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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Classicist.

We are recording on Saturday, September 4th, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, the star of the show, and its namesake is Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, which is where he is right this very minute.

And we're going to talk to Victor about what it's like to have been teaching at Hillsdale the past week and a bunch of important issues.

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

Victor, on today's episode, we're going to talk as we usually do on the classicist about some of your pieces for American greatness at your website, victorhanson.com, the blade of Perseus, where you have a lot of original material.

But it's now, you know, it's privilege, premium.

Folks, do go there, do do subscribe.

But I'm going to take one little piece out from behind the paywall, and that's Victor's really interesting piece, Historian's Corner on the Second World Wars.

And Victor, we also talk about California matters on the classicist, and you also have a big, important essay in the new issue of the new criterion on the fate of classics.

education in America.

But Victor, before we get started, how's it going up there in the back woods of of Michigan at Hillsdale?

Doing very well.

This is my 18th year

when I have my annual vacation from the Hoover Institution.

I have been spending it in Hillsdale for 18 years, and I teach an intensive course, a semester course, in two weeks, but it's a lot of hours of class time.

It's on World War II.

And then I did an online class earlier this week all in the morning, and that's going to appear in the Hillsdale online courses as The Dying Citizen, the new book they have a nice studio here so you can do fox news right from the campus and

i've got another week but i and i have a lot of good friends here i've known for nearly 20 years so it's a very busy time it's not so much a vacation but it's very enjoyable well victor you'll be back to california i guess in time for the forthcoming recall elections actually i'm a day late oh you will okay

don't worry i have voted you've been harvested yes yes i have voted okay well let's talk a little bit about what's coming up i think this might be the last podcast we record that's actually aired before the the election date um it may be discouraging news for those who are following the polls some in the last few weeks that seem to show that gavin newsom is holding steady on average according to real clear politics he's about 8.2 percent on the upside on the question of do not remove.

There's a new Trafalgar poll that has 5244 in his favor, KABC, 5143,

and a poll by PIC, 58 to 39.

These are polls of likely voters.

That said, there is a very worthwhile piece in today's Wall Street Journal, September 4th, by Stephen Eidi.

It's titled Homelessness is Behind the Anger at Gavin Newsom.

He writes, homelessness in California rose 40% over the past five years.

12% of the U.S.

population lives in California, but California hosts half of its street population.

And Mr.

Newsom's problem is that under his watch, homelessness has spread to every corner of the state.

I can attest to that, Victor, when I visit Fresno and other areas.

Victor, any thoughts about that?

If Newsom does lose, do you think homelessness will be one of the key issues?

Yeah, well, he had been making the argument that although he understood people were angry about the resurgence of COVID, that the total lockdown that he had imposed had not really resulted in a much different fatality rate per million residents than say Texas or Florida, but with far more grievous economic damage.

And he'd been making the argument that the drought and the inability to build reservoirs or improve the aqueduct or raise Shashta Dam was somebody else's fault, not his.

Or indeed, the failure to remove 60 million trees on his watch and Jerry Brown's watch was not the problem that we had these devastating creek fires and then the current fires up in the Tahoe region, but it was due to climate change.

And then he had been making the argument that the homeless people were

even invoked climate change, but basically he said that this was not his fault, even though he's made it very hard to build a house or affordable housing in California.

What I'm getting at, Jack, is that that was not resonating with the California voters.

And as you and I talked about just 10 days ago, the polls were showing almost dead even.

So then he tried a new tact.

He rallied, as he always does, and as Joe Bay, everybody does who's on the left from California, they rallied the Silicon Valley billionaires and they began pouring money in because he's been a good friend of them.

He's a boutique boutique leptist like they are that's privileged and doesn't really care about the ramifications of their own ideologies.

But he rallied the troops and they gave him a lot of money and he's got this refrain.

And it's basically the subtext is a guy like Donald Trump didn't know what he's doing and look what happened.

A guy like Schwarzenegger didn't know what he's doing.

Don't turn the state over to amateurs like Larry Elder.

So he focused on Larry Elder and then he used his surrogate, which is the LA Times.

It said Larry Elder, a black man, was the most dangerous white supremacist around.

And then they started running sordid stories about alleged girlfriend that said Larry, you know, Elder had pulled out a gun in front of her, and even though she was working for an opponent of Larry Elder's in this race, and that hurt Larry Elder.

And with that, people apparently, if the polls are correct, shrugged and said, well, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

But it's not over yet.

And the big $64,000 question, the mystery what's uncertain is that this state has really in its institutions have tried to galvanize the hispanic population and they've really loosened up absentee early voting rules if you go to a state agency and you encounter any bureaucratic organization whether it's a dmv or unemployment or welfare you are registered and they don't really authenticate your registration.

So the idea was we're going to flood the state with ballots mailed out to poorer people, many of them Hispanic, and we're not really going to worry.

And then we have third-party so-called vote hard.

Somebody can come to your home and facilitate it and do all the work of the footwork for you.

Okay.

But a lot of these people that they have tried to get out the vote in this manner are Mexican-American.

And they are not.

sold.

I don't like to use the word they about whole groups, but let's just say that a lot of them are not sold on Gavin Newsom.

They don't like wealthy people going out to private Tony restaurants like French Laundry, where he lectures them.

Nor do they like to have their kids unable to go to school and then they lose their job or one of them does to stay home while Gavin Newsom's kids are in a Tony prep school open all the time.

And from that, they start to question why did these people up in the Bay Area, why do we have the highest electricity cost, the highest gasoline cost,

the highest taxes, sales taxes way up there, top 10, income tax is the highest for some people.

Why do we do all this?

In exchange for that, the welfare social services are overtaxed.

They're full of people and they're full of people because thousands of people are being bussed in from the border.

And then they go on and point out that the people crossing the border, the majority of them are not from Mexico.

So they don't have friends and relatives that they're trying to get across the border.

Not at all.

These are people from the Caribbean.

These are people from the the Arab world, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Central America.

So that issue that was the Democratic hook for the Latino vote is not as relevant.

So I think the question now is, Jack, whether Larry Elder has weathered that ad hominem attack and how much money can he raise, not a lot compared to Newsom, but will he get that?

48 or 49% back in the next 12 days.

Well, thanks for that, Victor.

Let's move on to the other side of the world.

You have a few pieces, two pieces, I should say, as you do every week, for American Greatness, samgreatness.com.

I suggest our listeners go there and read these pieces in full.

As you know, I write this weekly email.

It's civil thoughts.

And I ended this week's one with a line from Churchill's famous speech about the Munich Agreement.

He said, And do not suppose that this is the end.

This is only the beginning of the reckoning.

This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

I must say, Victor, reading your pieces, hearken to this Churchillian speech also.

In your piece, Is Our Military Woke, Broke, or Both, you write, it is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream.

Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S.

strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country.

And you wrote something much similar in the other essay, which we'll talk about separately that you wrote for American Greatness, Our Afghan Nightmare.

Victor, if you will, about your piece, Is Our Military Woke Broke, or both.

You say that something is terribly wrong in the ranks of Americans' top commanders and reflects something wrong with the country.

And then you went on to ask a number of questions.

You know, how about they explain the following?

Bagram air base given over, all the weapons, $85 billion in weapons, et cetera.

7,000 biometric scanners given over.

So Victor, you posed a question, is our military broke or both?

Is it both?

And could you talk about some of those questions?

Yeah, what are the symptoms of a broke military?

The symptoms of the broke military are what we're watching on the screen that we were told for, I don't want to say years, but maybe 15 years, that there was steady incremental progress.

Everybody that went over there said that.

That's what they assured the American people.

They never really articulated the mission that we were going to westernize the major cities and valleys of Afghanistan so that when the Taliban tried to take them over, they would be met by stout-hearted, Western-thinking Muslims.

That was the implicit assumption.

But it was all anchored by American troops.

So Donald Trump came in and he didn't want to keep paying $60, $70 million a day.

They hadn't lost a soldier in a year.

And he said, let's get out.

And the military got very angry and he had a staged drawdown.

He left office.

It was stable, more or less.

And Joe Biden came in.

And he, as we know from the phone call to the president of Afghanistan, he said, you know, it doesn't look good, but just lie about it if you have to.

Just don't let people know it's so bad.

And we'll give you air support, i.e., a quid pro quo quo that we've learned could be impeachable if it's based on the Trump's Ukraine call stamp.

Nonetheless, the military then, after all these years of not telling us how perilous and shaky this government was and not at least trying to remind Biden that he was wrong.

And remember what they did with Donald Trump in Syria, Jack, when Donald Trump said we're not going to get in the middle of the Kurds and the Turks.

There were officers who overrode that and ignored him.

Nobody did this, of course.

In fact, they clicked their heels and said, Yes, Baglam Air Base is not necessary.

Oh, the airport's much better.

We can do it.

Don't worry.

And so here we are.

And what have we heard from them from this catastrophic loss of 13 Americans at the airport of $85 billion in military equipment?

I got a lot of criticism when I said I was being conservative using, I thought, $50 billion, and I was taking an overhead of $30.

And I thought, why do that when every weapon system, the price tag includes the training and the development, et cetera?

So when you say $85 billion, you're talking about the money that was also used to train people how to use that stuff.

So I think that's a legitimate number.

And if that's true, it's more than seven of our most expensive aircraft carrier.

The Gerald Ford only costs 12.

We could have built six or seven for that.

We could have built a thousand of these $90 million F-35s that we don't have money to pay for.

As I said earlier, it's more than all the money we gave to Israel in 60 years.

So nobody talked about that.

It was just, okay, it's gone, no big deal.

Nobody talked about, well, we left some scanners.

Oh, yeah, we forgot to deprogram them.

So they can just go out and find anybody they want.

And, well, we really didn't give the names of people to the Afghans.

They got some, but not quite all.

And then we were told, I think it was General McKinsey's, well, they have the same agenda that we do.

They want out on the

31st.

We won out.

If that's true, why did somebody go through their ring of security and kill 13 Americans?

Because they don't have, why was it so chaotic?

Because they wanted to create that.

If they really had the same agenda, it would have been an orderly withdrawal.

But they don't have the same agenda as we do.

Their agenda is to humiliate, defeat, and make the United States whimper away as a laughingstock in the world and they succeeded.

And you want to know why they succeeded.

So that's the symptoms, but what's the diagnosis?

Well, I went back and looked at some of the things Millie and Austin have been saying since Joe Biden took office.

They said that climate change was one of their chief missions.

Austin, of course, said that he was going to go through the ranks and look out for white supremacists.

Millie recommended that we read Professor Kendi.

He couldn't explain why.

His explanation was incoherent.

And then he said he wanted to find out what white rage was.

Just think of this for a second.

We've talked about this, Jack.

So he was going after a social, economic, and racial gender class that represents about 35% of America, the white male of the middle class.

And they die, as I said, 75 or 76%.

So he was going at the heart of his combat profile and basically calling them all races.

What if he had done this?

Can you imagine what would have happened if Secretary Austin and General Milley said, you know, after this 120 days of rioting and this inner crime rate and some of the things that Professor Kendi has said, you know, that it's racist for a white woman to adopt an African-American child and all of this crap, I want to find out what black rage is all about.

And so we're going to go through the entire roster and look for BLM adherents because we know that it's a self-confessed or self-declared Marxist organization.

Ms.

Queller says she's a, can you imagine what would have happened?

That would have alienated the entire African-American community.

And they have done that now with a large section of America.

And so why they're doing all of this, they're not being empirical and honest with the American people about the lack of progress.

They're not resigning.

They're not protesting these insane orders to give up Bagnum Air Force Base.

They're not worried about our allies.

Remember, Donald Trump was crucified for jawboning and hurting the feelings of the NATO alliance by forcing them to spend another $100 million to increase the alliance's battlefield efficacy.

And they didn't say a word as Joe Biden basically destroyed it, pulled out in the middle of the night of Baglam, didn't tell our allies, who, by the way, outnumbered us by about three and a half to one in Afghanistan.

And so the question arises.

Did Joe Biden's soothing words and betrayal of NATO help ruin the alliance in a way that Donald Trump's loud and brash jawboning helped to save it by making it more military ready.

So all of these questions arise and then you put this in a context where all of these retired generals and president generals leaked to the press.

Milley leaked to the press after that quote-unquote photo op where he said, I don't think I should have been doing a photo op with Donald Trump out by the same Episcopal Church.

And he did that because the Washington Post and the New York Times said Donald Trump clears Lafayette Square with tear gas to have a photo op of General Milley.

Oh, I don't want to be associated with Donald Trump.

And so he apologized for a lie because the inspector general said that was a complete lie.

He did not tear gas anybody could have a photo op.

But then he leaked to pet journalists with, I might resign.

It's so embarrassing.

I'm considering resigning.

So you're considering resigning by having a customary photo op of the president, but you're not considering resigning, presiding over the worst military defeat since 1975.

Come on.

So all of these people, and then we add that other dimension that we've talked about, ad nauseum, that we're getting the impression that the military does not promote on battlefield efficacy.

How many bombs on the target did your air wing achieve?

How many artillery shells did you hit the dot?

How many of your men in your rifle companies were marksmen, etc.

You get the impression that they are promoting on two criteria.

Are you woke?

Let me see your gender, race, pattern of promotions while you were a colonel or a one-star, or that they are basically saying, if you want to be a one-star, two-star, three-star, four, you've got to get posted to the Pentagon.

You've got to get on that White House NSC staff.

You've got to be a congressional liaison.

You've got to be an under, under, under, under deputy, deputy something in the Pentagon.

You've got to learn the currents and eddies of Washington.

And then when you retire or maybe

after getting one, two, three, four-star woke and acquainted with politics, then a nice woke corporation like Raytheon or Geo Dynamics or Northrop.

or Lockheed will hire you at a fantastic salary and stock option plan to be on the board so that they can mine your brain for your knowledge of the Pentagon Labyrinth.

So that's what's going on.

And we've had this crisis, Jack, the American military.

We had it in the 1940s, right in the first, on the eve of World War I, what happened at Pearl Harbor, what happened at the Kaiserine Pass,

what happened at Anzio.

And those people fired generally.

They fired General Lucas, they fired General Fredenhall, they fired the two commanding respective Navy and Army commanders at Pearl Harbor, and they have not done that.

And you get the impression they're not going to do it because the military has the goods on Joe Biden and they've probably got transcripts or recordings of them giving advice.

And Joe Biden knows that.

So he says, you know, you shut up and I'll shut up.

And then we each get to keep our job.

Well, Victor, you would think there wouldn't need to be firings because there would be retirements out of shame.

And maybe on some future podcast, we should talk about whatever happened to shame.

It doesn't seem to be a play at all in a situation where it reeks of shamefulness.

Victor, related to this piece, you also wrote a longer essay, Go to American Greatness.

It's titled Our Afghan Nightmare, Tanks for Nothing.

And Victor, we've talked about some of the things already.

You wrote, when Biden then blames Trump, it raises the immediate questions and some immediate questions are raised, which I'm not going to recite here, but maybe you would talk about.

And then separately, you talk about the blame for this sordid mess, and it's threefold.

You talk about the media, the Democratic apparat, and the Pentagon's top brass.

So let's start first with Biden blaming Trump.

And then where does the hypocrisy smack in that, Victor?

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Now, you can say whatever you want about the wisdom of drawing down 12,000.

to 2,500 or 3,000, but the military, as we just said, never really explained what the mission was and what progress was to be defined as

and why the Afghan army was collapsing.

But Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump had a graduated plan.

I didn't like the idea they were having photo ops.

Pompeo was with the Taliban or they released prisoners.

But nevertheless, when Donald Trump started that process, There was nobody killed.

They hadn't had anybody killed in a year.

And he was using airstrikes as punitive measures to make sure the Taliban complied.

And the Taliban, to be frank, were terrified of him because he dropped the mother of all bombs on them a few years before.

He had killed General Soleimani.

He had been tough with North Korea.

He had bombed the proverbial SH blank blank out of ISIS.

He had no problem getting rid of 200 mercenaries that attacked a U.S.

contingent in Syria.

And so the Taliban did not want to screw around with him.

And that was where it was.

And then all of a sudden, he turned it over to Joe Biden.

And Joe Biden didn't, you know, Joe Biden was Joe Biden.

And the Taliban incrementally began to break the conditions of the withdrawal.

And the Afghan army was not assured that it was going to have Americans fixing their planes and, you know, contractors fixing everything for them.

And they were not going to have air support.

And so the Taliban just kept getting more aggressive.

And our guys started to get more and more ambivalent.

And Joe Biden then told the president to lie about it.

So his idea was to pull everybody out and he thought it would be orderly, I guess.

And then he was going to have a big parade on September 11th.

Remember when he killed?

Yeah, when they killed Bin Laden, Joe Biden was against that.

During the 2012 campaign, he toured the company, Jim is alive and bin Laden is dead.

Bin Laden is dead, Jim is alive.

That was what he mouthed off all the time right so he was going to do something like that i joe biden got every single american out of afghan i finally ended the war that every other president had promised okay and you did more damage to the reputation of the united states in general and the military u.s military in particular than any president in history has done and you lied about it i'm very curious to see if the washington post is going to resurrect their little table about the number of presidential lies that they used to say Trump did, most of which were exaggerations.

Victor, back on the other thing I just mentioned, you blame the media in part and the Democratic apparatus, political apparatus, along with the Pentagon for this mess.

You know, why is the media culpable in this Afghan nightmare?

Connect the dots.

And also, why is the Democrat Party leadership responsible?

Well, let's be frank.

Everybody understood that Joe Biden was campaigning like he was a 19th century candidate out on his front porch in Indiana or Iowa or somewhere.

He was not going to be seen in public because we know why.

We've seen what he does in public as president.

He cannot finish a sentence.

He's incoherent.

He has logo rea, that he says things that makes no sense.

He flat out lies.

He tells a group from a Jewish organization that he visited a synagogue.

He did not.

He goes to Louisiana and he says that a very distinguished and accomplished African-American bureaucrat, he said, we have this boy here, boy here.

So you can't unleash him because he has no idea what he's doing.

He tells all Americans, go to the airport, just show your passport.

It's easy.

And he's dangerous.

And they know that.

And they knew that before the election.

But they kept saying that

it was dangerous to even mention that.

And I went on Fox News and said that, and I got so much criticism for that.

The media shielded him.

They never asked him questions.

And every once in a while, he betrayed them by saying, well, here's a list of people I'm supposed to call on at the press conference or a young woman would ask a question said you know i'm going to ask you a question that they wouldn't let me ask or this wasn't on the list of approved questions or he would be talking as if it was extemporaneous and we could see the reflection of the teleprompter right so it was all staged and the media knew that and they said you know what getting rid of donald trump that end justifies any means necessary.

And now they're stuck with him.

So for a week, they turned on him.

And then somebody said, hey, wait a minute.

If you keep turning on him, the Republicans are going to take the House and Senate and the presidency.

And then you may lose your agenda.

So now they've made another about face and say, well, it wasn't that bad.

It's not that bad.

It's understandable.

So they are culpable.

And the Democratic Party knew that when they had this young group of candidates in 2015, 16, Pete Buttigieg, Beto,

Bernie Sanders, an older one, Elizabeth Warren, it scared the absolute blank out of the American electorate.

So then they wheeled out old Joe Biden that everybody knew from Robert Gates to Barack Obama could say or do anything stupid.

He'd always been wrong.

And they propped him up.

And the African-American community that was skeptical of a lot of these candidates was behind him.

And he started to win the primaries.

And then they just sort of pulled everybody out.

They quit the Democratic primaries.

And they just said, you know what, it's over.

Because you know why?

Joe Biden, to the degree that he knows where he is, has promised to give all your agendas.

Bernie, your agenda.

Elizabeth, your agenda.

Pete, your agenda.

Beto, your agenda.

He's going to be a left-wing guy if you can get all the troops out and to vote him.

And that's where we are.

We're out with somebody who is completely cognitively unfit to be president of the United States.

And when you add the sheer irony that Dr.

Bandi Lee

from Yale Yale came and testified before Congress that Donald Trump would have to be restrained because he was crazy or Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe said we've got to wear a wire and trap him so we can use the 25th Amendment to get rid of him or

the New York Times and Washington Post so hounded him that they finally

They, meaning his advisors, Ronnie Jackson, the White House physician, said, take the Montreal assessment.

And he did.

So none of that now, Jack, none of that.

Nobody's saying, Joe, just settle everything.

Take that little Montreal assessment like Trump did, cognitive assessment.

We'll see how you do.

Or, you know what, let's just get some Ivy League psychiatrists from Yale to come in and testify that you're just okay.

Why not?

Why don't they do that?

Well, I just want to say I agree with you, except as I mentioned before, I think the Joe Biden of 2021 is the same Joe Biden of 2020 as the same Joe Biden of 1972.

He is a phony.

he's a liar, and I'll agree he's not totally compassmentis, but if he was compassmentis, I don't know that the situation would be any different.

Oh, we don't disagree, Jack.

This is a guy, as you've pointed out, I think, in National Review, who toured the country for, what, 10 years, maligning a poor truck driver who tried to swerve when his first wife probably maybe

might have been culpable.

I don't like to use that of somebody's deceased in an intersection and blamed it on the truck driver and then further blamed it and lied and said he was drunk.

And he was perfectly able, capable.

He plagiarized a speech.

He was put on suspension at law school.

There was a very serious sexual complaint against him.

He demagogued the racial issue.

He said just terrible things, you know, about first black candidate who really can speak or articulate or clean about Barack Obama.

He wanted to divide Iraq into three different districts.

He just tried to personally destroy Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

A smile on his face.

A smile on his face.

Anytime it was time to demagogue an issue, he put his finger in the wind.

He played the shtick that he was simple old Joe Biden.

If you look at the income tax returns he's reported in the mid-300,000s, and you look at his lifestyle and his homes and the size of his homes, that income doesn't make sense.

It doesn't justify all that stuff he got as a senator and a vice president, unless you believe that Hunter Biden was a multi-million, if not multi-billion dollar grifter, that it was working for Mr.

10% and the big guy, as he termed it.

Yes,

who'd like to get his beak wet?

Well, Victor, we have to talk about one more thing.

I'm going to forestall discussion for another time about your Second World Wars, a piece that you wrote for VictorHanson.com.

Again, I recommend our listeners go there, sign up, subscribe.

It's affordable.

You will not regret doing it.

And also there, you mentioned earlier, essentially a documentary or series of videos about the dying citizen, your forthcoming book.

Listeners who go to victorhanson.com will find prominently the link for that book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying The Idea of America.

It's out, I think, a month from Monday.

But Victor, let's shoehorn in here a piece you've written for the new Criterion that's edited by our friend Roger Kimball.

It's the 40th anniversary special issue, and it begins a series on Western civilization at the crossroads.

And the kickoff piece of the series is yours.

Classical Patricide.

It begins with this question, should the formal study of Greece and Rome die or be killed off?

Some classicists seem to think so.

And I'll just read the very last paragraph.

Race and gender are important modern and ancient areas of investigation yet they are aspects of the greek and roman worlds like class age or legal status that do not ipsis factus define the classics the study of classical antiquity is a holistic and humane enterprise that transcends both race and gender a fact forgotten by the self-interested who are either indifferent to the discipline or now eagerly promoting the end of something they have never really understood.

Victor, before you say anything, basically you're writing about classicists, this kind of self-infliction and the self-emasculation of their own field of study.

And I'm just wondering, though, on a larger issue, how does harming the classics have a larger impact on society, as opposed to, let's say, sociology teachers who are hell-bent on destroying sociology?

I didn't know that it would have that great an impact, possibly, as what some of these classicists are trying to do to their field of study.

I try to do three things.

It's a very long essay, 8,000 words, and I'm trying to explain first what classics is.

It's the study of the civilizations that grew up between the 8th century BC in Greece and this 5th century AD in Rome.

And in that continuum was the basis of Western civilization.

By that I mean we saw the rise for the first time of citizenship, the idea of a constitutional government, of freedom of speech, of freedom to think rationally, whether that's through a reasoned explanation of natural phenomenon or traditional religion.

There were all of the great issues of the West.

Should there be slavery?

Should there be equal treatment of women?

They were first introduced by the Greeks.

They were very self-critical.

They had a critical consciousness.

In addition to that, they had free market economies.

They had private properties.

Everything we have now started in Greece, and it was articulated not just about its nature and how different, but what were the contradictions.

If you give people free time and leisure of market capitalism with constitutional government, be careful because you need religion or you need custom and tradition so that they don't become slaves of their appetites, i.e.

read the satiricon or i.e.

read Livy or i.e.

read Thucydides.

If you're going to have a democracy, make sure that it doesn't constantly devolve to the lowest common denominators, Plato fear, but it has a constitutional system of guardrail.

So I did that, and then I said, and for younger people, they need to know this about their own culture and society, but it also inculcates, if you learn Latin and Greek, you have a mastery of grammar, of syntax, of style.

You're introduced to the great ideas, literary ideas, philosophical ideas.

What do you do if your antiguity and the law is amoral, but to break it is also illegal?

What do you do if you're Medea and somebody's betrayed you and you want to hurt them, but to hurt them, you have to destroy yourself in the process?

What do you do if you're Ajax and you realize the game is rigged and the race doesn't go to the Swift?

And, you know, do you die, do you live ignobly or die nobly?

So all of these moral questions, it's just so rich.

And then we have these people, classicists.

They get a bachelor's in classics and they get four or five years in a PhD, supposedly, some of them take a lot longer.

And they learn Latin and Greek, and they learn ancient history and ancient philosophy and ancient arts, some are archaeological training.

That's their expertise.

Some are literature, some is philology, language.

And we have about 5,000 of them.

And they can be where I was at Cal State Fresno teaching Latin and Greek four classes a semester, eight a year.

Or they can be at Harvard where you teach one class a semester sometime.

But my point is that it's a noble profession.

And I I co-wrote a book with John Heath 23 years ago when we had the culture war saying that these classicists who want to do theory or narrow philology are going to destroy their field.

Indeed, it's radically shrunk since then, because they're not appealing to people of different classes and races and backgrounds, because it's a unifying idea.

It trumps race.

It trumps gender.

It says to anybody, it trumps age.

Why don't you explore what it means to be a citizen?

Why don't you explore your Western heritage and we can do this together?

So that's what we all try to do.

So very hardworking classicists, many of them underpaid at state universities are the backbone.

And there's also, you know, poets and writers in other fields, friends of the classics, philanthropists, autodidacts.

But there's a lot of people that are involved in this project.

And here come the classicists at the elite schools.

These are places where you teach very little and you get a lot of money and you're supposed to do research.

But if you look look at the quality of classics research lately, so much of it is either narrow, pedantic, specialized research, or it's just gobbly gook.

And that gobbly gook has changed from Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault of the 80s and 90s that there are no facts, everything's relative, all critical race theory, critical legal theory, critical theory tells us that all these laws and customs are just constructs by white male racist and Christian fundamentalists to perpetuate their own hegemony, that kind of crap.

Now is race.

Classics was racist.

The Greeks were racist.

And there's a lot of opportunity there.

And I focus on Donna Zuckerberg, the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, who bought a classics magazine and got a PhD from Princeton, then turned around and basically, if you read her Eidolon magazine, it's incoherent what she was writing, but it was all about this person's a racist, this person's a white supremacist, this field that I devoted my life to is racist.

It's nihilistic.

And then she just folded it and said, I'm not going to subsidize these people anymore and took off.

Or Daniel L.

Paratha, a classicist from Princeton, he was an immigrant from the Caribbean.

He came to the United States, indigent.

And what did the United States do?

Did it show how racist it was to the non-white, to the non-American?

No.

It made sure that he could get a full scholarship to a Tony Prep School in New York.

It It made sure that he could go to Princeton free of charge.

He majored in classics.

And it made sure he could go to Stanford free of charge to get his PhD.

And then for a while he seemed to be, you know, he said, I want to expand the field of classics to represent people like me that are not white or not born American.

And then the woke revolution came and he and other people thought, wow, this is a really good chance.

to claim that the Greeks were racist and everybody who studied them a racist except except me and redefined the field so people like me will be hired and then change the rules of promotion and compensation so people like me will do well and that's what they do and then people who are scared of him like some of his advisors as I quote in the piece say you know it was always racist Classics was always racist.

Oh, after 25 years of being a full professor at a very major university and being well compensated and doing very little teaching for that compensation.

Now you tell us that classics was racist.

But what?

Nobody wants to confront these people.

But if you confront them, then if what they say is true, examine it.

Is there a word for white whiteness in Latin and Greek that's a racist term?

No.

Do the Greeks and Romans discriminate against the non-white?

No.

Frank Snowden, a very distinguished classicist in the 1970s, African-American from Howard University.

And by the way, they canceled the classics department at Howard University.

There won't be any more Frank Snowden's.

But he was empirical.

Blacks and Antiquity, read it.

And you can get all the passages where the Ethiopians were considered noble people.

And guess who's not noble in the ancient world were these brown, tan Greeks and Italians when they ventured north into modern-day France and on the borders of modern-day Germany and modern-day Britain.

Guess who they encountered,

you know, with tattoos and drinking milk and worshiping trees and barbarism?

It was white people, blue-eyed, red-haired, yellow-haired.

And that's what the Greeks said.

So they were not racist.

And the people who studied them, there were two types.

They were the clergy, they were priests, they were anybody who in a pre-industrial world had the time to spend such...

to devote to such difficult ideas, but they were not racist.

They never said, oh, we're studying this so that we can perpetuate white supremacy by people who didn't even know what the word was.

And not that there wasn't a few crazies, there always is, but the field was never racist.

And if you look at the statistics today, Jack, white males are underrepresented.

Most of the PhDs in general go to women in the humanities.

And in classics, I think it's 54% are women.

If you look at the jobs, the field is increasingly being dominated by women.

And there are people of so-called color.

Finally, I showed how these people in classics to gain favor or personal reinforcement or career advancement said some crazy things.

You had curators from museums to preserve classical objects or from the ancient world in general saying, oh, I know all about solvents.

Don't just throw paint over stone.

Here's a acid formulation you should use to more quickly destroy the monument.

Or, hey, you guys, don't use use ropes to pull down those statues.

I know from my work with obelisks that it's much better to use steel cable, etc., etc.

So there was almost a frenzy of classicists to commit suicide, but with the assumption that it would hurt somebody else.

The guy from Cal State Bakersfield, the person from southwestern Kentucky, the person from

Allegheny minor campus there who gets about $45,000 and teaches all day underprivileged kids Latin, abolish that person's classics.

If you want to abolish my Princeton classics department, it's okay with me.

I'll just go to Complete.

And so it was very disturbing and people can read about it, but I didn't want to just attack them.

I wanted to explain what the field was and how noble classics is.

Folks who are listening, that piece is in the new criterion.

Just search for it online.

I think you probably have to subscribe in order to read it.

But hey, it's worth subscribing to.

It's a great magazine.

Victor, that's about all the time we have.

As we do at the end of our podcast, now we do admit that we read our reviews.

We thank the folks who listen, no matter what platform, Google Play, Stitcher, et cetera.

Those who listen on iTunes can leave a five-star review.

They can leave a one-star review.

I tell you, 99.99% have left a five-star review.

For Victor, we thank you very much.

Some people also leave comments.

And here's one.

Emma Kahana wrote just the other day, love listening.

Please prune intro.

Love, love, love hearing from VDH so often.

I'm a mom who tends to listen at night while working on tasks I can't do with my young kids.

They get to hear every historical parallel I picked up from VDH at breakfast the next morning.

Lucky kids.

Sammy Winks questions do a nice job of listening for the VDH wisdom.

One complaint, please prune the tedious intro.

I don't need to to hear about the the darn facebook fan page etc vdh's insights speak for themselves let's get right to them all right emica we listened we tried pruning a little bit but i will say here and now

on facebook our listeners should look for vdh's morning cup there is a fan page the victor davis hansen fan club great people that you'll find a lot of links there to victor's appearances including some from way back that still are quite evergreen if you're on twitter at V D Hansen, Victor's on Parlor, check out YouTube.

Again, VictorHanson.com, The Blade of Perseus.

Do subscribe.

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This is The Classicist.

We also have another podcast I do with Victor, the traditionalist, and then with the just aforementioned Sammy Wink, the culturalist.

Please try to catch them all.

Victor, thank you very much.

I hope your week goes well up at Hillsdale, and I hope you don't have any sagas when you end up heading back to California.

So, thanks, and we'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Classicist.

Yeah, we'll try to be a good Eeyore and not complain about flying back.

We'll see everybody next week.