The Traditionalist - A Tsunami Is Coming

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

We are recording on Friday, October 1st, in the year of 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

The namesake of this show is Victor Davis Stance, and he's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Now, Victor, I think this show, even though we're recording it on the 1st, is probably up on October 5th.

And I'd like to get out front and let our listeners know that on October 6th, you will be appearing.

on Guttfeld.

Now you're on a lot of shows this week because your new book is out, The Dying Citizen.

Actually, it will be out from the time we're talking right now, but it will be out next week.

So you're going to be doing a lot of publicity and marketing for it.

But I wanted our listeners to make sure they set the dial or whatever, set their timer to catch you on Gutfeld next week.

Victor, we've got a lot to talk about today, though.

And One of the things that's on top of the list is the imprisonment of Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller.

And we'll get to talking about that and other important issues right after this message.

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

Victor, what are your thoughts about what has been done to Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller?

I think he is yet to be charged with any particular crimes.

And as many folks have said, he is, of all the debacle that's gone on in the last month, he is the one man that's paid any price for it.

Yeah, I think that the issue that people are struck struck by is not that he did or did not break the chain of command.

He did.

And obviously you can't have an army where every single officer in the chain of command, captain, majors, lieutenant colonels, then question their superiors publicly.

So he admitted that.

But what usually happens, Jack, when that occurs is that they bring the officer in.

They try to suggest that what he's doing or what he has done is unwise.

And then they usually, if the officer persists, then they either offer him a different command or they suggest that he retire with his retirement and full pay, etc.

What's unusual about this is two things.

One,

he's in the break as we speak in jail.

And number two,

What he did is a misdemeanor compared with the felonious behavior of his highest superiors.

Because what we're talking about is a complete destruction of a 20-year project in Afghanistan, multi-billion dollars of equipment left for the Taliban, Americans still there stranded, the most humiliating defeat in 50 years, and the loss of deterrence, betrayal of our, and somebody did that.

Somebody did that.

Was it the CENTCOM commander?

Was it the Afghan theater commander?

Was it the Secretary of Defense?

Was it Joe Biden?

But somebody has not not taken responsibility.

So when they start, when you listen to them before Congress under, oh, them being Austin and Millie and McKinsey, the State Department did it.

No,

I told the president.

So nobody's coming up and saying, I made a recommendation that was wrong and people died from it and I'm sorry and I'm going to resign.

But this officer did.

He said, I cannot stop from telling you that these people are responsible and they will not resign and they will not take blame and I'm not going to be quiet until they do.

And so morally, ethically, he has the high ground and then customarily and legally he should be punished, but not to the degree they're punishing him, A, and B, especially not to the degree that they're completely immune from their own culpability.

And we'll get in later, but we're not even talking about the violation of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that says you cannot disparage the commander-in-chief when the Joint Chiefs, Milley, was calling at least three authors and telling them on the record that the President was a Mein Kampf-like figure, a Nazi, and that is a violation.

He suffered no consequences for it.

Or he was violating the chain of command in a much more egregious fashion.

by interrupting the normal chain of command involving nuclear matters or calling up his Chinese counterparts.

So it's that asymmetric, asymmetrical hypocrisy that makes us so angry and sympathetic to him.

And he was honest about saying that he violated the chain of command.

He was willing to take the punishment, but to put somebody in jail for that is way out of proportion to the crime.

Well, you mentioned, and this is one of the other topics we're going to discuss today, the appearance this past Tuesday, September 28th, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Kenneth McKenzie, who is the U.S.

Central Commander, and then the Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, all spoke to Congress.

A big expected, anticipated event where he, at least, Milley would be called out on some of these matters.

Three or four weeks ago, Victor, as you recall, when the book Peril came out, folks were saying, no way he's going to survive this.

He's got to resign.

He'll be thrown out, et cetera, et cetera.

I assume you watched the testimonies.

What are your thoughts about it?

What are your thoughts about how Republicans handled the matter that day?

And any other thoughts about consequences, if any, are going to happen?

They were very good.

I was surprised, especially the Senate.

I mean, Marcia Blackburn just asked him, were you the source?

And she just rattled off books of muck-raking liberal journalists.

And then, why are you doing this?

That was asked by a House member.

And he had the most preposterous.

incoherent response possible.

He said, part of my duty is to be a public relation and a transparent conduit.

And I'm thinking, and they pointed out, wait a minute, being an off-record, insidious, anonymous source to damage the prior administration and give your version and leak and disparage people, that's part of your job, is to talk to investigative journalists who have an agenda as a bipartisan advisor to the president.

That's your job.

And, you know, he acted like as if he had perfect memory.

Do you really believe when he says then, if he has perfect memory, when he's asked, you said to one journalist that you wrote in your journal

groups that were terrorist organizers, and among them were news organizations.

I mean, this is a civil libertarian millie, Epic Times and Newsmax, and he called them terrorists.

Can you imagine that?

the iconic chief of the U.S.

military calling a news organization a terrorist organization.

And what did he say?

He was asked, did you say that?

And if so, do you have it?

Did you record it in a journal?

And so,

can you produce it?

Oh, I can't recall.

The James Comey 245 times under, you know, oath defense.

So that was a dismal performance.

Everything he said was contradictory.

No, no, I'm an advisor only.

I'm not responsible for what happened in Afghanistan.

I gave the president advice, and it's not what he basically, he, if you want to cut to the quick, he said Joe Biden was a liar.

He said the State Department were liars.

He said the journalists, some of them, were liars.

Everybody was a liar, but Mark Milley.

And we have a transcript that was leaked to Bob Woodward from his phone call from Nancy Pelosi, in which they made fun of people's weight.

They talked about Trump being crazy.

And then he wanted us to believe the following, Jack.

He wanted us to believe that after he was so concerned about quote-unquote messy democracy in Donald Trump that he called his Chinese counterpart.

But then when questions under, oh, so you believed at the time he was crazy, or have you said that?

No,

I didn't think he was going to do that.

I didn't think he was going to start a war.

Well, then why the hell did you call him?

And so he made a, just like he did with the white rage, you know, when he got confused and said he was recommending Professor kendi's work as he does mao and and mark's adversarial text but he meant it in the sense of mr milley general milley these are on your recommended list as something you endorse

so you don't endorse marks everybody read i think he's way over his head and then when he leaks to the media that he's a princeton graduate or he's a biblophile or he's an intellectual he's I don't know, he's trying to act as if he's some kind of warrior intellectual, and it's not working.

Very much not so.

Very much.

Victor, I'd like to remind our listeners at victorhanson.com, the Blade of Perseus.

They can find links to everything you write and your various appearances and podcasts.

But if folks would like to read a lot of what you write, much of which is exclusive to VictorHanson.com, they need to subscribe.

And it's very affordable and extremely worthwhile because there is a motherload of writing.

You are a writing machine.

So I wanted to encourage folks to visit there.

Victor, let's move on to our next subject.

I'm looking right now at a few headlines.

Joe Biden has just gone up to Capitol Hill to,

I guess, see if he can twist arms.

He didn't have his nap today.

His numbers are continuing to fall, although the real clear politics average is 45 favorable, 49 unfavorable.

Again, I'm looking at real clear politics right now, some of the headlines.

The danger of electing Biden has been laid bare.

Another story I'm looking at, U.S.

News published, I think, today.

What happened to Honest Joe?

President Joe Biden's promises are turning in to lies.

Last night, real time, Thursday the 30th, he was at the

annual House Republican versus Democrat baseball game.

I guess trying again, wrangle votes up for this monstrous legislation that seems to be going nowhere.

So, Victor, your thoughts about two things.

One, Joe is flummoxing in decline.

Anything you would like to talk about and analyze the president at this point in time?

And then, in particular, the hubris of this positioning the $3.5 trillion

package as something that will cost nothing, which is really an indication of their assessment of the citizens that they are stupid and gullible.

Maybe a number are.

Anyway, Victor, what are your thoughts on those things?

Well, I think the people who are not impressed with Joe Biden thought that we're coming to a critical turning point because just in the last seven days, think of what he's said.

He's doubled down and said, no,

my generals didn't give me advice about the dangers of my withdrawal, even though his own Secretary of Defense is at odds with him, as so is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And then he said

that we've got to have justice for trillionaires.

I mean, mean, trillionaires have to pay.

I know that Jeff Bezos is pretty wealthy, and so is Elon Musk.

I think they're around 150 to 180, depending on the stock market, billion, but they're one-fifth of the trillionaire.

We've never had one trillionaire in existence.

And so that's why he does not give impromptu talks.

And on any...

At any occasion, his handlers do not lie.

And he's quite right to say, they told me to say this, and I'm not allowed to do that, because as I said earlier, he's like Admiral Jellico.

He can lose a war in one day, as Churchill said of the first sea lord in World War I.

And then he went on for his third trifecta after saying that there are trillionaires.

He said that his own border patrol was whipping people, whipping people at the border.

And you look at those very carefully and you talk to the photographer, and it's clear that, and we talked about this on an earlier podcast, that these long reigns are no way used to whip people.

Remember, he's never retracted any of this.

He's never retracted any of it.

And so when he continues to lie, we're getting to the point where he cannot say anything that's not untrue.

So you think,

well,

Jen Saki, what do you think about that?

And she doesn't think anything about it.

And the media doesn't think anybody.

And now their attitude, Jack, has metamorphosized into something like, well, he's 78 years old and a president's a hard job.

And that's the subtext.

And he he doesn't know where he is.

What are you going to do about it?

So, what?

What are you going to do about it?

25th Amendment, try it.

Impeachment, try it.

So, we don't really care anymore whether he lies or he can't, doesn't know where he is, just the way it is.

And just, you know, sit down and take it.

That's where we are as far as Joe Biden.

And

as far as the 3.5 trillion, or is it 5.5 or 6?

Notice a couple of things about the whole packaging of this.

We're in debt for $30 trillion, aggregate national debt.

We ran

pre-COVID a half a billion, and then during COVID, $1 trillion, $1.5.

I think we got up finally to $2.5 trillion.

And so now

we're going to go $1.5 million, and we're going to add $3.50 over an extended period of time minimally.

And no one is talking about how do you pay it back.

They're just saying it doesn't cost anything.

And our former colleague, Rich Lowry, had a good article at National Review when he said, and we've said it, and I said it the other day on Martha McCallum a little earlier: that if you and I go buy a car and we pay cash, that doesn't mean it didn't cost anything.

That meant that it was an investment of maybe, I don't know, 3,000 hours of labor, or you didn't fix the roof, or your wife's angry at you because you, you know, didn't send one of your children to violin camp.

But it's fungible.

And so it's not free.

And then notice notice how they only talk about the money.

It's 3.5 and 1.5 and compromise and that's a defeat or that's a win.

But they never talk about what's in the bill.

And what's in the bill is hardly anything about infrastructure.

That was earlier.

It's all about expanding all of these nanny state entitlements and bias training and immigration subsidies and da da da da da.

So the subtext of the whole thing is we're going to raise taxes on the upper middle class.

And believe me, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos will not be paying more taxes.

They'll find a way to get out of it.

But we're going to raise it on the upper middle class and take that money away because they did something wrong in acquiring that much.

And we're going to give it to the lower class who must have been doing something right not to have earned it.

And so it's pure socialism.

And it's just like the Soviet Union in its penultimate days, where when you looked at those beefy guys at the parade dais, when they paraded the missiles on May Day and Prezhniv and Koshygan and all those guys, gosh, they didn't believe in that.

They were all going to their DACAs and homes up on the Black Sea or Sevastopol or whatever they went.

And these guys don't believe this.

I mean, Joe Biden is right now under some scrutiny for not paying 500,000 of taxes.

Didn't he pay his fair share?

He didn't.

And these were payroll taxes on money he earned in addition to his generous pensions and salary and speaking.

And then in addition to that, I mean, Hunter's back in the news with his art grip and he says in the emails, if you remember correctly, that Mr.

10%, the big guy, was getting money and he was getting money from everything from a cell phone to repairs on his mansion.

Did he ever report that income?

So I just don't think that this thing is, it's Orwellian that we're supposed to feel so good that Joe Mansion, good old Joe from West Virginia, stopped it at $1.5 trillion after a trillion of infrastructure.

So we got $2.5 trillion.

Where are we going to get it?

We're going to go say to Mr.

X, who's making $350,000 with scrambling around with two 7-Elevens that he's got his grandmother and one in his attic and he's paying for his kids' tuition.

He's helping out a cousin, and he's out there for 19 hours a day.

We're going to say to him,

Well, you're just an insect, you're a parasite.

See that guy over there who's in his apartment and not working?

He's the victim, not you.

And so, we're going to take from you and give to him.

And then we ask ourselves, Financial Jack, where's the paradigm that this works so well?

We have a higher tax rate, an operative tax rate, than most Scandinavian countries now,

except for the value-added tax, the sales tax, which a lot of them don't pay.

So my point is, is it Colombia?

Is it Cuba?

Is it Venezuela?

Is it Russia?

Where is it that socialism is this beacon of prosperity?

It doesn't exist.

And then we finally end up with this existential question that you and I wrestled with, and that is, is it all because of incompetence?

Or is it angry nihilism?

Or is it destroying the system to rebuild it in socialist?

protocols?

I don't know anymore.

Well, Victor, I'm going to spring something on you.

There's a poll out today about conservatives, Republicans wanting to secede, blue states, red states, just created a new nation.

I mean, I can see people answering that in a poll.

I don't think majority of Republicans or conservatives would actually want to do that, but I think that bespeaks something.

probably bespeaks something about that's a theme in the dying citizen but i'd like to talk to you about that in a minute but first back to what we were just talking about where's the money going to come from?

Right?

No, $400,000 a year, you weren't going to be taxed.

Now, here's an article.

This has to do with Maria Bartiromo, who's the Fox Business Show, and she had Senator Steve Daines from Montana on, and they're talking about Joe Biden's demand for banks to begin reporting financial transactions above $600 to the federal government.

And it says he wants to report all transactions flow in and flow out from our bank bank accounts because he thinks he's going to catch tax cheats.

He thinks about projection in life.

Catch tax cheats.

You've got to remember it's called the Hunter-Biden law.

Right.

From someone withdrawing $600 from their bank account.

So, you know, that is kind of on a financial par, I think, with what.

the red Chinese do with women's menstrual cycle.

I mean, just how intimate knowledge does Joe Biden and others want of the lives of Americans?

It was a very Soviet kind of aspect there.

Anyway, Victor, you have any thoughts about Biden wanting to know your every doing in your financial life?

Well, I think it's revealing because they talk about new monetary theory that you can just borrow money and borrow money and borrow money.

Or the more clever among them say, you know, there's all this hidden productivity with zooming and digitization and artificial intelligence.

So the old classical paradigms of revenues, balancing expenditures no longer matter.

But this is more revealing because it suggests that they know that they got to get money somewhere.

It's sort of like job of the hut is the government and it's hugely obese and it's eating all the time revenues and somebody's shoveling food into its mouth and they look around and that pile of food is shrinking.

And they're looking around to take and nobody has any.

And so

they're talking about the payroll tax.

They're talking about the estate tax.

They're talking about the capital gains tax.

They're talking about income taxes.

They're talking about corporate taxes.

And that's still not enough.

And now they're thinking, well, it's not just the taxes.

We've got to go make sure that people don't cheat.

And we're going to go after these people.

And I'm for all paying a person's taxes.

I get very angry when I leave this house.

and I go somewhere and I buy a car or an appliance and I pay almost 10 or over 10% sales tax and I just go around the corner and there's somebody you know hawking everything from lawnmowers to baseball bats to clothes out on the side of the road with no sales tax.

So I'm not, I'm all for

compliance, but this is a revelation that this job of the HUD is hungry and they don't know where the food's going to come from.

So they're going to scrounge and look for it.

It's almost an insane tick that they have that

we've got to look for problems that don't exist.

Then when we find them, we've got to hire all these people out of these ideological universities and we've got to train them.

We're not very far from everybody wearing little scarves and chanting like that we did in the Obama administration for a while, you know, songs about praising the great leader.

This is really Orwellian, what they're doing.

And I'm trying to answer it in conjunction with your other suggestion about a de facto civil strife.

But boy.

Let me tell you about that.

And here's this poll by the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

It says three things.

52% of Trump voters want red states to secede.

41% of Biden voters want blue states to split off.

Then it says over 40% of voters in both parties favor abolishing the checks and balances built into federal government and giving the president greater control.

And the last polling item is over 75% of voters on both sides agree.

that strong supporters of the opposite party present a, quote, clear and present danger, end quote, to American life.

You know, Victor, this E plurbasunum has been quite frayed and untangling.

And I think this is part of a broader, maybe a cruder way of saying a theme of your book, The Dying Citizen, but do you have any immediate thoughts on this thing that I've just sprung on you?

Well, what's dangerous about it is that geo.

Geography is a force multiplier of civil strife.

We saw that in Civil War, where those guys were there and these guys were here.

And they were definite geographical and regional entities, one on one side, one on the other, the Mason-Dixon line.

So when the South went Republican and much of the old Republican areas like, you know, New York and used to have a Republican mayor, California went blue, then it was all mixed up.

And so you didn't have a force multiplier that would accentuate political differences.

And we kind of, you know, with national TV and everything, we had technology that sort of downplayed accents and we had easy travel.

So everybody went around.

But now the technology is working in the opposite effect.

It's accentuating social media, Twitter, the differences, and people are self-selecting under our federal system.

And we have, you know, I think it's 10 to 15 million people have left California last 35 years and they have not gone to blue states.

They may be blue in mind, but they go to low-tax states like Nevada, Arizona, or no-tax states or Idaho or Wyoming or Florida.

Now a big draw seems to be Tennessee.

And so what's happening is that there is a now a red state recombined geographical area and it's basically two areas.

It's everything

west of the East Coast and everything east of the West Coast with a couple of exceptions and that that is that little band maybe from Dallas to Austin metropolitan district and maybe around the Great Lakes where Cleveland or Detroit or Chicago are.

And they're about equal population, but now we're having a definite geographical area that's conservative.

And a lot of these political questions that we're having hinge on that because the Electoral College hinges on that.

The idea you're going to bring in two extra state hinges on that.

And it's kind of scary because, I mean, they all have McDonald's, they have Starbucks, they have the same cars.

I used to think when I was in high school, and I was told that, we wouldn't have regional accents anymore because of television and people moving around.

I think we're going to have more regional accents because I think people are re-tribalizing and recocooning and they just don't want to put up with it.

I don't know how.

And the sad thing about it, you've got the Roman Revolution

when Caesar crossed the Rubicon all the way to the second phase that ended at Actium or the American Civil War.

These differences are more accentuated and they're more fierce than us versus foreign powers.

Because there's this element of betrayal or familiarity that our force multipliers as well.

So, and what would you do in your family?

I mean,

you've got a Bernie Sanders supporter and a Donald Trump supporter, and then, I don't know, you take AR-15s and you go to war.

It's not going to happen, thank God.

But somebody's got to say, you know what?

Let's just cool it.

And the war is really being waged by these institutions.

It's not the people.

I mean, I don't see people necessarily on the left that I know that want to go to war.

It's usually Hollywood that lectures people.

It's LeBron James and the professional athletes that lecture people.

It's the CEOs of Disney and Delta and American and Coke that lecture people.

It's the people at Goldman Sachs and Wall Street that lecture people.

It's Mark Zuckerberg and the Google crowd and

Lisa Jobs and the Apple crowd that lecture people.

It's George Soros that lectures people and the foundations.

But

it's mostly left-wing, wealthy, privileged people who are driving this strife.

Yeah, Victor, it seems that this is virtue signaling at its core.

And

one of the paths is to say I'm virtuous is to say explicitly, well, you are not virtuous.

And I mean you pointing a finger at somebody.

Yeah, I mean, it's, I can be more virtuous by ferreting out somebody who's not virtuous.

And I can do it anonymously.

I've noticed this happens that every once in a while I get attacked very vehemently by somebody on the internet.

And I'll kind of of kid around

and I'll put it on Angry Reader and reply because they leave their information.

Apparently it's become kind of a, they want to be so identified.

But every once in a while, I've had somebody who attacked me and I wrote back and said, you know, you got something wrong, but who cares?

And then the person wrote back.

angrier and then I wrote back not as angry and then less angry and then me even less and after a while I didn't really care and he didn't really care and there's a way to resolve all all this stuff.

But when you get quick bites and virtue signaling and I'm on Twitter and look how many people follow me and this is trending and I'm a hero to my tribe, it gets really out of hand because you never see the person face to face.

It's one thing to call somebody a racist, da-da-da-da-da, but when I go to the supermarket, nobody

I think of all the times I've been anywhere that anybody's recognized I do something on these podcasts or Fox or something, I've had one situation where the person got in my face, but I've had 10 times that a month of people who do it anonymously.

It's cowardly.

And that's encouraged by the social media, that strife, that constantly churning the pot and trying to provoke people.

Well, Victor, let's end briefly.

I'll tell you a quick story about people who have been provoked.

And it's not too far from me.

The story's gotten some national attention.

Fox and National Review has a piece on it today, but it's in Guilford, connecticut and to fight back you need a leader and this one community which like a lot of states that were locked down public forums were also shut down and means of finding out what was happening within a city within a community were kind of

deep sixed and that's on top of you know these lockdowns are on top of not an elimination but ending of people getting local newspapers etc it's a news vacuum so these things operate very well in news vacuums.

But in Guilford, some parents found out what was going on in the school system, the imposition of critical race theory.

And they found that many of the Republicans who were on the board of education in that town were rubber stamping this.

Not only rubber stamping it, but this is a lot of what's going on with the CRT in the schools.

It's say, we're not teaching that.

No, we're not teaching it.

But it goes by another name.

Again, like you think we're stupid.

The Democrats think people are stupid.

3.5 trillion doesn't cost anything.

No, we're not teaching that stuff to your children when kids come home with the evidence of it.

Anyway, long, long and too long a story now, short.

Group of Republicans, conservatives joined forces.

They had a primary.

They removed the existing Republicans handily, handily.

And now, of course, everything comes to the November election, but people are.

fighting back, at least in some places.

I think the one place they can find fight back is on the political scene.

So a lot of local elections coming up this year may hold some promise.

So

any thoughts on how folks are reacting?

Victor, any signs of goodness you have?

And that's how we'll cap the show today.

Well, I think everybody understands there's a pushback.

You even see it with people like Bill Maher

and you see it.

with certain athletes and you see what you're talking about and people going to

boardrooms.

I mean, they're usually demonized or disparaged, but they're not out-argued.

Nobody says, well, here's why I want to explain what Mr.

Kendi really meant when he said you could be a racist, attack racism.

They know that if you were to accept that doctrine,

you would be in the former Yugoslavia.

And every Serb would say to, you know, every Bosnian or every Kosovar that this is why I'm killing you, because I have a right to kill you for what you did in 1200 or 1420 or something.

So it doesn't work and it won't work.

So you just attack the person personally.

But the pushback is coming and it's going to be, I don't think it's going to be dramatic.

I think a lot of people express their anger at the woke phenomenon in a lot of ways.

A lot of people will just, as they did in 2016, they'll smile and they'll say, I'm very happy.

And they will go in and vote.

against the Democrats.

And I think you can see a tsunami comparable to the 2010, the 1994 that almost wrecked the Clinton and Obama presidencies and would have wrecked them if they had better leadership and somebody other than Paul Ryan in that one case.

And then there's going to be people who just say,

I'm not going to send my kid anymore to Stanford or Harvard or Yale.

I'm sorry.

I don't believe that that cattle brand is worth it anymore.

Or they'll say, I don't watch the Emmys or the Tonys or the Oscars.

Or I don't want to watch LeBron Hector me anymore I'm just turning off the NBA and that's that's starting to happen or I'm just not going to go down to downtown Chicago not going to do it there's no reason Chicago won't become Detroit nobody goes you know travels to go to the million dollar mile in Detroit even though it's it's getting a little better so I think a lot of people are dropping out and they're going to places they're rural, small town, red states.

They do not want to go to New York.

They do not want to go to San Francisco.

I'm not saying that, you know, real estate hasn't, you know, collapsed there.

It has not,

that it has collapsed.

It has not.

But I just think that subtly people make their unhappiness known by what they do.

And some will do it by voting.

Some will do it by speaking out.

And

the most common question that I get, Jack, in emails or when somebody comes up and talks to you that you don't know is, what are we going to do?

How do we stop this?

What should I do?

And that's a good good question because it depends on your relative station in life.

If you're a lecturer part-time at a community college, you're not going to be as vociferous as somebody like myself who's got de facto tenure.

But I say de facto because there is no such thing as tenure anymore because they go after tenured professors.

But I wrote a kind of an article that I thought was correct.

It may not be called not too long ago, peak wokeism, that we were approaching the period where we did with Me Too.

Do you remember Me Too, Jack?

It just suddenly...

It started out with a premise that, a good one, that Harvey Weinstein was an ogre who had been protected by a cabal of like-minded people who wanted stuff from him, and he used them and manipulated them.

And then

when he was taken down, it opened the floodgates, and then everybody had a story of some sexual harassment.

And then we went into the Brett Kavanaugh period, and then it was back to 30 years, and then it was a word, or then, and we took out a lot of people.

You know, we took out garrison keeler and matt lauer and all these people some of them more deserving than others kevin spacey and all this and then suddenly people said wow joe biden digitally

digitally assaulted tara reed and you can't you can't do this because we did it to al franken and we lost a senator right and you know he just touched a couple of breasts that's what they said later and we really want to do this to joe biden and remember camilla harris when she was running against him I believed Harrow Reed.

So at that point, that was a turning point.

We just said this thing is like the French Revolution.

The guillotine's got to be turned on the guillotiners.

And I think we're now getting to the point where they're starting to make it difficult.

Like a guy like Chuck Schumer is going to have to run against Nutty AOC, maybe.

Or people are starting to see another thing that's going to destroy the woke movement is

what is Patrice Quellars doing with her fourth house?

What's Kendi doing with his 20,000 an hour Zoom charge?

What is the Obamas doing from their $25 million mansion?

Come on, what are all these people?

Todd Nahisi Coates went from a fiery activist on the barricades, decrying capitalism to what?

Adopting comic books to black themes for movies.

So he continued to be a multimillionaire.

So this woke movement was a careerist, top-down phenomenon, and people are cashing in, and they're getting cynical.

And I think it's going to end.

It did a lot of damage.

I don't think it would have ever started without the COVID lockdown and the panic about

the SARS virus and the election year and the hatred of Trump and all of that and George Floyd.

Without that, we wouldn't have been here.

But nevertheless, as we said last time, those were the fuses that let these long, long-laid IEDs off.

Right.

Well, Victor, this is about all the time we have, except for a couple of notes.

First review I've seen of the dying citizen has

been published in the New Criterion.

And if folks go to the New Criterion website, they'll find the link.

It's by Wilfred McClay, who's now a professor at Hillsdale and a great historian himself.

And it's a glowing review.

We won't give it away here, but check it out.

I did want to correct something.

The most recent, well, I gave before the ART Real Clear Politics Average, but a new poll out today about Biden.

Rasmussen reports 42 positive 56% disapproval of Joe Biden.

People who listen to this podcast, the classicists, the traditionalists, the culturalists, which is done with the great Sammy Wink, many folks leave reviews on iTunes.

If you leave a number review, please give Victor five stars.

We greatly appreciate it.

Many people write actual reviews.

And here's one, Victor, you should know that you help people get through their chores every day.

And this is by CEO Tool Rubio.

My multitasking pleasure.

I admire and respect VDH.

His brilliant perspective opens our minds without condescending attitude.

His wealth of knowledge with common sense and relating to us common folk is the perfect balance.

I enjoy listening to him while preparing dinner and other household chores.

He doesn't get worked up screaming his opinions.

Just the current climate of our country raises my blood pressure.

Thank you for sharing your insightful information.

We thank C.

Octool Rubio and others who leave such.

We do read them.

VictorHanson.com is where you can find links to everything Victor has written and a lot of original content.

Please subscribe.

There's a link for The Dying Citizen, which is out this week.

It's a terrific book.

If you haven't gotten it yet, do get it.

Or you may be able now to get it directly at your local bookstore.

For me, I'm Jack Fowler, the director of Center for Civil Society.

So please check out centerforcivilsociety.com or

subscribe to my little weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

You'll find that at civilthoughts.com.

We'll be back again with another episode of The Traditionalist next week.

Victor, thanks very much.

And we thank all who listen and wish you well.

And Victor, I hope you have a great week as this book launches.

And you'll be on, I think, folks will be seeing you in a lot of places in the next coming days.

So,

if I can get to Fresno, from Fresno to New York in a covered wagon, I'll come.

But I'm going into the belly of your beast in New York for a week.

Maybe I'll see you there.

Yeah, I'm glad that readers consider me more Atavan than Adderall.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.