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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star and namesake is Victor Davis Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Victor, we have a lot to talk about for this episode of The Classicist.

Not a lot of time.

We're going to come out of the box talking about Rome and Byzantium, but right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the classicist recording today on October 20th, Wednesday.

I'm Jack Fowler.

Victor, you wrote a piece for American Greatness.

Do encourage our listeners to go to American Greatness, to read the whole thing.

It's called, It's titled, Is America Becoming Rome versus Byzantium?

And I bow to you, my friend, a great classicist.

Why do you have this dynamic, this ancient dynamic, to describe the state of America today?

There's all this talk that we're in a civil war, that people are self-selecting and geography is a force multiplier now as it was in the Civil War.

We don't have a Mason-Dixon line, but we do have a red state interior and a bi-coastal elite that is ideologically at odds with one another.

Everybody understands that.

I don't buy into the idea there's going to be a civil war, obviously.

But I do understand there's tensions rising because Donald Trump is controversial.

But more important, there is no Democratic Party now.

There's not a liberal movement anymore.

There's not progressive.

These are Jacobins that have hijacked that party.

And they're sort of like what happened to the Labor Party with Michael Foot.

I mean, these are socialists.

They alienate people and they want to destroy the country as we knew it.

Okay.

But I don't think they're going to fight.

First of all, I don't think they would win, and they don't have the majority of the people.

But more importantly, I think there's going to be two radical reinterpretations of America, and that one interpretation will be viable and one won't.

And that's kind of what happened in the latter third century when Diocletian said, you know what, this empire is too big.

And we're going to divide it up.

And then in 313, Constantine said, you know what, I'm going to remove the capital from Rome to where there's stability and there's greater wealth and there's greater continuity.

And I'll found this great city on the old side of Byzantium, Constantinople, the city, the polis of Constantine.

And then over from the third to the lat fifth, the next 200 years, there was a drift.

And the drift was the Western Empire did not have defensible borders or could not defend them on the Rhine and Danube.

Its former colonialized peoples in Gaul,

in Belgium, in parts on the border with Germany, in North Africa, in Spain, in Portugal, in Britain, they began to rebel or they felt the central government was rotten at the core and could not create the same forces of a Roman melting pot.

Kiwis Romanus sum, I am a Roman citizen, did not apply anymore.

Latin started to drop, drop, certain case endings, conjugations were simplified, and we started to see the emergence very early of what would become the modern Romance languages.

Okay.

In the East,

they doubled down.

They said, no, we are Romani, Romanoi,

but we're Greek speaking, and we are going to stay.

intact under the aegis of Hellenism, the Greek language, the traditions of classical Greece, the Greek, what would become, what would become the Greek Orthodox Church, but a different, more rigid form of Christianity.

And we're going to promote scientific inquiry, etc., but we're going to concentrate on defense.

The walls of Constantinople were the largest in the ancient world.

Technologically,

they produced Greek fire.

They built the greatest cathedral, the largest dome in the world until the 17th century completion, final completion of the Vatican.

And at Hagia Sophia, they recalibrated all of Roman law under Justinian.

And

in the 520s and 30s, under the twins of Narsus, the eunuch general, and Belisarus, his favorite for a while, they reclaimed most of North Africa,

excepting Egypt.

And they took a lot of southern Italy.

And there was, for a time, this Byzantine model proved successful when Rome was in chaos.

The West was gone.

And it lasted for a thousand years until Black Tuesday of May 29th, 1453.

So my point is that what we're seeing in the United States now is some of the red states are saying we don't need to be globalist.

We don't need to adopt different constitutions.

We don't need to get rid of the Electoral College or the nine-person Supreme Court or bring in extra states.

We don't believe there's three genders.

We don't believe that Christianity is anti-enlightenment.

And they're doubling down on their traditions and customs and constitutional legacies.

And

even though they're not the cosmopolitan Roman, Western Roman type of citizen with windows on one side to the EU, on the other side to the

dynamic juggernauts in Korea and Japan and China.

So we're self-selecting, but we're not at war.

And they never went to war, Rome and the West, not until

the Fourth Crusade when the Frankish kingdoms and Germanic kingdoms started to appear.

So I don't think we're going to go to war, but I do think there's going to be two different paradigms of what America is.

And blue state America, I don't think is going to be viable.

By that, I mean most liberals when they have to move, they go to Tennessee.

They don't go to Chicago.

Great city of Chicago.

Remember that was a city that could do things?

Unlike New York, we were told in the 60s under Mayor Daly.

That's a city that can't do things.

Portland's a mess.

I've got to go to Seattle this week.

I'm dreading.

Last time I went there, I watched in my hotel room.

People spun Brodies in the intersection, shooting guns in the air with impunity.

I don't want to go there.

I don't want to go to Minneapolis.

I don't want to go to any of these places.

I don't want to go to San Francisco.

I just got back yesterday from Los Angeles.

I don't like walking around Los Angeles.

I did that all morning.

Just don't like it anymore.

I don't like the chaos that I see in that city.

That blue state model is unsustainable.

It's unsustainable at the border.

It's unsustainable economically.

It's unsustainable energy-wise.

It's unsustainable racially-wise.

It's unsustainably criminally justice-wise.

And the red state is not.

And I think people are self-selecting.

And so I think one model is going to erode.

And what happens when it erodes, I don't know.

But the red states are becoming popular.

Nobody says in Tennessee or Florida or Texas,

oh my gosh, this is so boring and things just don't work.

I'm moving up there to Minneapolis or Seattle.

I got to get back to my city by the bay.

I left my heart in San Francisco.

And I'm talking about naturally beautiful cities like Seattle and Portland, much more attractive than many of the red state places.

They're naturally beautiful and they were well run and they were avant-garde and they were visionary and now they're third world messes.

Yeah.

I was down in New York City today, Victor, earlier and I was just glad that there were so many people out on the street smoking pot because it kind of dampened the smell of urine everywhere.

I mean it's really urine.

I mean I was Eeyore's cabinet every day there in New York two weeks ago.

I mean I've never seen that city until I was 18 when I first went there and I thought Times Square looked like it was a junkyard junkyard.

And it's starting to reappear that way.

There's junk and garbage on the ground.

There's a lot of people who come up to you and mumble something as homeless.

It seemed like every third business is shut down.

And

whether it comes back, it depends on whether they're going to get another Giuliani-like figure or Bloomberg.

I don't know if they will, but it doesn't seem like it's a safe, clean place to be, is what I'm trying to say.

Well, Victor, kind of in the same ballpark of topics, you wrote a piece for your website, and this is part of the exclusive content, but we'll talk about this from time to time.

I do want to encourage people to, you know, go read it, become a member.

The piece is titled The Ironies of the Rioting Youth of 2020.

And I want to just read a quick paragraph here.

But if you could talk more about the piece and like, what are the ironies?

But anyway, before you do that, here's what you wrote.

On one hand, those toppling statues are canceling their own on the internet, pose as vicious malice against the hardcore shock troops of the revolution.

Their brand is vile profanity, taunts to police, firebombs, and spray paint.

But on the other hand, the demonstrators and looters proved fragile and mostly bluff.

Apparently, the protesters were especially cognizant that their 20s were nothing like what they believed to have been the salad days of their parents and grandparents, who did not incur much debt, bought affordable homes, had families, and were able to save money.

That has got to stick in the psychological craw of many of these punks.

Why'd you write this piece and what are the ironies?

Well, the ironies are that they got what they wanted, didn't they?

So we were told that if we got rid of,

you know, 3.5% unemployment, we got rid of the melting pot, we got rid of the wall, We got rid of cooperation with Mexico and Central American governments, we got rid of, at least for a while, that refugees had to apply from their countries rather than just walk across the country, got rid of catch and release,

got rid of the idea that fracking and horizontal drilling were some kind of terrible plots to destroy the planet, and we just pumped, you know, 11 million plus barrels.

And if we got rid of all of Donald Trump and his awful Queen's accent and orange skin and fake yellow hair, then Joe Biden from Scranton would, we're all going to be united and we would all be happy and we would all be sort of JFK Democrats, or maybe at worst, Bill Clinton.

And that didn't happen, did it?

And they had their chance.

They took over and in the space of nine months, they showed us that they were Jacobin socialists and they wanted.

control and they were mean spirited and they went out to destroy their enemies and they unleashed the media.

They had everything in their arsenal.

They had the House.

They had the Senate.

They had the presidency.

They had all the courts except the Supreme Court.

And that's even iffy at times.

They had the media.

They had the university.

They had K-12.

They had the corporate boardroom.

They had Hollywood.

They had entertainment in general and professional sports.

And what did they do?

They took, as we said, they took paradise and they turned it into purgatory.

And that's what they did.

And it's nobody to blame.

And they said, Trump did it.

Trump did it.

Finally, that voice is so hoarse and

whiny and shallow.

Trump did it.

He did Afghanistan.

He gave us inflation.

He did all this.

No, you did.

You did because you got your wish.

You never really had a chance.

Nobody within their right mind would have ever turned the country over to you, hard leftist.

And the plague and the shutdown and the recession, self-induced, and George Floyd and the riots and the 102 million ballots,

all of that chaos, you said no serious crisis should ever go to race and you didn't waste it.

And you got this

merit, you know, this, whatever you want to call them, a puppet, a simulacrum, Joe Biden, and you pulled the strings and you got, this is the AOC's dream.

It's her dream and our nightmare.

Yeah.

Victor, you know, I love your sarcasm and it comes through in the writing sometimes.

So first of all, in this piece, you talk about, and I think this is a great term, and like you elaborate on it, it's about elite overproduction and what are the consequences of that.

But I just want to read this little sentence here.

As you describe some of these elite, you call them the woke but godless, the arrogant but ignorant, the violent but physically unimpressive, the strutting but fragile, the degreed but poorly educated, the broke but acquisitive, the ambitious but stalled.

It's a great uh

picturing the guy in his in his footy pajamas.

Uh, we've talked this before.

Pajama boy or lifetime boy.

They wanted all of that.

That was what the rioting was for.

Remember when Joe Biden was elected, that thing stopped like you wouldn't believe.

It was almost like a guy from Central Rioting, the Bureau of Central Rioting, wrote a memo

to the riot police and said, make everybody stop.

There is no need anymore for chaos.

It achieved its goal.

And then all of a sudden we had no riots.

Maybe minor ones here and there in crazy Portland.

So that was ironic.

These people got what they they wanted.

And it was very ironic, wasn't it, that

there was employment for them at 3.5%.

And

things were going good.

But these people, elite overproduction is a major problem in the Middle East.

And what I mean by that is, it's not my term, it's very commonly used by sociologists.

What it means is that you educate people at government expense and their own expense.

And the society and the individual invest a lot of money and time in this so-called cattle brand called a BA or an MA or an MS or a BS or whatever.

And the education proves to be warped.

It proves to be ideological.

It's not grounded in the same merocratic standards of the past.

And you turn out people that really are not very well educated, but have a sense that given the amount of money they spent, you know, it's like buying a clunker.

You spend all that money, a lemon, and then you think that you got to get mad at somebody are they mad at themselves maybe are they mad at society yes are they mad at the right somehow yes are they mad at the left yes but you're talking about a prolonged adolescent that can't afford to get married cannot have children can't afford a family cannot afford to buy a home and in that vast abyss all of these forces, these centrifugal forces start to enter.

Transgenderism, childness.

childness.

It's better, AOC says, not to have children.

Why would you bring them into a polluted world?

You know, give AOC, you know, 400,000.

She's almost there and a nice house.

And believe me, she'll have kids in the nicest house and the nicest clothes of anybody.

So a lot of this anger is the fact that they were sold a bill of goods by the university.

I'm not saying they're not culpable.

Any idiot that borrows $90,000 to get

a BA from

UC, I don't know, any campus in sociology deserves it.

But the university's hand in glove with the federal government enabled this con.

And so most of the anger in this country of the youth are people that are ignorant.

because their educations were not competitive and they're arrogant, i.e., I am articulate.

I have a big vocabulary.

I am analytical.

I see how the world really works, unlike that buffoon on a tractor in Indiana, unlike that guy who's a slave to his checkout counter at 7-Eleven, unlike that silly fool who's an Uber driver.

I am aware because I am God Almighty of the Enlightenment.

And you know what?

People are not impressed.

They're not impressed.

When they say, I graduate from college, most people say that means you were A, brainwashed, you have no moral compass, and C, you're probably obnoxious.

And you're a very marginal utility.

Do you know how to weld?

Do you know how to take apart an engine?

Do you know how to build a bridge?

Can you work all day side by side, a new immigrant, and

go up in a skyscraper in New York and balance a girder?

No, you can't do anything.

So what good are you?

And I think they understand that.

And there's just a lot of this anger self-loathing.

Yeah, it is.

You've mentioned not impressed.

Victor, let's switch here to talk about two two political things we just take them on one at a time one is the january 6th commission which obviously keeps happening and and i'm not saying it's uh irrelevant but my gut is that most americans are not impressed or not cognizant or or don't care about this either

honestly don't care about it, as opposed to dishonestly, or just because they're already consumed by thoughts of skyrocketing inflation and

just madness happening, country going in the wrong direction.

If it's going so radically in the wrong direction, how can folks be focusing on this?

Saying it's wrong to focus on it.

Reporters do, both sides.

But there's some news came out today.

Steve Bannon is going to be held in contempt.

Anyway, Victor, it's all one big blob here, but we haven't talked about this January 6th commission in a while.

Do you have any thoughts you want to share about?

Well, remember why they're focusing on it.

Because after January 6th,

they had an argument and they had a narrative.

And they said that a bunch of white supremacists stormed the sacred Capitol with a plan of an arms insurrection to take control of the government and have a coup and prevent Joe Biden, who was elected from assuming power.

And that was their high watermark.

And that's probably what led to the demise of the Republican, you know, in Georgia, the Republican control of the Senate, no doubt.

And that's when Trump was kicked off and they went after

parlay and parlair, whatever we want to call it.

And they went after everybody and they de-platformed, canceled out, and Trump persona non grada.

Taliban can tweet, not Donald Trump.

Okay.

But there was a shelf life on that.

And the shelf life thought, we thought, okay,

each day you're going to dribble out more incriminating information but just the opposite happens suddenly no no no no no 20 000 hours of video no you can't hear them policeman's name who shot ashley but no no no

we always release the name don't we when a policeman shoots an unarmed suspect this person wasn't even in custody okay

so no no no no that's not going to happen armed insurrection do we have people actually inside the capitol they took guns or they used them no they might have been people in the periphery that had a weapon but not in the capitol i don't think is there anybody char we thought i thought wow these people are going to get these huge conspiracy racketeering interstate the fraud nothing

nothing and so

all we're left with is

Four out of five Trump supporters of people who died were Trump supporters.

The whole deification of the tragic death of Brian Sicknick was based on a non-truth.

He was not killed by a fire extinguisher or bear spray.

He had a tragic stroke.

And he was the only one that was a non-Trump supporter who died.

Ashley Babba was shot in the neck, and she was unarmed, committing either a serious misdemeanor or a moderate felony by breaking a window or illegally parading.

Okay, that's what we were left with.

And that little that what we were left with is getting less and less and less.

So they now look at the border and they look at Afghanistan and they look at inflation and they look at the gas prices and they look at the empty shelves and they look at the supply chain and they look at the COVID mandate.

And what did they say?

They say, oh my God, somebody spare us.

And when you say somebody spare us, there's always Adam Schiff, the one trick pony of little talent.

And he raises his hand and says, well,

the Russian collusion thing didn't work.

The impeachments that we entered, the engineer didn't work, but I got another life draft.

It's called the January 6th hearing.

And so, and we'll just go get who's the guy that everybody hates.

It's Steve Bannon.

He probably planned it.

He's a conspiracy.

He's an alt-right.

Let's get him in here.

And who else can we get in this theater, this circus?

Oh, wow.

All of these Republicans, there's 10 of them.

Who will join us of the Republican congressmen who voted to impeach Trump or believe that our narrative?

So let's put Liz Cheney in here.

And so meanwhile, the news elsewhere ticks, ticks, ticks.

There's no evidence of an armed insurrection.

Everybody knows when you put 25,000 troops on the streets of Washington, that was a political act

in a way that they had demonized the very people who did it had demonized Donald Trump for considering it.

And meanwhile, we've got this other guy out in the shadows called John Durham.

And he's like a, I guess he's a slow, slow motion mowing machine.

And he's slowly grinding up this story.

And he's getting, you know, he's got an indictment.

And he's basically, if you look at his trajectory, it is Hillary Clinton through the DNC, the Perkins-Coey law firm, Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele concocted a radical lie and then called all of their contacts, whether it was Bruce Orr in the DOJ or Loretta Lynch or James Comey and Andrew McCabe and the FBI or members of the State Department.

And they seeded this lie and they thought it would take out Donald Trump.

And it got so bad that even when the DNC's computer was quote unquote hacked, they called in their buddies, CrowdStrike, and then James Comey said, well, Hilly wants CrowdStrike hit their cronies to investigate.

I guess I won't investigate.

And then they said, oh, we can't quite say it was hacked, but it was kind of, sort of, maybe hacked by the Russians.

But you know what?

We have the computer and don't get near it, but we have no evidence that the Russians did it.

And then you've got the WikiLeaks people saying, Assange saying it was not hacked by the Russians.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is that all of these narratives blow up because they're all based on lies.

And this January 6th, if it was a sober and judicious investigation of domestic unrest and it was truly bipartisan and it examined 120 days of looting and arsing and rioting and murdering and killing 28 dead 2 billion up uh in theft and destruction of property 14 000 arrested and no enforcement of the major city if it investigated that in the single day of january 6th yeah it would have credibility but it has none because it's so asymmetrical and it's designed to take attention off this disastrous news of the Biden presidency.

And to tell you the truth, this slow motion grinder called John Durham.

Victor, Nook, I've just seen a clip, an outtake.

I don't even think this thing is there yet.

We mentioned Christopher Steele,

the architect of this Russian collusion document, and he still seems to be getting media love.

It's quite interesting.

mean, I just don't.

Well, I do get it because, as we've talked about before, you know, there's a double standard.

I don't think there's a double standard.

I think there's a standard for you and me.

And they have their own standard.

And if it seems hypocritical, too bad.

That's the way

they get to operate by separate rules for truth.

And you know what he reminds me of?

You know, when you go to these receptions and you see people, say, having gin and tonics,

and there's a bunch of limes on the counter, and they don't have enough limes, and people squeeze them.

Yes.

So people are so different.

They'll go up to an old one and squeeze it.

And then they'll find another one that's been squeezed three times and squeeze it again.

He's that lemon.

He's been squeezed so much to provide some juice and there's nothing there.

And they're so desperate, they take that old dry lime and they say, you know what?

I don't care if he told a British.

court that he has no evidence and no notes when he was being sued.

I don't care that there was never a consulate, Russian consulate in Florida.

I don't care that there was no evidence for the peepee tapes.

I don't care whether a Russian who was working in Washington probably fabricated most of this.

I don't care even the pathological liar, Michael Cohen, you cannot prove that he was in Russia.

I don't care about any of this.

He's Christopher Steele, and he did us a lot of good.

He sabotaged and derailed the Trump administration for 22 months.

He had the dream team, the all-stars, the hunter-killer legal team.

Without Christopher Steele, we wouldn't have had that.

That led, as soon as that thing collapsed, then we had the impeachment.

So he did a lot of good things for us.

And so let's not call him a liar.

He did yeoman service.

And that's where they are with him.

And he's got a British accent.

And Roger Kimmel wrote a brilliant article, you know, comparing him to the new PC James Bond.

Steele's the name, Christopher Steele.

And, you know, shaken, not stirred.

Ha ha ha.

He's the American.

It's the idea that there's these suave, debonair agents in Britain where the guy hadn't been to Russia in what, 20 years?

He didn't know anything.

He usually, I read the whole dossier very carefully, those scare capitals, scare quotes, and all the little fancy pseudo formatting.

It was just a total fantasy.

And think of all the people who peddled that.

You know, the old.

Still being pedaled.

I mean,

we're going to move forward.

We're going to move on.

But yeah, well, Stephanopoulos was the outtake I saw.

So do you really, do you still think those P-tapes are for real, are out there?

This is insane.

All right.

Well, anyway, speaking of insane, and the last thing we have time for, because on the classicist, we do talk about things California.

And Victor, this seems vindictive, petty, bizarre, among which is typical of the things Gavin Newsom does, but has issued this ban for small engines.

So you want to mow your grass, you want to use your chainsaw, you got a weed whacker, you got a blower.

Those are going to be outlawed in the state of California, unless I misunderstand.

Is that right?

And yes, I mean, well, new ones will be, and there'll be a whole market like remember Cuban 1956 Chevies that are still

in the streets of Havana.

Well, that's what will happen.

There'll be a whole industry of how to keep your steel chainsaw or your trimmer lawnmower working.

But there's two points here, I think.

And it reminds me in a weird way of this vaccination mandate.

When I went to New York two weeks ago, your beloved city, Jack, I went to a lot of restaurants.

I went with you once.

I noticed something.

Whereas a lot of the employers were people of color, almost all the people I went to were white or Asian inside the restaurant.

And then it dawned on me that when you show a vaccination and that's required to step foot in a restaurant, it's kind of like a medical Jim Crow.

I mean, you can argue whatever the reason, whether it's scientific or not, or it's helpful.

But the fact of the matter is when you have communities that have way overrepresented in under vaxed or no vaxed people, you know, they don't just have one shot, no vax, and you're telling them they can't come into a restaurant, then the demography of the the restaurant changes.

And that,

under our definition of proportional representation and disparate impact, remember the left said there was something called disparate impact.

That meant that

if you

have a police force and it's 7% black and you say, you know what, there was not enough black officers that passed the test or we're mostly a white count.

It doesn't matter.

There should be 12%.

Right.

We weren't trying.

It was a matter of time.

You apply that doctrine to restaurants and you should the left and say, we don't care whether it's vaccination or not.

We want that restaurant to represent who we are.

It has to look like America.

So it turns out when it's convenient, that the left, they're racialists.

The same thing is true of these.

90%.

of the landscaping industry is run by hardworking first generation and second generation Latinos, Mexican-American largely.

And I know these guys, they have 20 businesses in Selma, and they're master mechanics of chainsaws and mowers and trimmers and automatic shears and limb loppers and all that stuff.

And that's how they make, they're fabulous landscapers.

They're not just maintenance people.

They're very imaginative.

They'll come in and say, you know what, I'll pull out this tree and plant

a little walkway here.

So they're landscapers.

They may not have a degree from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, but they are landscapers.

And what you're doing to that community and that industry is saying, you know what?

You're going to have to have about a thousand batteries in your pickup.

So when you get that little, you know, electrical

and it's going to go.

And then you're going to be on that job and we don't really care about you.

We have no concern.

The final thing is, remember about how California, indeed America in general, works now.

When it can't address the existential problem, it always focuses on the misdemeanor.

I used to call him, I use the term, the Bloomberg effect.

Remember when you guys couldn't get the snow out of New York during Bloomberg and he started talking about supersized cokes and global warming?

He wouldn't get the snow plows out.

And that's what Gavin Newsom does.

You can have the air in the San Joaquin Valley blanketed with smoke from part of the 60 million trees that went up that he didn't, he never harvested.

You can take your life into your hand when you go from six to four lanes on the decrepit old 99 near Tulare, California to Delano.

You can look at San Luis Reservoir.

It looks like a pond that's stagnant because during bountiful years you didn't have the storage space and you let the water go out to the ocean.

And indeed, you still did during this year.

You can look at all of these existentials.

You can go down to San Francisco and say, Governor Newsom, there's people fornicating, defecating.

urinating all over the street.

They're hitting people.

They're attacking people.

They just hit a girl in Santa Monica.

Why won't you address that?

Or you were mayor, Governor Governor Newsom.

I can't drive to San Francisco because every time I do, they break my windshield.

Or they've shut down 17 Walgreens.

These are problems.

Or Governor Newsom, the Port of Los Angeles is in your state.

Have you seen it?

It's a total FF mess.

People are not even working.

It's not open 24 hours.

There's ships out there.

to handle it.

No, I think I would rather target the Latino community

and those

blowers and mowers, because that's where we have to save the planet.

And that's how the progressive mind works.

It always goes after the misdemeanor and virtue signals, and it never deals with the existential problem.

And you know that the progressive mind says to itself, I don't like charter schools.

I'm for teachers union.

But they never do the one thing that wouldn't that would really make a difference and that is put your kids in the public schools, go to PTA meetings, go to public school board meetings, give input, tutor your kids' school, integrate with the other.

They'll never ever do that.

So they always do the symbolic, the iconic, the worthless, the useless.

And that's sort of what gets to an existential question, Jack.

It's not just a question of, you know,

weed

right weed lobbers in California, you know, or air, you know, blowers.

It's more of a question of what is behind the entire lunatic progressive mood.

Is it some kind of psychological dysfunction where people have certain innate fears or prejudices or biases, and they want to be with people that they feel comfortable with, i.e.

wealthy white people, and they are ashamed of it and they're guilty about it.

So they project this

omnipresent, all-knowing, 360 and 24-7 virtue presence all over and try to disrupt everybody else's lives to show you that they are angelic on racial basis.

Because their personal life is not.

You're being too nice.

You're being too nice.

I've said it before.

I think it is this depraved, down deep, but maybe not so down deep thrill.

at telling other people what to do, even if it makes them grovel,

it harms their lives.

There's just a sick thrill that comes with that.

And I think the people that

have the means of making those orders are sick.

I always, I think there's two columns I've written in my 25 years that got me in the most trouble.

I mean, hate mail.

I mean, I did a radio show, KQED, hate.

I gave a talk in San Francisco.

I thought a guy was going to attack me.

One,

was, if you believe in affordable housing and egalitarianism and these poor people that are marginalized in the Bay Area, they have no housing, they have to drive all the way from Salinas and sleep in a Winnebago to clean the floors at Google.

Okay, if you take Palo Alto up to Crystal Springs Reservoir in 280, you've got a 50-mile corridor that has what?

A super highway, could easily have mass transit.

It goes all the way to Half Boon Bay, Pacifica.

It's uninhabited.

And why not, you really, for high-density housing, why not build light rail, expand 280, and build, you know,

thousands of apartment buildings to let the other live there where they work.

When I wrote that, all these people from Woodside and Portola Valley had horses and polo teams, and they actually said that to me.

And they called in when I was on.

They hated it.

They got so angry that you would ever suggest that.

And the other one that was almost as bad is when I said right during the so-called cages at the border in Trump's first year, I said, let's just solve this problem.

There are right now about a million dorms in the United States.

I think 50,000 in California alone.

And the school is out of session.

And this university has resources.

It has legal teams there for the summer in the law schools.

They have these university wonderful med centers with ER rooms.

They've got students at summer schools that are ideal leftist leftist progressive mentors.

You've got the whole thing.

And best of all, they have empty dorms.

Why don't you let the people who are crossing illegally come and stay at Stanford and Berkeley and Caltech and USC and UCLA and have the progressive community flock to their assistance?

And it was funny, the emails that people wrote me were not what you'd expect.

Well, Victor?

Two things.

So that reminds me.

No, they they were not what they expect what did they write

what did they write jack at least eight or nine of them did they say that's impractical or you're being mean yes a few of them said you're a racist i don't know what a few of them a few of them said you understand how hard it would be to clean and disinfect and and make it you know we pay a lot of money for johnny to go to stanford and you can imagine how would we put him in that room after those people have been there i thought that was so funny because they were the people objecting to cages and this is being no cages at Stanford, believe me.

You know, similarly, I reached out and we only have two minutes left.

I just got to tell you this.

When there was some event, I think it was the hurricane, not Katrina, another one, but I wrote to the head of the bishops at the United States Catholic Conference.

All left-wingers, right?

And we have all these empty convents.

There are no more nuns, empty seminaries because there's no more priests.

You own them.

Put your money where your mouth is, Your Excellency, and let's use these facilities for the poor, right?

Wouldn't you?

I probably said go to hell under his breath, but it's easy to call out our friends or enemies on the left for their hypocrisy here.

Look, Victor, I got to say one other thing quickly, because then we got to go.

I did want to let you, you know, we talked about on the traditionalists, one of the other podcasts we do, by the way, the cultural list with Sammy Wink, encourage people to listen.

There was a new poll out today by McLaughlins, and you mentioned Hispanics before.

And and Biden's disapproval among Hispanics in America is now 48%.

And opinion, Biden's ability to lead has gotten so bad that 65% of Hispanics are worried about the future of America with Joe Biden as president.

Now, I know we were just talking about Gavin Newsom, but they're of the same ilk.

So, we've talked about Hispanics before, and they're seemingly veering away from the Democratic Party.

And I think maybe enough soon to come in episode we should talk about that more.

Very quickly in a minute, I think what's happening is if you talk to people, and I have Mexican-American people in my own family, if you talk to them, two things come up.

Until now, until the last three or four years, they were focused on the border.

They had relatives there.

They wanted basically illegal immigration.

Now, and then second, they would always say that they were very uneasy about the white liberal nasal voice.

He's going to tell everybody what to do.

They had a coalition with them, the Gavin Newsom type.

That's when people always say, why did the Hispanics not like Gavin Newsom?

Well, because he was the epitome of that.

I am going to tell you what to do, and I'm going to wear jeans and act like I'm one of you.

But he was a phony and he was condescending and he was arrogant.

And the Hispanic community picked that right up.

So they didn't have a reservoir of goodwill toward the elite AOC Bernie Sanders left.

But that was disguised, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker,

because of the border.

And now they are the middle class, and they're in government, teaching, et cetera.

And that border represents to them what it used to represent to the now gone middle class whites of California, who were not racist.

They just said, we don't have the money.

We're not wealthy.

We have social services.

It's going to cost high taxes.

It's going to impact our schools.

And now the Mexican-American community community is saying, at least 44% of it is, that's true.

And number two, they're saying, don't tell me what to do.

I'm an independent, successful person.

I came from Mexico.

I know Mexico.

You don't know what Mexico is like.

Mexico does not like indigenous people.

That's why I came from Oaxaca.

Mexico is corrupt.

Mexico doesn't work.

I can wave a Mexican flag and I can act like I love Mexico, but I'm not going back to Mexico, nor am I going to recreate it here.

And I don't want to recreate it here.

And you want to use me to recreate it here.

And I'm not going to leave as a peasant from one country and come back and be a peasant in the second one.

So they have an innate reservoir of anger at that elite, white, educated, bicoastal, busybody, quote-unquote, Karen type figure.

And once you take the border out of the equation, and it is out of the equation now because it is wide open and it's no longer let people come from Mexico illegally because I got a cousin down there.

Now it's let's 2 million people from the whole world swarm my town.

Right.

So I think this is going to accelerate because once the Hispanic community starts to legitimize, it's okay to say you're not going to vote for a left-wing Democrat.

Then it's going to start to snowball.

Well, as they say in Latin, Victor, Oremus.

Well, that is all the time we have left except.

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We read them.

And here's one from the other day.

It's titled Food for the Brain, and it's by Mike Incuse.

So I'm assuming maybe he's from Syracuse, but anyway, he writes, at age 59, listening to Victor Davis Hansen on his podcast or any other format.

brings me back to my favorite history class with the greatest teacher I ever had.

I look forward to each episode.

I am now in the middle of Victor's new book, The Dying Citizen, and I am amazed at the breadth of knowledge and insight of ancient historic political events and how they are illuminating as to where our present day social and political contentions may lead us.

A must read.

M.

Roche, thanks, Mike in Qes.

Thanks, all of our listeners.

Thank you, Victor, for another greatly illuminating episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Classicist.

Thanks for listening.

So long, folks.

And thanks, everybody, for listening.

I'll see you next time.

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