The Culturalist - Election Special

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is The Culturalist.

Today we're going to talk about the elections

and I want to remind everybody that Victor is a classicist, philologist, military historian, and commentator.

And so we will be tapping his talents as a commentator this morning.

His supporters find him sober and judicious.

His critics find him annoying and hard to debate.

And you can find that on the Angry Reader on his website.

We're talking today, as I said, about the elections.

But first, let's hear a word from our sponsors.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles, and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works: criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property, and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home titlelock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home, title lock.com/slash victor.

Welcome back.

It's a happy day, I think, for Republicans.

We've done a lot to win positions, offices in Virginia and New York, and New Jersey seems to be up in the air.

How are you doing today, Victor?

I'm doing fine.

I'm doing fine.

New York, I don't think we can call Democrat Eric Adams a

Republican, yeah.

But I see your point that he ran on a law and order agenda and he was much more conservative than the pathetic Bill de Blasio.

Yeah.

And so it's a happy day for all of us law and order people, I suppose.

Maybe we can call it that.

Well, we have lots of races.

I would like like to start with the obvious one, I hope,

the Virginia race between the former governor Terry McAuliffe and the first-time politician, Glenn Youngkin.

And Glenn Youngkin seems to have won and McAuliffe has conceded the race.

What are your thoughts on that race, Victor?

Well, I mean, before the election, of course, People like Kamala Harris were saying this is a very important race and the racists are all out.

And they use the Charlottesville January 6th, Trump is under every bed, your racist, racist, racist arguments.

And so they thought it was a cinch.

I was following it this September when I was at Hillsdale talking to some political analysts there.

And at that time, Yunken had started to break that 10 to 15 point deficit.

And by the time I got home, he had really focused on the school board.

And so the way to look at it is this.

There were these local, regional, state, I guess you could call them, blasting caps or ignition switches.

And those were being insulted by these half-educated bureaucrats that advised the school board, the school board itself, Merritt Garland, sicking the FBI on parents, the whole transgender scam where a quote-unquote transgendered

boy had raped a girl and her father was treated as if he was some dregs, deplorable, chump, clinger, etc., etc.

But those ignited people,

but they didn't create the fuel for the real explosion.

And the explosion, of course, is that it's a blue state.

And they not only lost the governorship to somebody never held office before,

they lost the lieutenant governor, and they lost it to the first black woman to hold state office, this Winsom Sears.

That's amazing.

And then they lost the Attorney General to a Hispanic Cuban-American, Morales, I think his name is.

And what I'm getting at is it was a controlled repudiation of the local issues of quote-unquote anti-racist, racist,

and the idea that parents have no voice in school board.

And that got people angrier about the first chance to say something about the lunatic last 10 months.

What I mean by lunatic is they were also voting to say,

I don't object to a porous border alone.

We have no border.

Joe Biden, you destroyed the border.

And then you put salt in our wounds when you're going to pay $450,000 to illegal aliens who broke the law when they crossed, broke the law when they stayed, and probably will break the law when they get fake ID.

And you did that.

And I've had no way to express and vent my anger.

And then you've been printing money, $2 trillion, and not that Trump didn't have the COVID relief package, but now you're having a $3.5 trillion

quote-unquote infrastructure that's not really about infrastructure as much as more entitlements.

And it's really going to be $5 trillion.

And you have near zero interest.

You know what you're doing?

Look at Venezuela.

Anytime you have zero interest rates and you print money, you get not just five to seven inflation immediately like we have now, but we're headed for stagflation.

They haven't had attempts to vent that.

They look at the shelves and they say, wait a minute, this isn't a political difference.

This is a stuff of life.

I can't buy anything.

There's no turkeys in the freezer, the department of the supermarket.

There's no Christmas toys.

Look at Port of LA.

Look at Savannah.

Look at all these ports.

People are not working.

When I look for answers, there's Pete Buttigig, and he took two months off.

He's not a guy with a cigar in his mouth, a teamster, you know, gets on the television, you know, the old type of transportation secretary that Democrats used to appoint and say, God damn it, I'm going to go out there and get the boys, and we're we're going to unload those containers.

We're going to get it done.

Get her done.

Or maybe Ronald Reagan with the airlines.

Yeah, there's none of that.

And instead, there is, oh, stay home.

You've been traumatized.

We're going to give you another $600 a week.

And, you know, if you want to go out, wink and nod and go get some cash and work part-time.

And they're mad about the shelves.

So there's not going to be Christmas turkeys.

There's not going to be Christmas presents as we're accustomed to them in the past.

And And if they are, they're going to be sky high because

there's no port facilities that are working.

There's no supply chain that we're accustomed to.

And we have a

transportation secretary that we're told that A, he's gay and B, his husband and he were raising two small children and C, he took time off.

And that's what all the news accounts are about.

They're not about what he did.

He's not an old teamster with a cigar in his mouth.

The Democrats usually appoint to transportation that says, get her done, and goes out to the port and walks among the truckers and says get the hell working and goes to the longshoreman says get the hell working and then you know talks to the name it's not that type of era that we're in and people are angry because it's not working and then they look and they say wow, I just filled up $5.10 along the California coast, $4.50 everywhere in California, in New York and Illinois.

And they're saying, this doesn't work.

I can't fill up my car.

There's a limit on $100 of gas.

It doesn't fill up the tank.

$100 doesn't fill up the tank.

And why?

We've had, you know, energy shortages in the past, but this was self-induced.

And so they're saying to themselves, wait a minute, Joe Biden cut back 2 million barrels plus per day of production.

And what did he do?

He went and yelled at the Saudis and Putin and said, why don't you give us the carbon fuels that I don't want to produce?

That's lunatic.

Just like the open borders lunatic, just like the inflationist lunatic just like the critical legal theory that you know laws are just reflections of white male slandered values and therefore they have no connection with natural law so people are saying i i don't want to walk out at night in chicago i'm not going to go in places i used to go in san francisco what happened who did this and when they ask those questions they find out that they were self-induced self-induced recession self-induced inflation self-induced border place mess self-induced energy crisis, self-induced crime spike.

And when they want answers, they're told, racist, you're a racist, you're a racist.

And they even wheel out Van Jones, the guy who got $100 million from Jeff Bezos, quote unquote, because he was a voice for calm and unity.

And what's he do?

He does what he always does on election night.

Oh, this is about white, this is about racism.

This is the Delta variant of Trumpism.

He yells and screams, and he's back to the white lash argument.

So they have have no answer other than to call people racist.

And then Trump is what?

Under every American bed.

You get home, Trump's under your bed.

He did it.

That's the second argument.

And the fact is that

there is no Trump as far as social media

concerned.

They stripped him of Twitter and Facebook.

He's not able to communicate.

And

the more that we don't see it, hear his tweets, the more we remember what he did.

And it was good.

And it contrasts with Biden.

And so Trump is nowhere but he's everywhere in their mind and that's not adequate so people were angry about these cosmic national issues but the local ones set them off and it reverberated it's going to be very close in new jersey it had there's going to be a lot of close faces in the virginia state legislature probably will i think go republican and who knows maybe you'll have a republican governor in all places new jersey so what this message was was manifold And yeah, didn't they, in the campaigns, wheel out the Democratic elite to help these guys campaign?

Didn't they?

Even Biden go down there?

Did Obama all

plus 41% approval rate Biden, yes.

And

what Barack Obama thought, you know what, I'm kind of bored at Martha's Vineyard and I've got to, the season's ending, so I got to get my limo and go back to Calorama Mansion from this mansion.

So maybe just detour a little bit.

I'm kind of tired.

I want to shoot some hoops.

I'll go down to Virginia and call everybody a racist and say that this is all ginned up and these parents are nuts.

And that'll get him elected.

And then, and then Terry McCall, taking a cue from those brilliant political spin masters, Obama and Biden, said, you know what?

I'm going to finish out with a flourish.

We have 50% African Americans in the public schools, and we only have, you know, we have 80% white teachers.

This is racist.

That's just what everybody wanted to hear.

And so that's, yeah, they wheeled them out.

So what is the lesson?

The lesson is

if you're going to be anti-racist, racist, it's not going to work.

How weird to say that Youngkin is a racist and the Republicans and the conservatives and the parents are racist when they're trying to stop racist material in the school.

And they elected the only Latino and black statewide candidates in the history of Virginia.

And so what the left is really saying is

we would rather have non-minority candidates if they are politically correct and they follow the dictates of white elite multimillionaires like Terry McAuliffe, who defeated in the primary minority candidates.

And that was a big lesson.

The other thing for Republicans is, you know,

I know I've worn this out, but you got to get even.

You can't just get mad.

And I know that Yunkin is a corporate guy and he's a multi-million, million, millionaire and all that stuff.

But he kept the Trump base.

He didn't say, you know, you're yokels, or he didn't do the Romney or the Never Trump stuff.

He got a higher percentage of some of those Trump counties than even Trump did.

And Trump endorsed him very wisely so.

And he didn't repudiate Trump.

And they hammered him.

And everybody says, well, you know, he's not really a MAGA candidate.

Okay, but they said he was.

And everybody said he ran distancing himself from Trump.

Not quite, because it didn't matter to the left.

They tied him and said he's Trump, Trump, Trump.

That was the only thing they had against him.

And he didn't shy from it.

But

he went to the independents and the swing voters and the suburbanites and the so-called soccer moms.

And he said, this is not about me being a conservative and you being a Democrat or independent.

It's about these people are nuts.

They're crazy.

And they

destroyed your way of life.

And that's something, something, this get even, not get mad, is something that all of these national candidates, Trump included, are really going to have to think about in two years.

So final bottom line.

I'll give you an example.

I've given it before.

Under this new paradigm, you don't say that Anthony toes like a girl and keep him there.

You say the following.

His man has been a dedicated public servant.

We all across the political spectrum admire what he's done.

But as an octogenarian, I just can't ask him to sacrifice any more of his golden years.

He's done enough.

And so I'm happy to announce, and he's in full agreement, that tomorrow morning he will start his retirement.

And that's a much better approach to speak softly with a sledgehammer than loudly with a gavel.

Okay, so then you know there's no one who wants to jump on this Republican agenda is winning bandwagon more than me.

But I have have a question for you because McAuliffe got 48.4% of the vote.

And Youngkin, well, I want to say only got 51% because that's not much of a spread.

So I don't feel like, I mean, even Joe Biden won by 10 points in Virginia in the last election.

So I don't feel necessarily like this is the everybody's jumping on.

I mean, so I don't feel that way, but why would we interpret those results that way?

Why?

Because this is not a purple state.

This is a blue state.

And the Republicans were prepared.

They didn't have the money.

He self-financed a lot, but he did not have the money of that Washington, Virginia left-wing nexus.

So the Democrats took this state, they thought, a seasoned pro.

And he was the most seasoned of anybody, Terry McCall.

He's been a corporate lackey Clintonite for 30 years, multi-millionaire.

And they put him in there and they said, this is a blue state and it's, it's in the bag.

And it was.

And they didn't care about any of their so-called diversity principles.

He steamed rolled minority candidates.

And then they had a media blitz.

And they thought, wow, this is a Mitt Romney candidate.

Another guy's got a lot of money.

He's going to come in, no political experience.

We're going to just smash him.

We're going to call him, we're going to do the same thing we did.

We're going to call him Trump and we're going to call him a racist.

And it's a done deal.

Look at Gavin Newsom.

He

was not recalled.

Same thing.

That's what all Gavin Newsom did.

He said that Larry Elder was a white supremacist and a racist, and he said he was a Trump footseat.

Okay, and what did it do?

I mean, when the Republicans have time, and there was no time in the recall election in California, but when they have time and they think about it and they start to turn the tables, as Jungson did, and said, these people are the racist.

I'm the one running with fellow people on a statewide statewide ticket that are what you call you leftist racist, not white.

I don't care what they are.

But the point is, I am the diverse person, not you.

And I'm not going to take it anymore.

And you're not going to stick the FBI on me.

And parents do have control of students and the country is falling apart.

And you did it.

And that's a very effective message.

And he did it in a way that didn't make that suburban, you know, that guy in Arlington or somewhere or, I don't know, Prince George County, get up and say, wow, if I vote for Youngkin, I'm going to be ostracized at work, or I can't go to the teacher's lounge and talk to people.

He made it acceptable.

And what I'm suggesting is to all of the Republican candidates is, I'm not saying to be John McCain or Mitt Romney, but focus the anger and say the following.

You have a finite number of outbursts and use them very carefully.

You're all hunters.

And you know, when you go dove hunting or quail hunting or duck hunting, you don't just go through your magazine.

You selectively shoot and you get become effective.

And so anytime you rant and rave and it's not going to lend itself to a political electoral voting ballot advantage, it's counterproductive.

And fire people, but don't talk about firing them.

And I think Trump can learn a lot too.

I think he will learn a lot if he wants to run again.

Do you think that this incessant calling people racists is going to fall to the wayside?

Because it seems to me that it's very hard to unbind.

Well, when you talk to the wayside, this thing was a Jacobin moment.

I mean, where did Robespierre come out of?

He was just a nothing.

And then he came out and said, you know what, I'm going to kill my, and he got, and where, who was Stalin?

He was a two-bit former bank robber.

These people come out of nowhere.

So this anti-ti-racism racism, this faker Kendi, you know, this is a Ponzi scheme.

That's who he is.

He's a Bernie Madoff of the race industry.

He came out of nowhere with one book.

And then it was like a pet rock or a hula hoop.

Everybody wanted to say, I'm an anti-racist because it was good woke insurance.

If I may have a bad principal of a high school says, who knows?

They may go back 20 years and find an email.

They may find a tweet I did 10 years ago, but I took out woke insurance.

And I know what woke insurance is because I see it every day from Stanford administrators who write, this is not who we are.

It's come to my attention that there was an incident and I must, that kind of stuff.

And that's walk insurance.

And that's what they do.

But the point is, it wasn't based on reality because this is not a racist country.

This is not 1958 in Salma, Alabama.

And so they know that.

And it was a fraud.

It was a fake.

It was a hysteria.

And all it takes is enough good people to say, you know what?

I'm looking at this big, fat, ugly emperor, and he doesn't have any lavish new fabric on.

He's buck naked.

It's a joke.

And if people do that, and I think they will, so immediately to answer your question, if you're Joe Manchin and you're right across the border, what are you thinking?

70% of my constituent voted for Trump.

They like me because I'm folksy.

They like the idea that I'm a Democrat because I'm conservative, but that reminds me of their parents.

party and everybody in West Virginia likes the idea that I'm an old, good old Democrat.

Okay.

And then he's thinking, but these people are nuts McAuliffe has surrounded himself with, and they lost, and they lost in Virginia.

And am I going to go out and empower that agenda and then go back and, what, face my West Virginia?

They may get angry at me.

And Sinema's thinking even more so in Arizona.

And then there's about 100 Democratic candidates.

coming up for reelection who want to run and plus

who want to run in a serious fashion, who think they can win in a trump plus congressional district you know two trump minus two trump that kind of district and do they want to run with the you're a racist trump did it and joe biden's record is great and parents have no say in the school district and we got to have more critical waste theory i don't think so

so i think it's going to send a message you know to encourage you know like Voltaire said of the execution of Admiral Bing, you know, it's every once in a while they have this strange habit of hanging an admiral to encourage the others.

Every once in a while, there's a key, close, but a very key election to encourage the others.

And that's what I think they're wise.

Do I think that's going to happen in a logical inductive world?

Yes.

Do I think it's going to happen?

Not so much.

Because their attitude, anytime you're a zealot, the attitude is, oh, I was too zealous.

I was too extremist.

I alienate people.

I got to be a little bit moderate.

No, it's okay.

We lost Virginia because we didn't call people racist enough.

We should have said they have no role.

They can't even come to school boards.

We should have told them Joe Biden's record is so wonderful.

They're stupid.

They don't appreciate it.

That's how they're going to react to this, and they're going to lose.

Okay.

But I would like to follow along with you on that maybe racism will not be used so much politically, but you'll never get rid of the facts of things in the sense that there was slavery, there was a Jim Crow South, there is today lots of poverty and crime among the black community.

And that's where they had the nexus.

They said, well, there's lots of poverty and crime among the black community because we had slavery and Jim Crow and racism.

So my point is just that I see this coming back up again and again.

And the anecdote to that is not

to elect a Mitt Romney or somebody that won't address it in an honest way, in a Shelby Steele Tom Soul way.

And the way to address it is saying, I do not want to get some big government program that makes a bunch of white liberals feel really good about themselves, but segregates them from the problem by paying woke insurance or penance money.

I am going to deal with it.

If I'm going to run for governor of Virginia, I'm going to make sure that I have a black woman as my running mate as lieutenant, you know, lieutenant governor.

I'm going to make sure there's somebody from a Cuban American that's going to run for Attorney General.

I'm going to address that.

So the problem in the United States on race, it is not the Hispanic community or the Black American community.

It's the white liberal community.

And I want to put a little dash there, the white liberal, wealthy community.

And I don't know what got into their heads, but there is some sick psychological contortion in which they become adamant and they demonize brilliant people like Shelby Steele,

or they demonize Jason Riley, or they demonize Tom Sowell, or they demonize any black politician.

And they do so because that threatens them.

That say, you know what, I told that guy what to think and he's not thinking what I did.

And I did so much as a white, wealthy, affluent liberal, suburban, and they're not listening to me.

But I think people are slowly catching on that it's some weird psychological condition because you look at these way these people live and the clothes they buy, the places they go,

the people they hang out with, you really think that they want to be with people other than themselves?

Why don't these white liberals just say, you know what?

The teachers unions are so great and charter schools are so bad.

And that's why I have my kids in the public school and fences and walls don't work that's why I tore down mine around my estate in Woodside in Palo Alto or why don't they say I believe in diversity so I'm I go out to dinner every other night with people who don't look like myself or I go and I'm in the PTA with a bunch of black people why don't they do that but they never do that they never never never do that and as the price of never never doing that they construct this cosmic cosmic anointed justice.

Tom Sowell spent a life charting, outlawing this discrepancy.

And it's very hard to break because these people are very articulate.

They have a lot of credentials.

They're very wealthy.

They've got, you know what they are?

They are the logical evolution of the abolitionists.

The abolitionists were right about slavery, of course.

But anytime anybody said something to the abolitionist,

this puritanical Protestant New England kind of self-righteousness that was really, I mean, it was, I have a lot of admiration because they, they created a civilization out of rocks and scrub.

This was not the deep loam of the Shenandoah Valley.

So you got to admire them.

But my point is this, they were not Western pragmatists.

of Michigan or Indiana or Ohio.

So when they went to the abolitionists and said, we're going to have a devastating war unless we can solve this slavery thing.

Maybe we can buy slaves.

Maybe the federal government can just take money and buy these 3% of the southerners off and then bring slaves and bring them to the north and get them out of that toxic environment.

And maybe we won't have a civil war.

It was no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

We don't want to do this.

And they didn't have come up with a pragmatic alternative.

I don't know if there was one, but they didn't try is what I'm saying.

They're so damn self-righteous.

Same thing with this group.

They do not want to say, I believe in the melting pot, integration, intermarriage, assimilation, and I'm going to live it.

And so.

Yeah, you know,

I was just thinking the same only a little earlier example.

The Puritans ended up in that horrible soil up there in Boston and around that.

And they, you have to hand it to them.

They.

created a civilization that was more viable than any other colonial civilization and more prosperous.

They They created great universities.

And yet they were the ones that were so zealous.

That

zealousness comes with a very productive, capable individual who then also can become a Salem witch hunter as well.

And remember that in their defense,

the Puritans and the abolitionists and that whole New England self-righteousness, they did believe in God and they did believe in transcendence and they did try to be sparse in their own private lives and they did sacrifice.

They projected their views on everybody else with no compromise because they thought that they were Puritans and they had a freeway to heaven and everybody else was going to go to purgatory or hell.

Okay,

this group does not have a God,

these Puritans.

They do not have a God.

They don't believe in God.

They don't believe in transcendence.

They don't believe in sin.

They don't believe in the redemption.

They don't believe in the Sermon on the Mount Forgiveness.

Their God is one, is radio.

They are

French revolutionary Jacobins.

Their divine power is divine wisdom, reason.

And that's not going to, I mean, that's why we get this climate change fanatic religious fervor.

That's why we get this anti-racism fervor, anti-racism, racism fervor.

They pursue every initiative as if it is part of the New Testament, but they don't believe in the New Testament.

So if you don't have a God, as Nietzsche and other German nihilists said, then you'll find something to replace it with.

And it's usually a lot worse.

And they've replaced their God with, I don't know, Margaret Sanger and abortion, that theory, or they've replaced it with, you know, we're going to shoot you if you drive another car.

And they also have one other thing.

They're a priestly class.

a preacher class, an evangelical class.

They do believe that people, if you go back and read of the differences between Frederick Douglass and Lloyd Garrison and all those people, they do believe that they are superior, that they have devoted their lives to reason and education erudition.

And if you disagree with them, they don't have any tolerance for you.

They always say, I'm better educated.

Look, I have an MA.

I have a Master of Social Work.

You mentioned the Angry Reader.

One thing I always do in the Angry Reader is I have my Angry Reader points scorecard.

And one of the ways ways you can really hit the bonanza win the jackpot is those letters after your name.

And I don't put them all in, but it's like, you're an idiot.

You don't know anything.

And no detail, no detail.

You're a racist.

You're a homophobe.

And then it's like, Dr.

Susan L.

Smith, BA, MS,

M-A-M-S,

M-A, P-H-D-J-D, M-D, Dead, Dead E, Dead E.

And it's always the argument of authority.

You saw it with Anthony Fauci

when Rand Paul had him dead to rights.

And he said, You gave money through Echo Health to subsidize gain of function research in the Wuhan lab.

Can you explain why you did that when it was outlawed in the United States?

And what did he say?

You don't know what you're talking about.

I'm Anthony Fauci.

And it was the argument from authority.

How dare you talk to me?

And that's the attitude that people really don't like.

They don't like these people with letters after their name talking down to them.

I learned that from my mother and she had a law degree from Stanford.

And

when I got home with a PhD from that university, she said to me, you better be very, very careful because you've been around people who will tell you that you're part of their club.

You're not part of their club.

And my dad, I've said on other broadcasts, you better get down there and wire that dehydrator right away.

And I don't give a damn what you learned at Stanford.

And that was a very good message.

And I remember right before my mother died of a brain tumor very early in her 60s, she called up and said,

okay, I can't go to this judicial conference, so I can join in the farmer's market in Santa Cruz.

So your dad and I are driving over there, and we'll meet you at 5 a.m.

So we drove over in a van and we had like three little kids and all of the plums, peaches, nectarines, tomatoes.

And at 5.30, my dad drives up and he used the Oldsmobile and he and my mom put on their little, I don't know what your aprons and we all get at the table and we start hawking all of our organic fruit for six hours.

And then we drive back in this van and they follow us home.

That's what she did and that was very important.

She wasn't doing it to be fake populist.

People know that you're not going to have a happy life unless you balance the physical with the intellect, muscularity with the brain.

And you have to have a balance.

And that's important to keep your bearings.

And we've created this artificially divorced Silicon Valley Wall Street corporate suburban lifestyle.

And when you argue from authority like the left does, it's...

It's inevitably faulty.

Yeah, it is.

Can I ask you one more thing before I join this bandwagon of we've entered a new day and things are going to be getting better?

I didn't say that, Sammy.

I didn't say that.

I said they were going to take the long lesson from it.

Okay.

Okay.

But then not going to change them at all.

I have one more objection to getting on that bandwagon, which is that this movement doesn't really have an a head or an icon like the Jacobin movement.

I mean, once they did Robespierre in and took his head off, everybody in that movement was, whoa, we don't, there's no

head rolling in this movement, and it's broadspread and it's infused into our very institutions so I don't I don't see it leaving so quickly and so ashamedly that works both ways because

it's like saying well the Hula hoop fad won't will always be with us because there's no Mr.

Hula hoop on television that's the national icon or when I was in graduate school I I'm not kidding, when I was in Palo Alto, I would go to these stupid

Stanford University Mall high-end boutiques, and there they were, pet rocks.

And they had a little box, and they said, and I didn't know what it was.

And I asked this, I remember going into, I think it was Macy's or somewhere, and they said, you get your own certificate about where this rock came from.

And it was like a pet, and they were charging, in today's dollars, something like 30 bucks.

But there was no Mr.

Pet Rock, right?

It was like the Say Them witch trials.

There was, I know there were the Saythem judges and the witches but it was it was inside people because people are no damn good for the most part and what makes them good people are religion and tradition and custom and you know trying to to mitigate your your innate natural impulses and appetites so there is no mr race critical race theory person

except maybe Kendi and a few people.

And he said the other day he was horrified that his daughter daughter was transgendering.

He's not even a national icon.

And so what I'm getting at is a double-edged sword.

Yes, if you have a national icon, you can galvanize people.

And yes, if you have a national icon, then they're dethroned, then the movement runs out of gas.

But this is amorphous.

And so what they do need now is somebody to say, you know what?

Critical race theory is what I really want.

Why doesn't Kamala Harris say that?

Why doesn't Joe Biden say that?

Instead of

cowards.

Because they know that it's intellectually bankrupt.

The reason you don't have a national leader other than a tenured professor, every bad idea starts in tenured professors.

Think about it.

And the reason you don't is that nobody wants to be tied to a theory that says you can discriminate or you can be racially discriminatory to stop that.

Everybody knows you can't do that.

Once you have that means for any noble end, it doesn't work.

It It takes on a life of its own.

And we've already seen that.

And what we're doing right now in America is everybody is saying to themselves, I got to play the odds.

Let me see now.

Did I have a grandfather that was Mexican American?

Wasn't my great aunt Native American?

Didn't I have something that I, a cachet?

I have a son that's gay, don't I?

And then they're also saying, hmm, who's going to win this thing?

I got to think of a memo I can do or a speech at my department meeting or PTA.

I got to say something to establish my credentials.

So when this mob comes out, I'm protected.

Or maybe I can join the mob and if it doesn't be effective, I can jump off at the last moment.

But it's calculated.

You said, well, there's this legacy of slavery.

Yes.

And we were addressing it with 60 years and 20 trillion dollars of this civil rights movement, Great Society.

And we had an African-American president, and we've done that.

And everybody's making a goodwill gesture so that we come a society in which race is incidental, not essential, except the wealthy, influential architects of liberalism.

They're not.

They want to perpetuate racism.

They want to protect that quote-unquote racism for their own particular power.

We could all get along tomorrow if everybody just got up in the morning and said, you know what?

I don't care how I look in the mirror.

I don't think that my appearance means anything.

I know this country has had a lot of problems because birds of a feather, as Socrates said, flock together and that's a dangerous idea that's innate in the human brain but i'm going to try to kind of avoid it and if i see somebody that doesn't look like me or doesn't come from the same place and i like them or i want to hire them i'm going to do it i don't care if anybody just had that modest humility about race i think we would all be very off instead of being these crusaders and what we're seeing now in the race movement is to tell you the truth this is very controversial but they're saying you know there was something to that jim crow movement they had this idea of one sixteenth and that meant if you had one sixteenth of black blood If our racist genealogists could prove that you had somebody way back there, a great, great, great,

then you were black.

And now they're saying the same thing.

If you can show us on a DNA chart, if you have hike cheekbones, if you can wear Native American get up like Wardrobe, you are a minority.

It's an obsession.

It's the same obsession.

And it's the same segregation.

We don't want people who don't look like us drinking at our water fountain.

Now it's, we don't want people like us coming to our safe space lounge.

And we don't want people that don't look like us writing something that we can't have a trigger warning.

Or we don't want people that don't look like us going to our separate graduation.

And I can tell you that throughout the history of conflict, anybody who said, I am going to adopt pernicious means or the means of the enemy to get a noble result failed.

It just doesn't happen.

Okay, so I think we're going to have to stop that right here because we have to go.

But it's a good ending because we've ended on people need to get up in the morning and not assume that their superficial appearance is essential.

And we each need to continue to fight this woke agenda from according to our station.

I think that's how you always put it, Victor.

So we need to go ahead and end this here.

And I want to remind people that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And we welcome you to his website at victorhanson.com.

And thank you very much, Victor.

That was very interesting and enlightening on the results of the election.

And I stayed up very late, but I must plead to the audience that I'm not sure about the final result, A in New Jersey, and I never put it past the left that we may find a trove of votes maybe maybe this afternoon in Virginia, but I hope not.

All right, thank you very much.

This is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

Thank you.