who are saying critical race theory are the racists.

And we don't want to use that word critical race theory anymore.

We want to talk about remedial education or tutoring America on their own past or the history of toxic racism or just African-American issues of the past.

You know, they're like Rust.

They never sleep.

but they always change a vocabulary when they feel that it's no longer useful.

Critical race theory is no longer useful to them anymore.

And just like global warming was no longer useful to them anymore.

Once all of a sudden people started saying, well, you know, in the last seven years, the last 10 years, or, you know, there was an ice age in the 70s,

they thought, okay, we'll just call it climate change.

And anything that's aberrant is climate change, cold, hot, calm, windy, rain, drought, climate change.

Same thing with about.

That was the idea of critical race theory.

It was racist, racist, racist everywhere.

Oh, that no longer works.

Well, we'll call it something else.

And they're doing that right now.

Victor, talking about climate change, and we will go, we will, after that, we'll maybe talk about that piece you mentioned of 20 words that mean

nothing.

If I'd just like to see if you have any thoughts about this,

I'll call it COP26.

I don't know what maybe people call it COP26, but this conference over in Glasgow that Biden was at, he was sleeping at anyway.

And

what's her name?

Oh my gosh, the annoying young girl.

Greta Sweden.

Yes, Greta.

I'm sorry.

Greta Thunberg.

And

the usual suspects have been rounded up, 30,000 of them.

And most many of them flying in and out on private jets and

driving there in caravans.

So any thoughts about this conference?

And then separately, and I had sent you a piece.

I don't know if you got to look at it.

It's by a guy named Tim Black writing in Spiked.

And we've heard this before too, but it's titled, How the Climate Lobby Crushed Debate.

And

it's almost complete in the science community that any disagreement on

whatever you want to call it, global warming, climate change, if you do not genulect.

to the entire doctrine, you will be crushed, which kind of

parallels COVID.

You're talking about that it might have come from wuhan earlier in the year you're going to be crushed if you disagree with the folks who somehow seem to be writing the catechisms anyway victor any thoughts on on this yeah i mean it's very

much akin to covid and it's and it's very much akin to critical race theory think about the covet So everybody has to have a mandate if you're not vaccinated.

You have to get vaccinated.

You have to social distance, except if you're Gavin Newsom

or Mayor Brand of San Francisco or Nancy Pelosi or

the governor of Michigan.

So we all are Bill de Blasio,

or if you're

critical race theory and everybody's a racist and you're going to have to do this, this, this, and here's the public schools.

But if you're Barack Obama, you put your kids in prep schools and you live in a gated estate.

So what I'm getting at is it's in that sense, it's an elite fixation of very wealthy, leisure people who have no intention of suffering the consequences of their own ideology.

So, what happens?

Was it 1,000 limos lined up?

These gas?

I would never, I've never driven one of those things in my life because I couldn't afford a black Lincoln Navigator or Black UConn, whatever they are.

I mean, they're like, I don't know, 10, 15 miles a gallon in city traffic.

And then there's 400 private jets that I don't know what they do, four gallons a minute or something.

They leave these huge carbon trails, but it's the John Kerry theory.

It's the Al Gore theory.

I have to fly private so I can make sure that soon nobody will fly private.

But more or less, the real message is: I have to fly private so you don't use a snowmobile and you don't go water skiing and you don't have a gas blower in LA.

You pour pee on stupid idiots.

Or Al Gore saying, I have to sell my cable TV

bankrupt station.

I got to do it before the capital gains kick in.

And I've got to sell it to carbon-rich gutter, who's going to have an anti-Semitic Al Jazeera buyer ready for me because I want those fossil fuel profits 50 million so that I can better tell people not to do what I do.

Same thing with John Kerry.

I've got to move my yacht out of Massachusetts so I don't have to pay property tax on it because that way it will free up more money so I can be more effective for you.

And that's the whole, it doesn't really matter what the issue is.

It's the ideology.

It's this

bicosta elite that feels that they have superseded, given their wealth, the daily challenge to live one more day, food, you know, gas prices, electricity price.

They don't care anymore.

If you've told any of those guys at Davos,

people in California, in Madeira or Visalia can't afford $5 gas.

They just can't

drive.

And they're going to say, well, why not?

I can pay $8 a gallon for aviation flu.

I'm making my sacrifice.

And that's how they think.

And so...

That's what the climate thing.

And then the other thing that's very emblematic of all of these things is

they are religious zealots.

They're not empirical scientific people.

They don't believe in, quote, the science.

We found that out with COVID.

If you told those people, the verdict is not out,

but if you get COVID and you get a high antibody level from a fairly long case, you will have as much parity as far as inoculation immunity as inoculation immunity.

It'll be similar.

And therefore, we could have an antibody test or T someday we can get a test that actually finds an antibody or a T cell or something that correlates with immunity.

And this is what we're going to do.

And they will say, no,

no.

we have to nobly lie.

We have to tell everybody you've got to get a vaccination because if they think they can get COVID and get the same thing and go to a restaurant, then they might not get vaccinated and then they might get sick one day.

And that's not as good.

So you can't argue with them.

And the same thing about if you tell a climate zealot, and I've spoken to people in class about climate change, when I've been invited on the rare occasions at Stanford to speak to classes or to groups, and they will, you tell them very politely, look, the biggest polluter in the world is China.

The biggest, second biggest is India.

They rely on coal.

They have to.

And their cities are a mess.

And we are a global village.

And we have cut our carbon emissions every single year of the last 10 years.

And we are outpacing the people in the climate accord, Paris Climate Accord.

And we're doing it because we have so much natural gas that leaves such a smaller footprint as far as carbon emissions than either burning oil and especially coal.

And so if you tell them that, they don't care.

They'll say, well,

we exploited India, we exploited China.

And what that means is we have to find a political guilt-ridden exegesis to explain why we can't do anything about it.

So they say, well, the British, you know, they exercised colonial powers over India and China was inhabited and colonized and occupied.

So yeah, they have to catch up.

So just as we were polluting in the 1870s up to 1950 or 60s, so they get their turn.

We can't deal with what they're really saying is the India and China say, you know what, we've got two and a half billion people.

Screw you,

so you can't do anything about it.

That's what they tell them privately.

And so then they turn around and say to the American middle class, you've already done more than anybody in the world to cut emissions, but you're still guilty.

So we're going after that gas bowl, we're going after that jet ski, we're going after that snowmobile.

And that's what we're going to do.

And you're culpable.

And we're going to keep pressing and pressing on you.

And you know what?

The air on the planet, Dewey, we found out doesn't circulate.

So our air stays there permanently above us.

And it's going to be, you know, it's our air and their air doesn't come over here.

So that's that's kind of the anti-science dogma, or they would be right now hectoring China all day.

John Kerry flies over there every once in a while.

And in John Kerry's milquetoast manner, he says, maybe court sort of could have, maybe, sort of, maybe.

Might you?

Cut a little bit that cold.

Now get the hell out of here.

And that's where we are.

So remember another thing about the leftist mind, I think all of our listeners know that.

They always go after the law-abiding citizen and they go after the misdemeanor.

They never go after the felony of the person who's either too poor or a protected species or they're afraid of.

That's what the bullying nature of the left is.

So they will never go after China.

They'll never go after India, but they will bully somebody who nods his head and says, okay, I'll turn in my diesel tractor and I'll try to get something new or I'll get an electric car, just like you told me.

It's just like when you build a house or you're out here in the valley and you try to remodel your home and they drive along and they see it and they come in and they say, hmm.

you're going to pay this fine, this fine, this fine.

Let's discuss it.

And then they drive another mile back and it's chaos.

It's a third world thing where there's 50 cars and there's unlicensed dog and it's a total chaos.

And they'll never say to those occupants, as one person said to me, Mr.

Hansen, where would I start?

There's thousands of felonies over there.

The people are here illegally.

They're poor.

They're not going to pay a fine, but they are going to complain that I'm a racist.

So I'm not going to get near that place.

He told me that.

And off the record, I won't mention his name, but then you will pay.

And so we're going to fine you if you don't follow what we tell you can do.

And that's what that works on the national scene as well.

It's a very bullying attitude by the left.

They always bully and they order and they dictate to people who are trying to do a good job and are trying to follow the rules.

And they make fun of them and call them bourgeoisies and middle-class values, Sarah Payton types.

And then they romanticize the people who tell them, screw you, I'm not going to listen to you.

Well, Victor, they may be going too far, even in San Francisco.

And we will talk about that right after this message.

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Well, we're back with the classicist.

We're recording on Friday, November 5th.

So, Victor, I'm pulling a fast one, although I don't think it's too fast.

You know what's going on.

I sent you a link and a picture earlier in the week, and it kind of struck me as crazy.

Those containers and their contents, which somehow or other do actually get off the ships in Long Beach and are put on trains to be transported across America.

There's this huge train crime epidemic in California.

By the way, we talk about things California on the classicist.

And this image of these freight trains being stopped and then they're plundered right there on the tracks.

It's amazing debris everywhere.

And so we've got significant crime in California.

I think this affects the supply chain.

Don't be so judgmental.

Your crime is somebody's liberation.

That crime is, yeah, my lack of

a chip I need for a device.

But also, Victor, now this is the spring on you because I just, I found this piece and it's about the

DEA of San Francisco.

Yet another store, Safeway, there's closing.

A number of Walgreens stores have just shut down in San Francisco.

Safeway, you know, supermarket.

People need to buy food, right?

Well, they can't buy it if it's not open.

And the store is not open or closing early because this relentless shoplifting spree that's gone on, unprosecuted, by the district attorney.

But news to me is, I think, Chase Abodin is how the DA's name is pronounced.

There is now a

child of terrorists.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's just recall, but recall.

I'm glad you brought it up because it's an illustration of what we just talked about.

So you're presented with a dilemma if you're a San Francisco official,

municipal official, and that is that a lot of people who either claim they're marginalized, either racially or economically, they're going in and they're looting.

And the law says if they don't loot over, I guess, 950, under 1,000 basically,

then it's okay.

So it's okay.

I mean, they don't enforce it because why enforce it?

That means you have to go out and arrest somebody, and then there's going to be an incident because there's no deterrence on the police part.

So if somebody is a quote unquote marginalized person and resists arrest, there's going to be people with their cell phones.

They're going to be videoing it.

And it's a lose, lose, lose situation.

If you're a cop, you're either going to get hurt, you're going to get shot, you're going to be spat on, or if you do make the perfect arrest and the suspect goes quietly, he's going to be out before you get back to your precinct.

So they don't do it.

And then the city knows they don't do it and wants them not to do it.

And then what's the downside?

On the other hand, they're saying, hmm, those awful corporations will just have to take the laws.

And then the corporations take it, take it, take it, take it, because they don't want to think corporation abandons marginalized community.

But they finally do.

And then when they do, all of the marginalized people have nowhere to go.

And they don't care because they could care less about that.

Or the middle class has nowhere to go, especially they don't care.

So if you're a middle class person in, you know, San Francisco and there's 11 fewer Walgreens, who cares?

You're a nobody.

And they have no empathy for you.

So if you've, you know, your child gets sick and the doctor says you've got to get augmented right away.

And you get a prescription.

Now all of a sudden, instead of walking around the block, you've got to drive five miles in heavy traffic.

They don't care.

They would rather make you go through that because it's the least path of resistance.

The other, they do care.

And that's what's so frustrating and ultimately evil about the current manifestation of progressive ideology.

I think all the listeners should be reminded of that, that this ideology is not peace and brotherhood.

This is a deliberate war on people they don't like and that are upper middle class, middle middle class, lower middle.

They could not care.

The more those people and those three groups of that large conglomerate we call the middle class obey the rules, the more they're preyed and targeted upon.

And the more people feel that they have an exemption, they take advantage of it, and the more they're appeased.

They're no different than Neville Chamberlain.

They really are.

They're chamberlains.

And

only they're...

They're even more sympathetic with people that break the law.

So that district attorney knows that.

He's told everybody in his office, don't prosecute marginalized people.

Go after people who, you know, they put in a mailbox, you know, on Sutter Hill or something, and it's two inches too tall.

They'll pay that fine.

Well, Victor, we have one other thing we'll talk about on today's episode.

And you mentioned it before that

you have written a piece for your website, VictorHanson.com.

And this is an exclusive.

piece, as is much of the content there.

I forget if I made this picture earlier, but I do recommend to our listeners visit and consider subscribing.

It's five dollars for a month.

Stick your toe in the water with five bucks.

You like it?

That's fifty dollars a year.

And it at that rate, it's more content and cheaper than an issue of any of your favorite conservative magazine.

I think that's fair to say.

So, Victor, one of the sections you have is called Words Matter.

You did a piece on 20 words that mean nothing, and you give a definition, and it's word number five: diversity, and you define it as segregation revival.

Kind of funny, but kind of sad.

Some of the things are here of the 20 words are genuinely funny.

Yeah, it is segregation revival.

Again, we've talked before on podcasts about Martin Luther King might not know what the hell happened to the movement he started.

Any thoughts about that you want to talk about that term or anything about this piece?

Well, anytime the left wants cultural change or what Barack Obama called fundamental transformation, fundamentally transforming America.

You have to change the language.

And so that's what they always do.

We mentioned climate change or global warming or diversity or you never use the word quotas, you always use proportional representation or disparate impact.

If you have segregation, it's always going to be what a safe space.

And if you're going to have censorship, it's always a trigger warning, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I just, in that piece, I tried to remind people, these are the words that they're using.

And,

you know, they don't mean anything.

They're just political weaponry that the left uses to disguise reality, which they feel otherwise people would bite back.

They would say, you know what, I don't like that.

And so they try to control the language.

And racism is one of them that they use all the time.

And notice with racism,

how they use these adjectives, Jack.

It used to be there was racism and there was not racism.

And then as racism started to disappear and played a smaller and smaller role in society to the point where in the last, I think it's six years, African Americans of the middle class and other minorities have made better wage gains than white working people.

Or when we hear a disparate impact and it's a racist country and you look at the death figures, which the Pentagon just is meticulously careful to keep by race on every other thing, except they don't like to release death figures.

It takes a while to find them.

But it's about double the rate of white males.

White males are about 35% of the population.

They're dying in about 75%

in Afghanistan or Iraq.

So my point is

they don't want to talk about.

things like that because it confounds the idea that we are a racist society.

So what do they do?

The first thing they say to myself, oh, wow, we got to get the word racism.

But there's, I mean, what do we do with LeBron James and Oprah and the Obamas and all these black officials and people that are overrepresented, like Asian Americans and Missions and 16 different ethnic groups other than white that are making more per capita?

Ah, I know what we'll do.

We'll say systemic.

We will say implicit.

We will say structural.

We will say implied.

In other words, it's kind of invisible, but we will say it's invisible because it's everywhere.

It's like oxygen, the air we breathe.

And that's what they do.

It's systemic racism.

It's a micro, there's no aggression, but it's a microaggression.

We can train you if you pay me enough and give me enough letters after my name and title me.

I can spot microaggressions.

I can spot system.

You can't because you're a dummy.

You're a deplorable, but I'm going to tell you where it is.

And that's what they do.

And they create new words and new psychodramas, lookism, you know, and all of these isms and ologies.

I guess what we have to say, Jack, is why do they do it?

And I think it's endemic, as a lot of philosophers have pointed out, going back to people that were very nihilistic, like Passidus or Suetonius, the biographer, or maybe Petronius, the novelist.

And then you go all the way into the Christian pessimist, and then you can go into

Dante and some of the people in the early Renaissance, or even the German nihilist, Hegel, Spinger.

they all were on Nietzsche.

They were all into something.

And that is, when you go to a consensual society that champions human freedom, and when you go to a market capitalist economy that creates goods and services much more efficiently and than any other system, then you're creating a level of leisure and affluence and good living that's antithetical to the human condition, which were born flawed and imperfect.

And so you must, you must restrain your appetites in some manner, or you're going to be sit home all day and watch Oprah reruns and get delivered pizza, right?

So you do it with the church, you do it with religion, you do it with your family, you do it with shame, you do it any way you can, not to do the thing, or in other words, you become decadent.

And so what I'm suggesting to you, a lot of people don't do that.

And they've got so much money on their hands.

They've got so much time on their hands.

They, you know, I work in academia and I remember the first day I left farming and went up there for a full-time job.

I could not believe it, Jack.

I would be farming for 12 hours.

I get off the tractor.

I couldn't hear.

I would be spraying and I'd blow out a roller pump and all of a sudden I'd be covered with surfland or I'd get paraquat on my hand and it would burn for weeks.

And this was farming or I'd pull out a shotgun because a coyote

almost bit my dog or something.

I go up here and I realize, wait a minute, I'm not working 12 hours a day.

I'm working, you know, I teach four classes a semester.

That's a lot.

That's 12 hours a week.

I have my office hours.

I'm sitting in my office.

It's cool.

I got air conditioning.

And you know what?

I'm working nine months out of the year.

I'm working about 180 days.

I got Christmas.

I got, you know what?

I got a guaranteed pay.

I got something called tenure pretty soon.

This is a wonderful life.

And then I go out and I go home at five and I get on the tractor and I talk to these farmers and they were always upbeat.

They were kind of dry.

You know, hey, Victor, how's that discon doing?

You know, you just paid the bank $27 an hour to get on that tractor.

They were kind of dry, but they were, they were earthy.

They were, you know, they were, they knew.

And you'd get up there and you get in your head, you know, you'd be out there in a ladder or thinning trees or you'd be pruning vines.

You'd say, wait a minute.

tick tick tick tick insurance prorated today tick tick diesel fuel tick tick tick pruning tick tick tick wire tick, tick, tick liability, tick, tick maintenance.

And you would think, where's the money to counterbalance all that that went out today?

Oh, it's my packer, it's the co-op.

We will, we, we found that your raisins were substandard.

You had too many scars on your plum.

We're not going to pay you what we thought.

Sorry,

or your load of pizzas got sidetracked in Utah.

We can't, they weren't delivered.

Safeway didn't get them.

So you're paying for it.

What I'm talking about is what 90% of the world goes through, but not these people, not these people that are very wealthy in tech and academia and the media.

They have a whole different.

And so as a result, they divert their attention to us to make life miserable for us.

That's what they would do.

I would be in these academic lounges.

And the same is true to a degree at Stanford.

And people whine.

They complain.

Oh, man, Victor.

It is so unfair.

They're making us have an extra half hour of office hours.

Did you hear that?

Did you know know that you have to teach one night class every other semester?

Can you believe that?

I don't know.

You know what?

They're not giving A parking stickers to anymore.

We're going to have to walk 200 yards.

So it was always, that was what we had $200 in travel money and they fought like dogs over a piece of meat.

And I'm thinking, I just went to a guy who lost everything and he never said a word.

It was farming.

So

I think, you know, I'm not a Marxist.

I'm not an anti-Western.

I'm a very pro-American of the system and Western civilization and best system there has been that works.

But it puts a big burden on us.

And when you create these people like Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos

and

Mark Zuckerberg and the Google crowd and Jack Dorsey and I could, you know, and Diane Feinstein and Gavin Newsome and all of these people, and they start lecturing you about how you're going to live and you're going to do this and you're going to do that.

And then they go to the French laundry or they have a Chinese communist spy as their chauffeur.

Or,

you know,

they want people to wear diapers so they don't take bathroom breaks or some people think they do at Amazon.

Or they're investing in China.

It gets a little hard to take.

And I think that's at the root of all of our problem to sum up.

We've got an elite, a royal aristocratic elite.

They're kind of like Marie Antoinette that dressed up as a peasant and kind of took a hoe and did it outside Versailles in a little tiny fake peasant village.

That's what they do.

But

we're the people they practice on.

And they've got too much money, too much time on their hands.

So they're going to worry about all these cosmic things.

So John Kerry is going to fly all the way around the world when he's not on his multi-million dollar yacht on his wife's private jet.

And what's he not going to do?

He's not going to stop in New York and say, my God, we got 10,000 or San Francisco.

We got 20,000 people defecating on the street, urinating on the street, fornicating on the street with disease and sick.

This isn't civilization.

Or we think, wow, you can't walk.

If you're a poor person, you can't walk in downtown Chicago.

This isn't civilization.

No, no, I don't want to deal with that.

I want to be cosmic.

It's easier.

And I want to shake my finger at people.

If I shake my finger enough at people, then I don't have to be around these other earthy problems.

So, you know, I mentioned that before in a podcast.

Dickens has a lot of novels about that, about all of these Victorians that want to save the Zulus, or they feel so bad about the caste system and British imperialism.

Then you look at their homes, their kids, they're not out of control.

They can't handle, or there's Dickens is writing about poverty and starvation and thievery and horrific conditions in London right under their nose.

And yet they're worried about somebody, you know, way off because it's, it's solvable psychologically.

It means you don't have to do anything, but here you've got to get dirty.

So I always would say that when people, they would tell me, well, what can I do about the inner city?

Or what can I always say, go tutor somebody.

Right.

Go out to dinner with somebody.

Go, you know, work side by side with somebody.

And I learned that from my grandfather of all people he'd always say i i remember i came home one day from high school and that we had a kind of a caesar chavez propaganda thing and said i said wow i i think i'll go and listen to a caesar chavez rally said why do that

he goes you got manual and you got joe and you got all our workers just go out and work with them all day and see what it's like and see if you can cut it and see if you could live on one i give i do i give them a free house i try to help but if i'm not if i'm wrong you tell me so i would have to go out and pick grapes and I have to prune.

And I saw what it was like, but it wasn't like a student going to a Caesar Shabbat Israel.

And it really taught me to be very respectful of muscular labor and the people who have to do it.

And, but these people,

the only time that they deal with people of the underclass is their gardener or their landlady or their cook.

And they always say, I meet them sometimes.

They say, you know, I gave Yolanda some extra clothes.

Wow, great.

Thanks.

Or, you know, I pay top dollar.

Well, I think that's good.

But my point is, don't lecture people about how liberal they are and how they're going to have to listen to critical race theory unless your kids are going to have to listen to it.

Or don't tell everybody about global warming unless you're willing to give up, you know,

flying first class every week or a private jet.

They never do that.

You know, this is a lead into a plug for

what I do, which I'm going to preface by saying when I was a young boy, I worked on a vegetable truck.

We called the fruit and vegetable truck that went around the neighborhood

selling our wares to the little old ladies and taking bets also for the races at Yonkers Raceway.

But I'd like to think that we were selling plums grown in Selma on the Hanson farm.

So I just, I'm going to fantasize about that.

Also, another fantasy, by the way, just a little suggestion.

You've talked occasionally about your grandfather, and I think that would be great.

And

someday in your child's garden section of your website, maybe write about him because he sounds like a phenomenal guy.

But in seriousness, what you just mentioned about helping people afar, I mean, there truly is a difference between charity and philanthropy.

And where I work, you know, American philanthropic, even though the word philanthropic is in there, you know, we care about civil society.

And yeah, it's Bill Gates, the guy who's working at the Bill Gates Foundation, is more worried about some program, which for addressing an illness in Africa, which are typically very disruptive and don't end up not fixing any problem, but causing other problems.

But

no charity to the homeless guy in front of the building who needs a hamburger or something.

You're quite right about you have means to engage in the corporate works of mercy, write in your own zip code, probably right in your own street, do that instead of virtue signaling about things afar.

So that's my little spiel.

But Victor, I do want to recommend now to our listeners, again, that they visit your website, victorhanson.com.

And now I'm reading off of the Amazon website.

You can order The Dying Citizen.

You'll find a link there on Victor's website.

But here's one of the reviews left at Amazon by no name.

It's by Amazon Reader.

Even leave a name, but it's titled Brilliant Thinker and Great Accomplishment.

He gave the book five stars.

And he said, I knew the book might be brilliant, as well as all the previous ones, but this one touches the most and deepest strings of our society and our everyday lives.

The sound is high and very well pitched.

Bravo, maestro.

So thank you, nameless person, for that review on Amazon of the Dying Citizen.

And then, as you know, we read the comments that people regularly put on iTunes.

You have five-star rating there, Victor Davis-Hansen show is five-star rating.

Here's one comment left by Thomas, WPB, which I assume stands for West Palm Palm Beach, best thinker in public life.

Quote, no one is as clear and insightful a thinker as VDH, nor illustrates their point as effectively and efficiently.

Not only will you learn about current events, the classics, and World War II history, but just by listening, you'll get an education on speaking and storytelling.

And yeah, he's Thomas WPB, you're right.

Thanks for that.

Thanks to all that.

Leave ratings on iTunes and leave comments.

Again, we do read them and we appreciate them.

As for me, Victor, well, you have with VictorHansen.com.

Folks, go there, subscribe to the special service.

I'd encourage our listeners, if they're interested in the little things I do, centerforceivilsociety.com, check it out.

And also write the weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts, and you can find a link to that.

Subscribe, it's free, civilthoughts.com.

Thanks kindly.

We thank everyone for listening.

Victor, thank you for sharing your wisdom on so many subjects today.

I want to encourage our listeners to check out also The Culturalist,

where Victor and the great Sammy Wink talk about things historical and other matters, classical and historical.

Victor, thanks so much for letting me be your host.

I really appreciate it.

I appreciate listening and talking to you.

I know it's something that many other people are envious of.

So y'all have a good week and we'll be back again soon with another episode.

And thank everybody for listening and thank you, Jack, once again.

God bless all.

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