The Classicist: Destroying Culture

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

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen show, The Classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic and the author of its new weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

You can subscribe to it at civilthoughts.com.

But who cares about the host?

Because we're here to listen to the wisdom of the namesake of this show, Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a farmer, military historian, a classicist.

He's many things.

You'll find just about everything he does at victorhanson.com.

That's Hansen, S-O-N.com.

More on that in a little bit.

Today on The Classicist, we are recording on Friday, September 17th.

We will be talking about about Victor's writings in American Greatness.

And, well, we had elections in California this past week.

So Victor's take on the recall and also a little bit about shame, a little bit about power.

But let's listen to this important message first.

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

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

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity That's home, titlelock.com/slash victor.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

Victor, you've written, as you do every week, for American Greatness.

You write a longer essay and then a shorter piece.

But let's take on the big essay you've written.

It's titled Woke, the Evil of Our Age.

And here's something you wrote in that piece.

You wrote, we should be worried about our own woke pandemic.

If you consider the history of France, Russia, and China, that's what you're writing about.

Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they went deadly and feral.

Victor, the CHICOMs, you say, I say the CHICOMs, they could not have conceived something so harmful for America as woke.

Would you elaborate on the main theme of this essay?

Well, if you wanted to weaken the United States economically, politically, culturally, socially, militarily, then you would try to divide it because it's the only multiracial

democracy really that has not relied on coercion.

to make, I mean, Brazil and India have much more greater levels of coercion to make people get along in a consensual society.

And they're not fully consensual like we are.

And more importantly, as we've talked about earlier, the usual prescription for keeping diverse peoples together in one empire or nation is death and punishment.

This is what the Soviets did with different minorities.

This is what the Ottomans did.

This is what the Romans did.

We don't do that.

And so you have to have a natural unity, and that means each tribal group gives up their primary identity.

to a greater civic brotherhood.

And we're destroying that.

50, 60 years after the civil rights movement, I don't know what happened to us, but you know we had been doing enormously well we had record low minority unemployment we had

class was increasingly distinct from race the black lower and middle classes had made more wage gains than the white lower and middle class the last three years i think in terms of ethnic minorities Most of them were Asian, but there were 12 or 13 that had higher per capita income than whites.

60% of all college students were women.

And so all of a sudden these people came in after the George Floyd and they said, you know what, we've never had an agenda that anybody wanted.

Nobody wants a new Green Deal.

Nobody wants critical race theory.

Nobody wants new monetary theory.

But damn it, we've got an opportunity.

So we're going to create a complete fable.

And that is we've got to tear the country down because it was flawed at its so-called 1776 beginning, which it really was 1619, they tell us.

And it's been racist ever since.

And we're just going to torch it.

And that's what they were doing.

And they don't tell us why people are falling off the wheels on an Afghan plane to get here, or people are sitting in feces right now under a bridge so they can become an American, because it's supposedly a toxic white place.

But what I'm getting at is that

this is a year zero.

revolution, Jack, where people want to recreate the date America was founded.

They want to destroy the iconic statuary of America, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, everybody else.

They want to destroy the American narrative.

They want to go after the national anthem, God bless America, you name it.

Any reference to anything positive about the United States, they want to destroy.

And they want to start over with what?

The great legacy of socialism or communism throughout world history.

It's been an utter failure.

But that's taking them at their word, that they're sincere.

If you were going to be a cynic and you thought they're not sincere, they're just like the bloated people on the dais at a May Day parade in the late Soviet Union when they were all going out to their DACAs on the Crimea.

You know, they had six cars and all of this stuff.

And when you look at AOC and this $35,000 dress, or you look at Mark Zuckerberg's 50,000 square foot home, or you look at Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer, all bearishly breaking their own codes about masking and social distancing and quarantine, then you're cynical.

They just want power.

And, you know, that's not an exaggeration.

When you look at the architects of the woke movement, Ms.

Patrice Quellars is now living in Topographic Canyon in her fourth home surrounded by a $35,000 fence.

Professor Kendi is charging us, as we said one time, $20,000 for his wisdom.

AOC apparently likes $35,000 dresses.

And Tanaheshi Coates, he was the one, he was the godhead of the, you know, he was the brilliant writer.

Well, he writes comic books about blacks now, and he's trying to turn those comic books into movies.

More power to him.

That's the capitalist way.

But these are not Marxists.

They're not street organizers.

They're not poor people.

These are people who really want to fight with the ruling classes to, you know, get more money.

So the BLM movement is run by people, as I said last time, on the Lido deck, and they want the better better chairs.

And the white establishment is willing to give them some chairs, but this is really an intramural fight among wealthy, wealthy people who are trying to leverage each other.

And unfortunately, the fallout affects all of us.

I wish they'd just go in a room and say, you know what?

We're going to give you this many commercials.

We're going to give you this many title roles and Hollywood movies.

We're going to give you this many admissions.

And we'll just work it out between us.

But they don't.

They affect everybody.

So some guy on on a forklift, as I said, in Bakersfield has never had any privilege.

His kid gets straight A's.

He can get in anywhere, he won't get in anywhere because he's a white male.

So, I'm being cynical, but that's what it is.

You know, you say that forklift operator, actually, in this piece in American Greatness, you wrote, A trucker from Boise has more in common with a Mexican-American sheriff in Modesto than he does with a woke techie in Menlo Park.

I totally agree with that, of course.

But do you believe that the truck driver in Boise is starting to think that way?

Like, yeah, I, you know, I've got more in common with that Mexican

hardware and vice versa.

Are there Mexican Americans who are thinking like, yeah, you know, these guys are my probably worth as much Sympatico between us more with me, with the trucker than there is with AOC?

Well, you know, I don't know about exit polls.

I have my doubts about them, but in this failed recall effort, about 42% of so-called latinos or hispanics revealed that they voted to recall and it was just about the same as the white number both minorities most latinos most whites voted not to recall but the point is there's no longer a distinction based on race either in the approval or the rejection of gavin newsom in the case of latinos and blacks that's new because usually they were predictably overwhelmingly democratic or liberal or progressive.

That's not true anymore, especially with Hispanic males.

When you look at the number of black males and Hispanic males who voted to recall them, it's pretty, it's getting very high.

And so, yeah, I think that's encouraging because race is becoming more incidental the way it should.

And I think a lot of people,

let's be frank, this is what we're supposed to do, Jack, is tell

you and I have navigated a lot of our lives,

you and the punditry and magazines, and opinion making, and me and academia.

And there is a certain subset of a bi-coastal white elite who feels that they deserve certain exemptions and prerogatives based on their zip code or who their parents were or where they were.

Absolutely.

And they have a certain bearing about them, their accent, their stature, the way they look at people.

For a lot of people, poor whites, Hispanic, they're not easy people to get along with.

When I sent minority students, I sent over 50 of them in 21 years to the Ivy League in Stanford, Berkeley, their complaint was never they can't do the work.

It was always that the culture, the culture was antithetical to them and that the people thought they were better than they.

I know some of it was envy, some of it was insecurity, that's normal, but there's something about this self-righteous, puritanical culture that has lost its God.

So

you could excuse it maybe during the abolitionist period because there was a great cause, abolition, and they were using religious zeal.

But when they lost their God, they have created new deities.

And, you know, it's global warming, critical race theory, and they have the same zealousness that, you know,

you're going to be perfect or you're no good.

And we're going to be self-improvement.

And you got to do this and you got to wear that mask.

And, you know, they have no compassion.

They have passion, but no compassion.

And they're a really hard group of people.

I spent most of my life around them at Stanford University when I was a student,

visiting professor at various places and now at the Hoover Institution and having to be on the Stanford campus.

And boy, they're not an easy group to get along with and they're assumed heirs.

But I think a lot of Mexican-American people, to take one example, don't like them.

And they feel they look down upon them and they do.

And they talk about all this cosmic justice.

And then when they look at their lives, they think, hmm, they want us to be maids.

They want us to cut their lawns.

They want us to cook their food, but they do not want to put their kids in the public schools with us.

They do not want to go to a PTA meeting with us.

They don't want to go out to dinner with us.

We don't associate with them.

And you've talked about that before.

It's a psychological medieval idea of tenants or indulgences or something.

Well, it's also an evil.

Not everyone who listens to this podcast actually goes to American Greatness and reads the pieces.

I do encourage our listeners to do that.

But towards the end of this essay, you wrote, so what is truly evil is the current woke trademark of loud, privileged whites who scapegoat the losers in the globalist game as racist or in the Obama-Hillary Clinton Biden patois of clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, chumps, mostly out of elite condescension, virtue signaling guilt, and pathetic contextualizing their own privilege by projecting their unearned status onto the supposedly distant cultural losers.

A really powerful sentence there, Victor.

I think it speaks for itself.

If you want to say anything more about it, say so.

Otherwise,

we will move on to the next topic.

That's what California is about, Jack.

So that was a kind of a wordy or cumbersome description of what's actually happening.

In California, People who live in 70-degree weather on the coast tell us that we're going to pay 27 cents at peak hours when it's 105 here and poor people can't afford air conditioning.

Or they tell us that we're going to pay 450 a gallon.

I just got back multi-state speaking, and I can tell you that gas is about $3 a gallon.

Here it's, I just filled up yesterday, it was $4.80.

And people who are poor and have to drive, you know, from Bakersfield to Porterville or from Fresno to Vice Value, that's not like going to the Silicon Valley Google campus and going to downtown Minimal Park.

And so that affects other people themselves.

The people who say we just have to trust the teacher humans and we just have the state board of education is, you know, transgender, their kids are not subject to that.

They're in Sacred Heart.

They're in Castileia.

They're in the Harper School.

They're in all of these private schools.

They are.

They're sprouting up like weeds all over Silicon Valley.

So what I'm getting at is that I don't know where it is.

It's like loyalty or French aristocracy, Robespierre brothers, you know, upper middle class play acting.

or maybe it's Marie Antoinette in a peasant costume at Versailles and acting like she's out in the French Normandy countryside.

But what I'm getting at is these people talk down to people.

And yet, as we saw from Pelosi in her ice cream freezer and her hairdresser or Newsom at the French laundry or Chuck Schumer yesterday sneezing out loud or expectorating or whatever he was doing without a mask,

they feel that they are privileged.

And

as part of the aristocracy or the cleric, they feel that they should not be subject to the rules they impose on us.

And that's what this is about.

Yeah, I think when they're accused of being hypocritical, it doesn't register because they're not in their minds that they're entitled to do whatever the hell they want to do.

They don't feel that that.

No, they don't.

You're absolutely right.

They think, what?

You mean me with a Harvard degree, me?

with a resume like this, me in this zip code, me with Buffy and Jodi, these super kids that have been branded with every type of award and my kids, I have a daughter at Stanford, I've got a daughter at Yale.

Me, me, of course I am, I'm hypocritical, of course, because this is what I worked at, this is what I deserve.

And, you know, I don't want to be around with a deplorable and irredeemable, a chump, a dregs, a clinger.

I don't want to be near those people.

And you can see it.

Every once in a while, you'll be somewhere.

And I, you know, when you're with these people and somebody from the working class comes into an elevator where you're there on a repairman they don't feel comfortable they're either patronizing or sneering

and that's not what america was about what tocqueville said what made this country work and what foreign observers john de crave corps said the same thing he was an american citizen finally is that we had an independent autonomous middle class at that time yeomanry but now the truck driver the small business person the guy that owns the 7-eleven this is what America is about.

It's not a bunch of people who get stamped with a bunch of letters after their names and think they can talk down to people.

And boy, you really saw it during COVID.

If there was justice in the world, given all the things that Anthony did when he was engaged in funding gainers and denied that under oath and can't come up with a...

coherent description of a mask or a coherent description of herd immunity or a coherent description of the origins of and then funneled

money to Peter, whatever, Dresdak, and he was on the investigative committee of investigating himself, essentially.

That's what these people are doing.

Where have you shown that you're superior in your judgment to Joe Smith, who drives a long-haul truck?

You're not, because you're all over the map.

And the same is true of the rest of them.

And that is, you know, that's LeBron James.

That's General Milley.

That's the head of American Airlines.

That's the head of Delta.

They all want to tell us how we should act and behave.

And yet when we say to them, well, where's your accountability?

Well, Victor, you just talked about Tocqueville and the centrality of then an emerging middle class.

But maybe we should veer off a little bit here because I think this is a theme of your forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen, which...

I forget if I mentioned this earlier in the program, but I want to encourage our listeners to go to victorhanson.com and subscribe to it, because that way you can access much of the original content that Victor writes.

It's only readable there, nowhere else.

There is a premium service.

It's very affordable.

Also, there's the link to Buying the Dying Citizen, which comes out in about three weeks, October 5th.

But Victor, there is a clear dot connection between the dying of citizenship in America and the health and well-being of the middle class.

Is there not?

Well, all indicators suggest there is.

We had 12 years until the hated Donald Trump stopped it of continued erosion of middle class wages until 2017, 18.

For the first time in 12 years, we started to see an increase.

And as I said earlier, most people, 50% of Americans die with about $10,000 in net work and with credit card debt.

And we have $1.7 trillion in aggregate student debt.

And that didn't go for necessarily engineering degrees that are going to pay well.

So when you look at home ownership, it's starting to go down again.

You look at the age of people get married, it's going down.

When the age of people buy a house, it's going down.

The age of people having a first child, going down.

It all reflects a deep pessimism of the middle class.

You look at suicides, opiate addiction, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because we're not

with the middle class.

So what Joe Biden and the left is doing is say, we're for the middle class.

We're going to tax the wealthy.

Well, I don't think they're really going to tax Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Deswell.

They're going to tax the doctor who works all day in the emergency room.

Or they're going to go after some businessman who's trying to feed millions of people on 100 acres or 500 acres of oranges or almonds or grapes or something.

But they're not going to go after the very wealthy.

And they're not worried about the middle class.

I know they're not worried because they never say we're going to make affordable housing and actually do it.

They're not going to deregulate to make housing affordable.

They're not going to frack and horizontal drill.

We've cut back by 3 million barrels to let people have affordable energy.

They're not going to go up there and say, we're going to harvest 60 million trees in California and revitalize the timber industry, A, to prevent forest fires that pollute the skies where your children breathe, and B, so you can go in there and buy that four by eight sheet of plywood without paying $90.

They're not going to do that because they don't care.

And that's what's happened with this elite.

They're the most selfish group of people.

This country, it's so wonderful, produce this echelon, this bi-class of globalized elite that just have this sense of entitlement and they're not worried about the middle class or the poor.

And, you know, they'll step over feces and needles on their way to the Pacific Heights mansion.

And you better not say anything about cleaning those homeless up.

They are saintly people.

Just keep them away from me.

And you middle class people, if you can't avoid it, and that's your problem.

You didn't make enough money.

Victor, it's maybe unfair to label you as one of the great political commentators in america i've always felt that i think in 2016 no one was a better political analyst than you were and i think that talent carries on whether you want to believe it or not but put on your political hat if you don't mind and talk about the recall election

do you think it was winnable at any point if it was winnable how did it go off the rails a number of people have said in the last week that one of the problems was the election became about Larry Elder.

And if it had any chance of winning, all focus had to be on Gavin Newsom.

I look at it in the same way that I did the 2020 presidential election, not in terms of voter fraud, but in the terms that people were not expecting what the left was going to do.

And by that, I mean why Donald Trump was having these huge rallies and everybody looked at them, 50,000 people.

Then they looked at Joe Biden and they saw what 50 cars honking at like a outdoor movie set and then the guy with a brain freeze they thought

this is going to be a no-brainer but what they didn't realize that behind the scenes silicon valley was funneling five six seven hundred million dollars and very scientifically to pre-selected precincts to get out the vote in a selective manner to add to the precinct workers, which is illegal to selectively give money to influence election.

And they had been systematically in March and April earlier that year, changing the voting laws, whether it was

no need to substantiate your address or your full name or your signature or a postmark date.

They were all lax.

And when you saw that the error rate went, as I said, from a normal 0.5% to 0.4%, That was where the election was won.

In the case of California, Larry Elder announced, then it was, let's look at Davin Newsom.

And Larry Elder started to say things.

Do you want 60 million trees dead in the Sierra and all those carbon emissions released when they inevitably go up and smoke when you have no timber industry that can use them?

Do you really want to ban nuclear power and natural gas and depend on wind and solar if you don't have any money?

Do you really, really want to not have built a reservoir since 1983, and yet two-thirds of the population live where one-third of the precipitation is you don't believe in water transfers well then what are you going to do he asked started to ask those questions and then bam the poll started to show it it was almost dead even or within the margin of error and everybody was saying wow larry elder has galvanized the race he's made it about gavin newson and i thought to myself uh there's going to be a big ied go-off funded by Silicon Valley.

And sure enough, they waited and waited.

And then suddenly the Netflix, the Zuckerberg, they just poured in $75, $80 million.

And for the last 10 days, you didn't hear about anything about Gavin News.

He never said to you, as I said earlier, I expanded the 99 freeway to six lanes.

He did that because he didn't, he not only didn't do it, he didn't want to do it.

And he never said, I got affordable housing.

He didn't do it because he didn't do it because he didn't want to do it.

He never said, I cleaned out the forest.

So all it was then was Larry Elder is Donald Trump.

And he got his surrogates, LA Times, he's the face of white supremacy.

Think how absurd that is.

He created such a, and I'm using the terms of the left now, a hate climate, a climate of hate that some crazy white woman, I don't know if she's Antifa or a protest, she really thought it was okay to wear a gorilla mask and walk up to a black man and throw an egg at him because she understood the climate had been created where the social media people and the Los Angeles Times and the elected wouldn't say a word.

that would not be a hate crime if that person had been barack obama and some guy got out of a semi truck and did that he would be in jail right now sitting just like the january 6 people and so that's what happened and you could see it coming the election was not about gavin newsom it was larry elder is donald trump and he's a uncle tom sellout and he's dangerous and he's going to destroy your coastal livelihood that's what they said and for a guy who came in late into the race and

never run before, it was poorly funded, you knew what the script was going to be.

And people would ask me the last two weeks, do you think he's going to win?

I put off the record, I didn't want to say it publicly because I think he's going to lose.

And I said to people, as soon as he loses, they're going to blame Larry Older.

They're going to say, if he just hadn't gotten in the race, we had these wonderful candidates, Folkner and Cox.

Well, Cox had run and crashed and burned, and the mayor, the ex-mayor, was a very nice guy with good ideas and about as charismatic as Mitt Romney.

And so that's where we are.

And people get what they deserve in a democracy.

If they want this state to continue, then they're going to get it.

But as I said earlier, 43% of Hispanics and over 50% of Hispanic males said, not this pig anymore.

I'm not going to do it.

Okay.

Well, we have a little bit of time left.

I want to encourage our listeners to also visit American Greatness to check out the other piece you wrote this past week.

Science is dying, superstition disguised as morality is returning, and we all will soon become poorer, angrier, and more divided.

If you could briefly tell us about this piece, and then we're going to talk a little bit about shame to wrap up the show.

Well, very quickly, think about what science is.

We had Dr.

Vandi Yee from Yale who tele-diagnosed Donald Trump, which is contrary to the American Psychiatric Association

canons, because they did that with Goldwater, Goldwater and they said never again.

But nonetheless, she declared that he was not only crazy, but he was in need of an intervention.

Nobody objected to that.

Think of the scientific methodology there.

You just look at somebody from a distance and said, Well, I've taken his pulse.

I know about his medication history.

I know about his general well-off.

He's taken a Montreal assessment test, which he had not taken yet.

And he's crazy.

And he's so that was a perversion of science.

Everybody knew that.

When Anthony Fauci kept saying mask, herd immunity, da-da-da, when the WHO said travel bans don't work, it's racist.

That was a perversion of science.

New monetary theory, the idea that you don't have to balance ever expenditures and revenue, and the more money you print, the more prosperity.

That is completely a bankrupt sort of anti-gravity theory.

And critical race theory that you can be hate to stop hatred.

You can be racist to stop hate.

That is completely insane.

Critical legal theory that all laws don't reflect natural realities, but they're just the construct of a white people in power that arbitrarily determines that if you go into a store and take things off the shelf, that's theft because the wealthy people don't do that.

That's crazy.

And I went down through the line of all these theories and practices and the COVID idea.

you know i said something i think other people had remarked on this well think of where we are to finish about COVID.

We know now that despite all of the objections and disagreements that quote unquote science from people, you know, from Stanford University to John Hopkins have said that if you get COVID and you develop antibodies, more likely than not, you're going to have a longer and more definitive immunity than you will if you got, like I did or you did, the shot.

That's a fact.

And yet this government, pseudo-scientific as it is is saying that is not enough if you have had covet you are going to have to get a shot even though that people that have had covet with antibodies when they're subject to artificial antibodies have a higher rate of side effects no matter and so what would be the antithesis jack it would be to say hey everybody all you people like Victor Hansen that got vaccinated, that's not very good compared to natural immunity.

And the government wants you to have both.

So Victor, just like people who've had COVID have to get a vaccination, we want you to go out, take that mask off and mingle so you get COVID.

And that way you have double protection.

That's what they're saying.

That's the logical trajectory of their insanity.

And so you add all that up and then you think, well, what are they doing?

What are they doing?

And it's one of these moments where mass hysteria and madness have taken over.

It's the Save Them Witch Trial.

It's the McCarthy period.

It's the final expression of Me Too, where it's just like taking some kind of wild fish and throwing them on the pier and watching them flop around in madness.

Did you see?

Yeah, did you?

I sent you a link.

Did you see that video that American Airlines, a woman with a little child with asthma, but trying to keep the mask on, turn the plane around, the plane was up in the air, turn around, disobedient passenger because of one tyrannical

airline attendant, which was probably its its own matter.

We could talk about the tyranny of

these people, but they feel empowered by this.

Mask mandates empower the pettiness.

It's become a talesman.

It's become a fixation.

It's some kind of, I don't know, pre-civilizational taboo.

I don't know what it is about vaccination with them and the non-vaccinated, but they have gleaned onto this.

And I, again, I got vaccinated.

I think the risk for most people of not getting vaccinated vaccinated outweighs the risk of being vaccinated.

I had a bad reaction to it.

I got an immune problem, and maybe that was the reason.

My wife got a different brand.

She got a little reaction.

My daughter got a very serious reaction.

We all knew that, but

we went ahead and got vaccinated.

So I'm not an anti-vaxxer.

I get vaccinated with a flu shot every year.

But what I'm saying is that when you do not have the data, it says that if you were vaccinated, you're 96% protected as it was advertised

getting COVID.

And I understand you're going to get a less severe case.

You'll probably have a less chance of dying.

I understand that.

But when you hype it as one reason, and don't worry about the other person, just get vaccinated, then you don't really care who gets vaccinated.

That's not what we were told.

That's what we were told.

And now, just to have all of these manipulations and contortions and retractions and adjustments, it's very discerning.

And people are just saying, you know what?

I don't have any respect for these people because they don't tell tell the truth.

And when you add the final Phillip to it, Joe Biden, I mean, just follow his evolution or devolution.

He said in October before the election, I'm not going to get vaccinated, anything to do with Donald Trump.

You can't trust anything that he would advocate.

Kamala Harris said, not me.

So they basically talked down

the vaccination.

We're not talking about now.

We're talking about when millions of people over 65 needed that vaccination, many with comorbidities, because we do know that it really helps people that are in that vulnerable cohort who are gonna die.

So people died if they listened to Joe Biden and come on.

Then the second thing he said when he got elected, well, there was nobody getting inoculated until I came on the scene.

And I'm thinking, there were 17 million people in the last month, a million a day because of Operation Worksby, you dunce.

Why are you saying this?

And then he said, the commander-in-chief is responsible for all those deaths.

There were 320,000 people died when I came here because of Donald Trump.

Well, nobody says, well, there's 320 more than that that died under your at a greater rate per day of your tenure from the origins of COVID to the end of the Trump presidency.

And so that's where we are.

And

it's really discerning

to learn.

You can really differentiate what's going on.

And it's not about science.

It's about I will say and do anything right now, and I will hide behind pseudoscience for a political partisan purposes.

I'm perfectly willing to contradict myself, to start with an Orwellian reboot if it's in my political interest.

And that has nothing to do with science.

That's why I use the quotes, quote unquote, science, they said.

And you know who had this right?

Scott Atlas.

He was demonized.

He was vilified.

And he said, you know what?

When it's all said and done, we're going to have to live with COVID.

We hope that it mutates into a less effective environment.

We want to wear masks if you're vulnerable.

We want to vaccinate as many people that it's safe to do so with these experimental vaccinations, but you're not going to save lives by shutting down the health industry, the restaurant industry, the food industry.

You're going to kill people.

And everybody demonized him.

He was right.

And yet people have no shame.

So let's end this podcast.

We promised that we would talk about the seeming lack of shame in our society.

And Victor, that, of course, came from the calamities of Afghanistan in August with things collapsing.

And there seemed to be from the president to generals, no shame, no admission of guilt, no sense of guilt that.

they had screwed up terribly, that they were leaving Americans behind, just no shame.

And I wanted to get your your thoughts on the importance of, is shame important

to have in a, in a,

I don't know, well-functioning or at least a functioning society?

And put on your classics professor cap, maybe talk a little about how the Greeks discussed shame and how they

made it central, and I think in some of the plays.

And anyway, is there an absence of shame in our society and how does that harm our society?

There is.

The Greeks had a word for it, eidos, but they didn't have a concept of what we would call guilt, a private feeling that you've done something wrong and you feel bad about it and it's between you and your deity.

They felt that that would not be enough to alter your behavior.

In other words, if you'd done something wrong that imperiled people, it wasn't enough to confess or to go to church and alleviate that guilt.

They felt that wasn't a strong enough determinant, going to hell or being an apostate or whatever the internal punishment.

They didn't necessarily think that was wrong.

They were very devout people, the Greek.

And we hear constantly in Greek religion that people actually will suffer in the next world based on their behavior in the present.

And that's the basis of the pre-Socratic and the later Neoplatonic movements about, and the Socratic movement about the soul and the duality.

Okay.

But it wasn't strong enough that people had to feel shame.

And there were people in the United States who both expressed guilt, but they also expressed shame.

When I was growing up and out here in rural California, people said things like this, Jack, well, that Nelson family over there, you know, that young kid's a bad seed.

You stole a car, you got in a fight, you got drunk, and he's just brought shame on that family.

You know, and we felt that was very terrible.

If you wore something that was outlandish or you said something, you shamed your family, you shamed your parents, you shamed your great-grandparents.

And that was a coercive, primitive, strong deterrent on your behavior.

I know that when I went to school, I studied very hard because I was interested in things at this very rural, kind of less competitive school, but I was also shamed.

I was told, your grandfather in 1909, when he graduated from that high school, he was Valley Dictorian.

And your mother graduated and she was student body president.

And you have to live up to that.

And we all thought that that was coercive.

It was psychologically dangerous, it impaired us, that our mental health was at stake.

And we adopted not the tragic view, but the therapeutic.

And there is no shame.

There's no shame about anything.

And, you know, we had this Herodotian idea at one time that you judge your life whether you are married, you had children, you had a stable family, and you contributed.

I remember my grandfather told me, Rhys Davis said, you know what, Victor, when you get older, I was about 12 out there irrigating with him.

It's plus and minus, Victor.

You're going to have to be held to account.

And I don't know what's going to happen hereafter, but did you follow the law or did you break the law?

Did you pay your bills or did you welch on your bills?

Did you produce children for the next generation or did you not?

And that was kind of controversial, that statement.

Did you fulfill your obligations?

Were you a drag on the society?

Or were you a plus?

I started thinking about all the bad things I've done.

And he said, now, don't worry.

It's not 100% zero.

It's 51.49.

That's all you got to do.

You've got to be a plus.

Otherwise, it's shameful.

And I've never told any of this.

I think I was 16 and a bunch of guys said, well, you have a little farm and we can drink and we don't have to worry about the cops.

Can we go out there?

And I said, well, I don't know.

So they all drove out and I was home and I walked in the dark out to the South 40.

We had a little 120 acres of trees and it was very shady and everybody drank on a Sunday afternoon.

And then, I don't know, they said, Well, we can't take the bottles back home and we don't want to have the bottles in the car because we're underage.

We'll just put them here.

And they threw them all over.

Oh, gosh.

All over.

And then I picked up some, but it was getting dark.

And so I went home.

And my grandfather said to me the next day, he said, I was out irrigating that Santa Rosa orchard.

Now I saw a lot of beer bottles and wine bottles.

And I saw other stuff that bothered me.

Do you know anything about that?

And I said,

well, maybe.

And he said, you were part of that group.

And I said, I wasn't part of it.

Yes, you were.

And did you pick them up?

And I said, no.

And he said, you really disappoint me.

And I said, I'm sorry.

And I went all the way out there and picked up every single one.

I said to myself, the next time they want to come out and do stuff like that, I'm going to say no.

I was so shamed.

When you get rid of that tool because you feel it's hurtful, and it is hurtful or it's arbitrary and it can be arbitrary.

And there's, you know, the Scarlet letter and all of our great writers have warned about shame there was a great classicist though bernard williams he wrote a book i think it was called shame and necessity and i remember it was a seder lecture and his argument was that when we look at the greeks and we kind of think they're backward because they were a shame culture rather than a guilt culture and then you look at the degree of civilizational calm they achieved and achievement maybe guilt is the pre-civilizational idea and shame is the more advanced.

I'm not talking about, you know, traditional Islamic societies like Afghanistan, where you try to stone people or shame them.

You have to have compassion, but this anonymous, highly urbanized, disjointed, transient population has no shame because shame is tied to a locale, a place, generations.

That's what the whole idea was about this constitutional republic.

That's what these early observers, as I said earlier, John Crevecor and Tocqueville, what they said was that this country is built on a middle class with fixed residence.

And it's not a big urban transient Paris or London.

And what they liked about it was if you do that and you're from someplace rather than no place or any place, countries basically, as authors have put it out, those who are somewhere and those can be anywhere.

And by they mean, as long as they go to London or Paris or...

San Francisco or New York, they know where the same type of restaurants are the same, same, same.

But there's other people who say, I'm nothing without my locale because there people know me and i have to follow a particular protocol or i shame people and that's important and so i know that maybe it screws people up psychologically according to the therapeutic gospel but when i say things like i'm saying now i try not to say things that are crazy or things that are foul or disgusting or laced with profanity simply because not only I don't think it adds to the argument, but more importantly it's shameful and i don't want to go somewhere and somebody said you know i listened to you and i could not believe you use you said that word and so i think that's important and when people don't have shame they're capable of anything and shame would be a great thing to restore but you will never have it unless you have a traditional society where people feel roots for generations and a sense of place or at least they have professional loyalties they don't want to shame the profession well i would i would have thought that with the military with some of our leadership, they would have a significant thing.

That's such a good point you made.

It's a really good point, because we have people who are relieved of command or forced to resign from command.

But I can't think of a general, maybe I'm wrong, that is actually resigned from the service, except that crazy Edwin Walker, that racist general who he's really political.

I think Lee R.B.

Oswald tried to shoot him and almost

he did resign.

And that's a commentary when a kind of a moron like that will at least resign when he can't function within the military, but all of these people like Millie will not.

I mean, what do you have to do to resign to be a general?

Let's take a look very quickly as we end, Jack.

Can you violate three statutes that circumscribe the behavior of the chairman of the joint fleet?

Yes.

Can you violate the civilian control of the military doctrine by making foreign policy or meeting with unauthorized, making calls that are unauthorized with foreign military leaders?

Yes.

Can you throw out Article 88 and disparage a commander-in-chief?

Yes.

Can you basically mislead the country year after year by saying that Afghanistan was going swimmingly well?

People underestimate the resilience of the Afghan national government force?

Yes.

Can you go up there and basically for cheap political gang, stigmatize an entire tribe of white males by saying they're prone to white supremacy and white rage?

Yes.

Can you lie and say that you have to apologize because donald trump did something improper by having a photo op while they were tear gassing people out yes can do all that and you don't have any shame not one iota of shame white kenning said i am sorry i am no longer effective i thought i was doing things that would advance the cause of the united states but when i look back i was misled and i did things that were improper if not illegal and i'm sorry and i'm going to resign i'd have a lot of respect for him he'll he'll never do that you know what?

Maybe he'll be relieved of command by Joe Biden, but if he were, who just expressed confidence, it's because he thinks in our shameless culture, if he were to resign, the first thing he'd do is have a book deal and he'd say, you know what, I'm not responsible for Afghanistan.

It was Joe Biden did it.

Kind of like George Bush, whom I liked, but when he said to George Tennett, you know, George Tennett said, you know, it's a slam dunk.

on the intelligence.

And then after he was so wrong, George Tennett, then he gave them the national Medal.

You know,

I thought, wow, why would you do that after he gave you the wrong advice and wrong intelligence?

And maybe it was because he didn't want to get on the wrong side in the post-career of George Tennant.

Yeah.

Well, that should be another topic for another day about

top administration officials

writing books, especially speech writers.

I just don't get it.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have, except we'll thank our listeners listeners who do leave reviews at iTunes.

I've mentioned on other podcasts.

We have

an average of 5.0.

Now, that's kind of impossible, but it's impossible.

It's 4.99999.

So it averages, it

becomes five.

Very few non-five star reviews for this, the podcast that we do.

The classicists, the culturalists, and the traditionalists.

Many people leave written reviews.

One from the other day is by, I think it's CPT Liu, so I think it's Captain Liu, who titles his remarks a giant in the corner of everybody in Middle America.

And he writes, I always look forward to listening to VDH.

Seems to me he is the best of only a handful, exaggerated, of scholars who uses empirical evidence for reasoning in all matters, political, financial, cultural, military, and science, rather than ideology or emotions.

P.S.

Love Victor's inclusion of blue-collared worker first responders in his essays and his lack of patience for poor military leadership and his lack of patience in media hypocrisy.

Thank you for that, Captain Liu, and for the others who leave messages.

We do read them.

Encourage again our listeners to subscribe to my little thing, Civil Thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com, totally free weekly newsletter, just a handful of suggested readings that you may like.

Victor Hanson, S-O-N, VictorHanson.com, consider

subscribing to the premium service.

That gives you access to all the original material that Victor writes, which does not appear anywhere else except on VictorHanson.com.

Again, also the link for his book, forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen.

That will be out in two or three weeks.

October 5th is the publication date.

Victor, thanks once again for sharing your wisdom with us.

And we will be back again soon with another episode of the classicist part of the umbrella of podcasts of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Jack, and thank everybody for listening again.

I hope to be with you soon.