The Culturalist: Technology and Education

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is The Culturalist and we are part of a three-part series with the traditionalists and the classicists that is co-hosted by Jack Fowler.

This particular segment is dedicated to

events and people, past and present, that have really influenced the way we live.

And we look at events and try to connect them with culture.

Today, we're hoping to do that on topics of technology and then maybe a little special on animals and animals and history.

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Welcome back.

And this is

Victor's show.

So he's the namesake of the show.

He's also the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in History at Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And we're very happy to be here today.

How are you doing, Victor?

Very well, Sammy.

Yeah, I hear you have a publication date for your book.

Is it indelicate or jinx to ask how that book is doing right now?

No, it's October 5th, so it will be out in a little over a week from now, about 10 days, and it's doing very well on the pre-sales, at least

you can always check it on Amazon, but it's not really out yet, so people

can order it on Amazon or Barnes ⁇ Noble or any of the online area or

bookstores.

And

I think it's very timely.

I wrote the book not at the period right before COVID and during the lockdown.

And then

I revised it,

not because of current events, but it just happened that way when I was doing the edits from the general and copy editing, then we got into the more acrimonious election stuff, although that was not the main part.

So I have a long epilogue trying to correlate the events after 2021, what the last six months, how they reflect the themes of the book.

And I think if you're worried about what you see on the border, there's a chapter called

Residence that suggests that residency, not citizenship, is what matters now in America.

Your feet on the ground no matter how you got here.

And if you're worried about inflation, I have the first chapter is called Peasants and that we're creating a peasantry out of the former robust middle class.

If you're worried about critical race theory and this racial acrimony, I have a chapter, the third chapter called tribes, that is

the regression in history, the regression to a pre-civilizational

identity that's based on superficial appearances, how you look is how you adjudicate things.

You hire your first cousin or your brother over somebody better qualified or somebody of your own tribe.

And then I have the second part, postmodern attacks on citizenship or the Constitution or America.

And these are

very

relevant.

The unelected is the first chapter.

And these are people

who have no authority through the electorate.

That is, they were not elected to office, but they were permanent bureaucrats and they've mastered a huge octopus, 2 million federal employees, and even at the state and local level, 40% of Americans now work for the government of some sort.

But think about it in the last 24 months.

We had General Milley, who interrupted the chain of command, I guess you would call it appropriated it, even though his job description legally limits him to an advisorial role.

He recalibrated the whole chain of command as it pertains to nuclear weapons.

He freelanced as a diplomat with China and said he would tip them off if we were to attack them.

mischaracterized the Lafayette Square incident and said that he apologized for having an op-ed after Trump had cleared the area with federal troops.

And Trump, we know now from the Inspector General that was a lie.

He said that the drone attack was a righteous act immediately, very quickly.

But that was, of course, two weeks later, we got the belated correct.

I could go on.

He's sort of Woody Allen Zelig or DeForest Gump.

Whenever there's a melodramatic embarrassment of the military, he's there.

And in that chapter, I have a long discussion of people like Robert Mueller,

James Comey, John John Brennan, James Clapper, who either lied under oath or said they couldn't remember or did all the things that you, the citizen, would be put in jail for if you were called in by the IRS.

And then I have a second postmodern chapter called The Evolutionaries.

These are people in universities and foundations and government who just feel that the Constitution is antiquated, human nature progresses, improves.

They're far brighter than Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or Alexander Hamilton.

They're the beneficiaries of a more sensitive

social outlook and therefore they have the right, indeed the duty to get rid of the Electoral College or the nine-person Supreme Court.

It's 150 years old custom, or get rid of state voting priorities

as they pertain to the national election laws.

Or that's in the Constitution.

States have the primary responsibility for ballot protocols during a national election.

Not all of them, but the primary, and that's going out the window, apparently.

And so is a 60-year, 50-year state idea.

Bring in more states, get in more senators, PRESCO.

Get rid of the 180-year Senate filibuster,

232-year Electoral College.

All of these are done, remember, not because of a huge mandate.

landslide election, but because it's 50-50 in the Senate and they have a three or four-vote margin that should in the House and that's it.

Yeah.

So they're going to try to transform the country.

The evolutionaries are on the thinnest of public support.

And then finally, globalization and that I talk about, how the country was hollowed out economically

with bicostal skill sets, whether it was in law or finance or media or academia that prospered in a 7 billion person new market where people who assembled and made things with their hands and arms uh were xeroxed or they were displaced or they were offshore or they were outsourced and then from that we confused cause and effect and said well they're losers and globalization is great and the great reset at davos is a way to have ecumenical government in a way that we now have power that the League of Nations or the UN never had.

But in the meantime, we'll invite the UN to come in and investigate our racism,

the International Criminal Court, to see if we're abiding by

rules in Afghanistan.

And remember, it's selective.

They always go after the misdemeanor or the law-abiding citizen of the world, the United States.

They never touch Russia or China because China, as Japan and Germany did and the Soviet Union did in the 30s, will say, screw you.

They don't listen to this nonsense.

They look at these Western diplomats.

Oh my God, what are we going to do?

Well, let's go after the United States and Israel.

They'll listen to us.

So that's a psychological dysfunction where you always ticket

a guy going five miles over the speed limit because the car ahead of you has no lights, no license plate, no windows.

And you know that if you pull him over, it's a nightmare.

And you don't want to do that in a cost-benefit analysis.

Well, it sounds like the book is well-timed, and we look forward to it coming out.

I believe it's October 5th is the publication date, and it's called The Dying Citizen.

So we can then turn to the agenda for today.

And I really wanted to, there's two things in the news: the Iron Dome and the Wuhan virus, which of course has been in the news for a long time.

But I wanted to just, because they're both involved in this very sophisticated technologies, maybe take a little bit of time, especially with the Iron Dome, to

get some historical background on it.

The bill, the bill, this Congress or the House just passed a bill with a 420 to 9 vote for $1 billion for the Iron Dome.

And

we have nine people then who resisted it.

And of course, Omar and Talib, the two

representatives, were the loudest about that resistance.

But before we say something about that resistance, can you give us a little bit of history on that iron dome and the technology?

It seems sort of related to Reagan's, as they dubbed it, Star Wars technology.

Yeah, although I think you might want to call it a tactical weapon.

And I mean a tactical defense weapon rather than a strategic one, although they have strategic elements with it.

And by that, I mean it came really out of the first Gulf War when Raytheon had the Patriot batteries.

And we saw that

there was an ability, not an absolute ability, and it was kind of overhyped, but an ability to

knock down Scud missiles.

So in that 30-year Genesis,

now we have the ability with sophisticated computers to knock down incoming missiles.

And Saudi Arabia has a version of their R Patriot updated system and other systems.

But Israel, as it often does with us, collaborates in their research and development, has created sort of a synthesis of U.S.

technology and Israeli technology.

And they have a system

of

sophisticated radar computer

monitoring.

So when that missile rocket is launched from the West Bank or from Syria, they can pretty well now knock it down.

Now the problem is that those rockets, they're almost always imported from Iran, either to Gaza or they they come into Syria.

Those rockets are very cheap.

They cost about $600 to $800.

But the sophisticated technology to knock them down could be $60,000 or $80,000 per rocket.

For the anti-missile is much more expensive because of the infrastructure behind it than some person just letting off a missile.

And the problem is in a sophisticated Western consumer society,

people walking into a target in Israel

or people walking on the beach and suddenly to see three people obliterated by one missile, even though it's a population of eight or nine million people, that's devastating psychologically, because then the West Bank terrorist says, I have the ability to shut down your entire country for $800.

So that was the idea that they were going to the Israelis were going to invest a huge amount of money.

And then we were going to give them about a billion dollars in totally per year.

And much of that was going to go to the iron dome.

And the idea was that this is not an offensive weapon system.

So the people of the left would support it because it's defensive.

And think about that for a minute.

There are people on the West Bank that are in direct profit.

If you go to Israel, you can be an Israeli living in one village and right across the so-called Walders of Palestinian.

If that missile goes to that village it's it's going to have repercussions because they're not very accurate and we've had a lot of cases of Palestinians blowing up Palestinians.

But more importantly there's also

about 20% of the Israeli population is Arab.

So the idea was that this ecomenical society needed protection and not only needed protection with a subsidy from the United States to help these missiles be launched so they could afford to keep building them because their arsenal gets depleted pretty fast when you get this

hailstorm of offensive rockets.

But more importantly,

the firsthand experience, the quirks, the inconsistencies of the systems, the glitches, all of that would be tabulated by the Israelis and then shared with the United States.

So we said, wow, A,

This is a defensive system.

It's protecting lives.

It's not offensive.

It's not trying to kill anybody.

And therefore, we're going to help subsidize it because some of the technology came from us.

But more importantly, it's a win-win situation because we get to see what's going wrong in these initial early phases of it.

And then we'll incorporate that into our more sophisticated.

So when we get into a war, we don't have to go through the early trial and error of the Israelis.

So that was one reason why we did it.

The other irony is that

besides the fact that it's defensive and it protects people, and besides the fact that the United States has a vested interest in it, and that is think of the cost.

So we had the members, Talib

and Omar and others, almost in tears

about this cut

that did not sustain a democratic majority.

In other words,

the leadership found a way after giving them a virtue signaling moment to restore the funding and they're very upset about it because they were basically saying, we wanted the Palestinians or Arab terrorists.

We wanted them to have leverage over Israel.

We wanted the Israelis to know that any moment they could be blown out, their families could be killed.

And what we in the United States did, we gave them protective cover.

And that's wrong.

And then why are we spending a billion dollars?

But look what they did not object to.

So this is almost simultaneously

occurring when just a few weeks earlier we left behind 80 billion and I know that that's a contested figure.

I get a lot of hate mail when I say 80 billion because that incorporates the depreciation over 20 years, the training, the service, but often those are compounded into a weapon system.

So I'm not shy of saying 80 billion.

And that went into the hands of the Taliban.

I said earlier in one of our broadcasts, remember that that was worth about 900 F-35s or six Gerald Ford aircraft carriers or almost 80% of all the money, all the money we've given the history of the Jewish state over its 75 or six-year lifespan.

And so

get this,

that these members of Congress are not at all worried that we gave 80 times the price of the iron dome.

to a terrorist organization called the Taliban, but they're furious for offensive purposes.

And believe me, this equipment is already showing up in Iran, and certainly it'll be re-engineered if if it has any value for China, North Korea, and Russia, but it will be used all throughout the terrorist world.

They're not worried about that at all, but they are worried that a constitutional democratic state that's an ally of the United States wants one 80th of that amount of money to protect its citizens.

So, we're really looking at people who are morally, politically, ethically, absolutely bankrupt.

And they have no credibility, and they should be shunned for

the moral,

moral,

I don't know what we call the amoral people they are.

Yeah.

I think the topic of a synthesis of US and Israeli technology is very interesting because I think the Israelis do that all the time with some of their weapons and things that at least that we give them.

But now that we're talking, can I ask or dare I ask, how does this reflect on or of the Muslim community here in the United States?

Are they cringing or cheering on these representatives that they have?

And you can decline to answer that if you would like to.

Well,

I think

obviously

these representatives come from areas.

They find strength in areas of concentrated immigrant, Muslim, and second generation populations.

Like I just got back from Dearborn.

So, I mean, I just got back from Michigan.

So I know where Dearborn is.

I know where areas in Michigan are that have high populations of immigrants in the Middle East.

And so that's where

Talib gets her constituency.

And the same is true of the Somali community in Minnesota.

That's where Omar.

And that's a very natural phenomenon that immigrants always like to promote people as representatives of their minority groups.

I understand that.

We have a long history from Irish to Swedes, Danes.

Okay,

but there's something else going on that I think I don't want to be Eeyore,

and I think it's a little optimistic.

And that is that there is an elite, that these elites, when they come out of these immigrant communities, their first instinct is to emulate the white bicoastal and

Asian upper middle, upper, upper, upper, middle, or rich classes, the Silicon Valley bunch, the Hollywood bunch, the Washington, New York entertainment political bunch, the university bunch.

And they adopt the mannerisms and the ideology of those groups.

And what do I mean by that?

How does that translate?

That somebody who's a taxi driver paying $4.50 a gallon for gasoline in California has to, and he happens to be Hispanic, then his first or second generation Hispanic or Latino legislator said, we got to get that higher because they told me climate change.

That's part of my progressive agenda.

That's what our caucus says we all have to do.

Or we have to get up to 27 cents a kilowatt hour to make sure that people

don't use too much electricity when a person is sitting in Bakersfield, you know, in an uninsulated apartment, paying, you know, $2 an hour for an air conditioner when it's 106 on like 70 degrees in Palo Alto.

Or when some people

in the inner city want to have a charter school or some equity or parity with prep school people.

And yet the prep school people are saying, no, no, no, no, that's wrong.

That's taboo.

And you're going to have those teacher unions.

You're not going to fire any incompetent teachers.

So, what I'm getting at is that the minority elite congressional delegations, state, and local and state representatives,

they emulate, they xerox, they replicate an ideology that has nothing in common

with the two constituencies.

So what I'm getting at is the person who lives in Woodside or Atherton, California or Malibu, California or Chevy Chase, Maryland or the Upper West Side in New York or Madison, Wisconsin.

They represent a type of legislature, legislator that represents their refined views.

And the refined views is basically this.

We have enough money that we have transcended the elemental effort to live one more day.

We don't worry about taxes, we don't worry about electricity, we don't worry about the price of gas.

We can now concentrate in our $500,000 a year incomes or whatever to 300, we can concentrate on cosmic issues, racial

economicalism.

We want to worry about climate change, but you know what?

It's for those gritty little people, grubby little people, grimy little people that have to worry about gas and electricity and commute times and driving when they all should be in high-density apartments and going on high-speed rail, unlike our Gulf Stream.

So, what I'm getting at is that these representatives insidiously are being disconnected.

And their relationship with the Muslim working class or

the Mexican-American working class or the African-American is just now for the first time starting to emulate the deplorable and irredeemable relationship with the white working class, upper classes.

And so you can start to see little cracks in the facade down on the border where people in Del Rio are out protesting, Mexican-American people are protesting.

Al Sharpton are there chanting, we love our border patrol.

Or you start to see it in our community here in Salma where people, about 40% of them, voted to recall Gavin Newsom or voted for Donald Trump.

And I think you're starting to, you'll see it in the Arab American community and the Muslim American community.

And you're starting to see black males, for example, who don't like to be told by this whiny, nasal-toned elite, you're going to eat the anth.

And I saw you over there without a vaccination.

And, you know, you don't know enough.

And Van Jones says that, you know, he's our climate czar and he should tell you.

and they are

Don Lenon or whatever his name is unseen.

They don't feel a connection with this elite.

They're starting to look at this African-American elite in the same way they look at the white elite.

And that's revolutionary to reintroduce this question of class.

And so if the Republicans are smart, and they don't listen to the never-Trumpers, who are really a disaffected elite, who were angry, they lost their billets on television or in conferences or as advisors to government or as essayists or luminaries, whatever they're

licking their wounds or gnashing their teeth.

If they don't listen to those elites, but they try to reformulate the party to address these concerns of the middle class in very pragmatic terms, I think they'll have enormous electoral success.

Yeah, let's hope.

Yeah.

Right.

So can we move on then to the Wuhan virus?

And the Intercept published some

information about 900 pages that they,

through court processes, had released to them.

And their findings largely said that EcoHealth Alliance was given money and it was helping, using that money to finance research in Wuhan's lab.

And that's not really surprising to some people.

But when I was looking at this, what surprised me was that the mainstream scientific community still seems to be cultivating the about doffing their hat to World Health Organization and cultivating the idea that the origin of the virus is still a mystery.

They can't quite figure out how it got from bats to humans.

And I was wondering whether you have something to say on that.

Yeah, let's be honest.

Science as we know it does not exist anymore.

And by that, I mean if you submit an article to a blind referee, to a medical journal, or you apply for a position at a medical school, university program,

your position on particular political issues will govern your success or failure.

And that creates enormous pressures on people.

I'm not exaggerating in the slightest.

We learned last May that if you were going to protest en masse without mask, violating every aspect of social distancing in the quarantine and you were doing it to advocate for BLM then 1,200 health care professionals were going to sign a petition that said this is more important for the national health than the exposure to the virus.

Think of that.

And we saw it, we don't have any, Dr.

Fauci has not said a word.

He will tell every single person in the U.S.

military who has had COVID, has superior immunity

to vaccinate that you must get vaccinated.

You people in the federal government must be vaccinated.

But you know what?

I'm not going to say a word about those 2 million people coming across the border this year.

I'm not going to touch the Haiti problem.

So there is no science as we used to know it.

It's been weaponized.

It's sort of getting its trajectory is Soviet or Maoist science in service to a particular state megaphone.

So here we have Dr.

Fauci

and he has been the self-appointed, even though he's not the head of the CDC, he's not the head of the National Institute of Health, he's the head of the National

Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, and he had this enormous cachet from the AIDS crisis, but he's not a frontline researcher.

And he had a terrible dislike of Donald Trump, and the people around him didn't just didn't like Donald Trump for a variety of reasons.

And so they used that angle and said, I'm not Donald Trump.

I oppose Donald Trump.

And the scientists who shared that sentiment said, okay, whatever he says is right then.

And they completely played

deaf, blind,

deaf and blind to everything he said.

And by that, I mean

no mask.

No, they're not necessary.

One mask is advisable.

You got to have one mask.

I think you should get two.

Oh, by the way, I lied because i didn't want everybody to buy a mask and have a shortage for medical practitioners uh the origins of the virus oh no it can't be a lab run by the chinese military could not uh just can't happen it was a pangolin it was a bad and we have perfect relations with the chinese oh well maybe

maybe there was some

proximity between the wet market and and now we learn where is that going that's going that he channeled to this Echo Health friend of his, Peter Desick, he channeled money to be given to Chinese researchers who were engaged, let's face it, in gain of function research.

And it's looking more and more likely that the more that the quote official investigation hand in glove with the Chinese run by Mr.

Dasek, who was deeply involved and culpable for trying to avoid U.S.

law by engaging or promoting gain and function research, they had no credibility.

And what everything they said was wrong.

So we even have doctors writing to Lancet now saying, you know what?

The orthodox position is not orthodox.

It's not correct.

The heterodox position that there is a role for the virology lab in their outbreak of this pandemic is a more likely scenario.

And so that's, I think what you're going to see is at some point,

Dr.

Fauci reminds me a great deal of General Milley's, another Zelda forest skunk character, that every single decision that's made, he's there on the stage.

And he's usually wrong.

And he's a hypocrite.

He'll pull down his mask at a baseball game and talk while he's not eating, but he'll say that sports events, which we have no evidence in those outdoor

congregations at football games when a high percentage of the people there are either vaccinated or have had the virus or both are super spreading events.

We know that super spreader events are concentrated in bars or restaurants or parties.

It's much more dangerous to go to the Vanity Fair indoor

vanity event or the Obama 60-year party than it is to go to watch a Michigan State football game probably.

But he's not going to criticize that.

That's what I'm getting at.

I didn't hear Dr.

Fauci say, Please, Barack and Michelle, just cancel that.

You know what?

It's not a good idea.

There's going to be people in that pavilion right next to you.

Why would you not wear a mask?

And you would have the servants wear a mask.

Come on, you people at Vanity Fair.

You don't really want to come out to this elite ball, $35,000 dress AOC.

Come on.

Why would you not wear a mask in an indoor event when everybody who's serving you is wearing a mask?

Come on, you people at the Emmys.

You've got to be, you're on the good side.

You're progressives.

Why would you not wear a mask and all of your Morlock servers have a mask on?

And so he has no credibility.

And I think he'll be like General Milley that he'll be, I'm never going to resign.

I'm an integral part of the medical solution to COVID, just as General Milley is distinguished.

And then one day they'll just say, I got to retire.

That's what we do in America.

When somebody is totally discredited and they're famous and we don't know what to do with them, or they're very powerful like James Comey.

Everybody thought James Comey was irreplaceable.

Can't fire James Comey.

He'll be around.

James Comey is a joke.

You can't get rid of what would you do?

Robert Mueller, Bob Mueller.

I knew Bob Mueller.

Bob Mueller, Bob Mueller.

And where's Bob Mueller?

22 million for what?

And John Brennan.

John Brennan is the voice of reason.

And that's it.

All of these people have zero credibility.

They fade because they don't tell the truth.

And if you don't tell the truth, and the word in Greek is aletheia, and it means you can't forget something.

Truth is,

it exists.

And when you consistently screw around with it and mock it and deprecate it and violate it, it comes back and bites you.

That's called the people will, do you think the people will eventually see this

or not?

Because I think they're already looking at it.

How can you be Dr.

Fauci?

Think about it for a minute.

You are saying that federal workers and soldiers have to be vaccinated.

Now, you can make that argument if it's consistent.

And you're saying that to stop these mutations, we've got to get everybody some protection, not absolute, but some protection through vaccination.

But then you learn or you know that people who have had the virus have longer and more robust immunity.

And you also know that there is some, not definitive, but some suggestion that they will have a higher reaction.

a greater reaction, I should say, if they're vaccinated, given their prior antibody levels.

Okay, so why wouldn't you just say take an antibody test or maybe T cell?

I don't know what they're going to come up with.

They can come up with a sophisticated test.

And we don't really care whether you've got your immunity in the more superior fashion through a naturally acquired

or artificially through a vaccination, but you're vaccinated.

But he won't do that.

He'll never say that.

And, you know, it doesn't make any sense.

Think of the absurdities.

And we talked about that before.

If superior immunity requires an additional inferior immunity, a vaccination, then people who have the inferior immunity, like me, and maybe you and other people, then you would say to them, well, you've got to get the superior because we're advocating Americans must have both if

possible.

So, you, Victor, you've got to go out there and sit out there in a bar for a couple of nights and get COVID.

Then you'll have to naturally, and that's their attitude.

Or Dr.

Fauci could say, All of you, I recommend that all the soldiers in the military get vaccinated.

And you know what?

They're down there

on that military base dealing with Afghan refugees, or they're federal employees in the Border Patrol, and ICE dealing with 2 million people expect to cross the border.

And guess what?

The people they deal with who are not U.S.

citizens are not going to have advantages or prerogatives that U.S.

citizens don't.

If we're going to make the people who care for them or have to be responsible for monitoring to be vaccinated, even the some who have been

prior infected, then surely we can ask people who are not even citizens to be back, but he won't do that.

So he has no credibility.

And when you have no credibility and you won't tell the truth and you're a political animal, then you live or die with politics.

So as long as Joe Biden was 55%

and Donald Trump was the insurrectionist, oh, January, and that was the mantra for eight months, why the fumes, remember what we're talking about, Sammy, the fumes of the prior administration, a good economic policy, energy development, a stable Abrams Accord in the Middle East, deterrence against Iran, China, Russia,

a secure border.

All he had to do was smile and say, I did it, but he couldn't do that because he's a man now of the left.

So he overturned all of that.

It turned into an abject disaster.

He's 39, 40, 41 in the more accurate polls, maybe 45 in all of them.

And so when you get to that level, you start to see people say, well, wait a minute.

I'm a leftist, but I don't think we should cancel Iron Dome.

Wow, I'm a leftist, but I think $3.5 trillion is a little bit to borrow when we owe $30 trillion.

Well, I'm a leftist, but I really don't think we should chase people out of particular safe spaces based on their race.

And so that's not principled statements or reflections of sincere beliefs, but it is a reaction to political realities.

And as he continues to show cognitive challenges,

he's not going to be able to recover.

Because

none of these initiatives that Biden is advancing have popular support.

So as he continues to decline in the polls, then people like General Milley and

Anthony Fauci are faced with a dilemma.

They have to do one of two things.

They either have to abandon and distance themselves from

Biden, as they did from Trump when Trump hit low rating,

or they're going to be fired.

And they're going to be, you know, are rendered irrelevant.

Nobody's going to listen to them.

So they're going to have a choice because the president's popularity in a democracy matters a great deal and affects the bureaucratic mindset, the bureaucratic mindset.

When George Bush was after 9-11,

the first week even going into Iraq, he had a 75% approval rating.

So a guy like John Brennan was writing memos about why enhanced interrogation wasn't torture.

And when Bush left office, his approval ratings was rock bottom in the low 30s.

And John Brennan was reversing himself, said, Bush did it, not me.

I want to be in the Obama administration.

That's how the bureaucratic mind works.

And these people are bureaucrats.

Yeah.

And

I'm impressed because you seem optimistic rather than Eeyore about the ability of the ordinary people or what would naturally come about with ordinary people in the seeking of or the knowledge of what is truth.

And I find that the Pravda wall put up by cyberspace is somehow daunting and I'm a little bit worried, especially about the young generation.

And so I would like to just take us to recently you gave a talk at a community college and I know that you had some reflections on that younger generation and maybe we can turn to that and you can let us hear the experience because you haven't been in a community college setting in a long time and I understand it was more or less like a classroom.

Yeah, please go ahead.

Nice group of people.

I was invited to speak both to an in-class audience and one on Zoom.

I won't name the professor of the local community college to avoid embarrassment for them, maybe.

And I wanted to talk about my book and citizenship, but one of the things I wanted to offer the students is a different point of view from what their official

administrative and faculty messaging or narrative is.

And I basically said to them that we're citizens of the United States and race is incidental, not essential to who we are.

And when somebody asked about systemic racism, I tried to say that two things.

Every majority population,

almost everyone, is unfair to a minority population, whether it's in China with a Han population, whether it's former Soviet Union, whether it's today in Mexico and the people in Oaxaca that are indigenous people.

But in the United States, there were correctives because of the Constitution.

There was an amendment process, there were courts, there were legislative back and forth, there were two parties.

So that we work these things out.

And I wanted to remind everybody, we don't have to be perfect to be good in this class.

I said, so if you're and most of the people I think would say they were of Mexican-American heritage.

So I said, remember, if you or I want to go to Japan and be a full-fledged citizen of Japan, we're not going to be able to do it.

Legally we can, but not psychologically or morally, because people don't look like us and they value that much more than we do.

If you want to go to China, you're not going to be accepted as a Chinese.

If you want to go, if I'm so-called white and I still had blonde hair, then if I went to Mexico, I could be a legal citizen of Mexico, but I could never be considered a full-fledged Mexican.

And I'm kind of taking a prompt from the Mexican Constitution that all but suggests that.

And so this country is a multiracial democracy.

It's the only one in the world that's ever worked.

It doesn't use coercion like the Soviet Union or the Ottomans.

And the students need to hear that.

And then they need to not be so judgmental of the present,

in the present of the past.

And so I tried to suggest to them politely

that if you're in a pre-industrial society, which is what America was until the 1860s or 70s, and even in the 1920s and 30s, it was a non-technological society, as we know that word today,

then

it's a little bit, you have to give a little bit of leeway to people's moral differences.

And by that, I mean they're just, they're working for one more day.

And I'll give you an example very quickly.

When I grew up, I was on this farm and it was 1959, 58, some of my earliest memories, but that was only

20 years after the Depression.

And so my grandmother had a big kettle and she had a big iron that she'd hit and she still made things and then hit.

And everybody from the ranch would come for lunch.

And what she was telling me, and then she worked all day.

There were no, if you remember, washer and dryers had just come out.

There was a ringer that you had to wash and then you put it in the ringer to get the,

you know, the spin it, spinner, and then you put it in the dryer.

But most often she had clotheslines everywhere.

And what I'm getting at, that was a hard job.

And the vacuum cleaners were so weak compared today.

What I'm getting at is that most people until very recently spent most of their waking hours cleaning themselves, cleaning their surroundings, worried about where they were going to get the food.

I remember I went into this old,

when I came back from college and I moved back in, and my grandmother was 93 and

she's sort of lost cognitive.

She goes, can you go get me some apricots?

I said, no, I can't.

Well, I canned them.

And I go into this concrete chamber and there's 50 year apricots full of mildew in glass jars.

And there was hundreds of them.

Black widows.

And that was their whole supply of food.

They worked all summer long to canned tomatoes, apricots, peaches, grape, anything.

So to ask them to have this leisure as these modern students do, and remember they're taking a curriculum that to be frank, if they were back in school in the 1960s or 70s at UC, Berkeley, or Stanford, they would not be able to do what they're doing.

They would have to study because I know it as a university professor, the curriculum is a joke compared to what it was just 10 years ago.

So I was asking the students to be a little bit modest and not to use the standards of the present to condemn the past, but also to think,

well, wait a minute, I'm going to be in the past.

I'm going to be part of history soon.

And if we've advanced this greatly, from our so-called racist, sexist, homophobic, evil founders, our ancestors, well, what are they going to say of us?

Are we exempt?

And I said to them, we abort a million babies a day.

I mean, a year, excuse me, we have.

I think it's on the decline now.

What is somebody, I don't know, 50 years going to say, you know, those people in America knew that a fetus was viable at a very young, and they still aborted them.

And they wouldn't call it death.

They wouldn't even use the word infant.

What was wrong with those people?

Or they'll say, you know, they lived in a very sophisticated society and they let people live on the street, defecate, urinate, cause public harm to themselves and passersby, inject drugs, throw their detritus right into the road.

Are they going to say those people were very sophisticated?

And yet they did nothing about 7,000 African-American youths shooting each other every year, more in one year than all those who died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And they said nothing and they did nothing.

And I could go on, and they might even say of Dr.

Fauci in our medical community, oh my God,

you know, you guys make fun of bleeding and leeches and the humors of the body.

But here, you know, 100 years later, we look back at you guys.

Did you really inject people with chemotherapy poison?

Did you get some big radiation machine and burn a hole in their skin to shrink a tumor?

What kind of medieval doctors were you?

And if we said, well, that's all we had.

We were trying to save lives.

No, no, we're judging you by our standards.

And that's what makes me so angry at this young generation.

Yeah,

some of them had to, they have no idea what

those people suffered on Okinawa.

They have no idea what the people on the Oregon Trail suffered.

They had no idea what people during the Great Depression, of all races, of all walks of life.

And so for this kind of smug, affluent, leisured student, well, you know, I think feel that this is my safe space because of endemic racism and systematic oppression.

I'll tell you what, systematic oppression is: it's getting up at four in the morning and going out behind two horses and trying to plow two acres of wheat and then trying to can and cook all day long and fix your house with no money.

That's what systematic oppression is.

And that's what most Americans of all walks of life, as I said, face.

So

that's a powerful message.

How was it received by them?

Do you think?

I would say in silence.

So I don't know whether their silence was, hmm, that guy is an old white nut that I can't stand, or that guy said something I never heard before, and maybe I should just go home and be quiet and think about it.

But I have a feeling it might be the former.

But

we all have to do according to our station.

We have to say the truth as we see it.

And this generation of youth is entirely disconnected from nature,

for the most part, disconnected from what we used to call hard physical work, very judgmental, the most poorly educated college group of people.

And I'm just not spouting.

I'm looking at statistics on test scores.

And

boy, if you said to today's student,

okay, you're a freshman at Stanford.

To get your BA, you're going to have to take the SAT again.

And we're going to have to have a minimum SAT score when you leave, just like you're going to be audited when you want to get the bar exam to get your BA.

Or you know what?

If you want to be a high school teacher, you can get your education fifth year credential, but you can get a minimum A too, an academic degree.

You know what, faculty?

You're going to sign a contract every four or five years.

And it's going to say, you must have the following, this many

refereed articles, this book, this teaching evaluation.

And you know what?

We're just not going to give you lifelong tenure.

And I think you'd have a very, I don't think you'd have time to do what we're seeing at the university today, which is not education, it's activism.

Well, just to encourage you, I think that 17, 18, 19-year-olds are specialists and looking disinterested, but they usually are listening nonetheless.

So perhaps

it hit hard.

Well, our last topic today was animals and especially the

historical view or anecdotes of animals and their representations or value in older societies.

And we don't have much time.

So I'm thinking, would you like to talk about that right now very quickly?

Or should we just save that?

Oh, okay.

It could be very quick.

Yeah, I thought

on that topic, I was just thinking, I had a colleague that John Heath and we co-authored two books.

One was Bonfire of the Manities and

Essays About the University, and the other was Who Killed Homer about classics.

And he wrote something called Talking Greeks, I think the name was.

And he made the argument that the Greeks defined animals in a little different way than we do.

Their primary distinction was they're not rational, and that rationality

difference was manifested in speech.

Animals couldn't talk.

And in the Iliad, when you have horses that talk, or when animals do talk, then they become human, despite their their shapes centaurs can talk horse bodies man torsos

and then they extended that idea that the difference between people who could not talk Greek barbarians or people who didn't talk well and so they that was that the way they looked at animals as not necessarily

inferior, but just didn't have the ability to express ideas and talk to them.

And so, and they also were a little different.

They understood that they had, that animals must have a different way of looking at things.

And every once in a while, you know, Argos in the Odyssey, who dies on that dung pad,

whimpering, and he senses things.

And

hawks and eagles give signs.

And

if you go to many places in Greece and you, grave

epitaphs, you'll see horses in them.

So they had a little different, I think they were much closer to animals because of the physicality of Greece, the pre-industrial nature.

And they felt an affinity for animals, a great affinity.

And they were curious about why they couldn't speak.

And they said, because they can't speak, they're not human.

Yeah, well, the modern reflections on animals are from people like John Locke, who said Some of natural rights apply to animals because they're

sentient animals.

And Darwin also said that no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.

And I thought that was rather interesting.

I think the Greeks would say if that's true, then

when was the last time you talked to a baboon?

And so

I think Darwin's point, what he meant,

And I haven't read The Origins of the Species in a while, but I think what he was saying is that men are not exempt from natural selection and evolution.

In other words, mankind naturally selects.

Maybe the industrial or technological world has aborted that natural process.

But I can tell you that

just in empirical experience, when I look at my grandmother's family of 12 people,

siblings, growing up in dire poverty, my maternal grandmother in New Mexico, and losing three or four of that 12 to childhood diseases and the people who survived into their 70s or 80s or 90s, there was some kind of natural selection.

And I think when I meet people in the Oklahoma diaspora or the Arkansas diaspora, that is the dregs of society as they were seen in the postbellum Civil War South, they had nothing for them.

They had no money.

They had nothing.

And they migrated into with nothing into the Oklahoma Territory or Arkansas Territory.

And then they were hard scrabble and the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

But the people who survived that,

when you meet them today, they're very hardy people.

And there was kind of a primitive natural selection that affects us all, at least

until recently.

And so that's what Darwin was saying, I think, that

unfortunately, the survival of the fittest, at least physically, I know that I wouldn't have made it.

I'm not the fittest, because I think at the age of 68,

I've had three kidney stone operations.

I've had a a knee operation.

I've had a ruptured appendix operation.

I've had, you know, my tonsils and adenoids taken out.

I've had a serious sinus operation.

Every one of those

could have, except for the knee operation, could have ended badly.

And then I have to have glasses and et cetera.

And so out in the wild, I just wouldn't have made it.

I would have been dead at 20 probably.

And maybe my genes will reflect that.

So are you suggesting that the animals that have survived are the strongest and dark values?

Absolutely.

You can see that with animal breeds, can't you, with dogs?

I know that every once in a while over my

40 years here on the farm, I've

not often, but on occasion,

weakened and bought a pedigree dog,

you know, a Generation.

or a golden retriever or a Labrador and versus the mongols that people drop off.

And every time the mongols, if people drop off that seem to be, have ropes around their neck or open sores or they're snarly

and they're of all mix.

You couldn't even know what their pedigree is.

They survive.

Yeah.

And the longest.

Yeah, the purebred that have been groomed and they're just selectively breeded to look like each other.

They seem to have, their back legs give out.

I had used to, I bought once two pedigree German shepherds.

I saved up all summer and bought them for guard dog.

They were beautiful dogs, but by age eight or nine, seven or eight, their back legs started going out.

Yeah.

I bought a beautiful great Dane once and his eyes started to go out and Dalmatians, especially.

But

boy, I couldn't get rid of them.

They lived to be 15 or 16.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I think we better call it a day here.

I'd love to ask you about the Roman perspective on treating animals like royalty, like some people do in our modern day.

And I know that they have a say on that, but we'll save that for another time.

I want to remind your listeners that you have a website, Victor Davis Hansen, Victor, sorry, VictorHanson.com.

And it's a new website as of two months ago.

You're also found on social media, Facebook at V D Hansen's Cup, and on Twitter at V D Hansen and Parlor at Victor DavisHansen.

And

we want to thank you for today.

It's a really good talk, and we're happy always to hear your wisdom at the end of the day.

So I hope our Saturday crowd enjoyed this.

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