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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

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

We are recording on Friday, August 20th in the year 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, author of its new weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts, and the man lucky enough to regularly talk to my good friend, Victor Davis Hanson, about his thoughts on a whole wide range of issues.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We do encourage you, our listeners, to go to victorhanson.com.

You'll find the website upgraded, refreshed, revived.

All the old features are there.

There are some new features.

There is a tremendous amount of original content.

And there's also a lot of premium content.

So do consider subscribing.

Victor, I don't know.

I think in the last two or three weeks, it seems like you've written, you know, 30,000 words, not all for the website, but just a tremendous amount of content there.

Today on the classicist, we're going to talk about Victor's big essay from this week past in American Greatness.

It's titled, Are We In a Revolution and Don't Even Know It?

He's also written, this is one of the premium pieces for the website, but we will talk about it nonetheless, give you a little hint and flavor.

It's 10 easy ways to unwind a nation in just a few months.

And then also on the classicist, this is where we talk about California.

politics or California things.

And there's a heck of a lot to talk about with the Newsome recall coming up and some controversies that have come up in the last few days relating to Larry Elder, who is the man who seems to be the most, if Newsom is recalled, it looks like Larry Elder is in place to become the next governor of California.

At least it looked like that the other day.

So we'll begin by talking about California, but we'll do that right after this important message.

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Hi, we're back with the classicists.

So two things, Victor, you're out there today, as you are most days in the Central Valley of California.

Gavin Newsom, he spoke right on the heels of Joe Biden's, one of Joe Biden's, let's say the first disastrous Joe Biden speech of this past week, that he was, quote, incredibly proud of the president.

It's kind of shocking.

Meanwhile, also related to the recall, Larry Elder, the conservative talk radio host who has just emerged.

He's blowing away the rest of whatever pack there is of folks who are seeking to replace Newsom.

Larry is quite out in the front, but a few bombs have dropped on his campaign in the last few days, alleged scandals, et cetera.

Victor, do you have any thoughts on where this is at, where it's going, and anything to say about Larry Elder?

Well, I think you could make the argument that what was seemed impossible, what seemed impossible three months ago, i.e.

that Gavin Newsom would be recalled and that Gavin Newsom pulled every lever that he could when he had a plus 50 approval rating to get the election speeded up or, you know, held on September 14th, that had looked like a disastrous mistake because all of a sudden the fire, we had this terrible fire, we're in this drought where they're destroying almond orchards by the thousands of acres.

The COVID Delta variant came back after we were sort of told that the vaccination was the gold standard, even though it really mitigates serious illness.

And then we had the national disasters on the border and in Afghanistan.

So when you looked at the polls, it was just a steady loss of confidence in Gavin Usum.

And the recall was essentially a dead event now in some polls.

And then when we look at the 46 candidates that were going to challenge them, there was sort of a Romney-esque, a nice guy who's the mayor of San Diego Falconer, and

he really didn't resonate.

And then there was John Cox, who'd run before and failed, and had some kind of funny commercials about a bearer and him.

I guess the idea is the California grizzly bear,

but it didn't work either.

And then Larry Elder came out of nowhere after trying to be sidetracked.

And he was up to 20, 25%.

I thought he had a very good chance.

I still do think he has a good chance, but this latest disclosure that

a person working for Mr.

Falconer, his rival, was a former Heidi Flash lady of the night with a price tag of $10,000 per session, that she was Larry's girlfriend.

And then in a fit of rage, he supposedly loaded or put a...

bullet in the chamber of his gun that he has by his nightstein in front of her and she attests that he was under the influence of marijuana.

The problem with all this story is that again he said she said and then when you want to know he said he denies it and he she said it's true then you ask her to prove it was there pictures or was there a recording or stealthy tape or are there people coming forward and substantiating that she was so shocked she ran out and told people is she a neutral or does she work for a political rival of Larry Elder?

And then the story starts to break down.

But for a moment, I think it will be effective in causing some doubt.

And then I think people are going to say, you know what?

I've had it with Newsom and I don't really care about it.

There's two questions.

You want Newsom around?

And I think most people are going to say no.

And then the second question, well, who will replace him?

I think they'll probably say Larry Elder is better than the alternative.

So I don't think it will have a lasting effect.

But in the short term, it did.

And I think that Gavin Newsom with his huge war chest will have a lot more because Larry Elder is a very outspoken talk show and he's got a team listening to 30 years of tapes.

And so there's where I don't want to get into whether what's the advisability of dating somebody who's been a professional call girl or smoking where I'm wanting, all those charges, because I can't substantiate them.

But that's the idea.

I think there's a lot of,

I have a kind of peculiar take when I talk to Mexican-American people, which are the only people really in my community that's very non-diverse, but they've had it with Newsom and they feel that he's arrogant, that he represents privilege, that he instituted lockdowns that helped destroy their small businesses or made one of the partners, the husband or the wife, lose their job to stay home with children who were not allowed to go to school and had to be watched.

They feel that he didn't play by the rules that he enforced upon others, that he ate at the most tony restaurant in the nation, the French laundry, with lobbyists during a quarantine.

They feel that all the bloviating about schools, lockdown, masks, did not apply to himself, where he put his own children in very exclusive prep schools.

So, everything about him to many people, the middle class, of all different backgrounds, but especially Latino backgrounds, I think exuded arrogance and the sense of entitlement.

And I think that's kind of that transcends, it's beyond what Larry Elder supposedly did this day or that.

People are just sick of him.

It reminds me of that great speech in the British Parliament: just be gone, get out.

Let's be done with you.

Yeah.

About Chamberlain.

Do you think if Joe Biden is supposed to, it was scheduled, may still tend to go.

I mean, he hardly does anything, so why not have tripped to California?

But he was supposed to go out there, is supposed to go out there, excuse me, to campaign with Newsome.

If that happened, do you think I can't see how that wouldn't hurt Newsom, but you know, it will hurt him.

He's Biden, and I think four polls a day is about 46 or 47.

And the point is that unlike Trump, when Trump got to that level, it was his base didn't care.

They're fired up and they would go out and vote no matter what.

Biden, but especially Newsom, they don't have that fanatic base like Trump did.

And what I'm getting at is this could be very ironic because this Democratic Party in California has bent over backwards to stretch and bend and warp the law in order to get all elections into an early voting absentee ballot system in which you have legal voting harvesting and every time you sneeze go to the dmv go to the unemployment office go to the welfare office go to the zoning committee you get you get registered to vote and there's no accountability where these ballots are mailed out to and part of the idea is that it's sold to us that 40 percent of the electorate is hispanic and they're subjects of systemic racism and therefore anybody who questions the authenticity of this system is a racist but how ironic that they're really going to flood the Latino community with ballots and urge them to vote.

And I think a lot of them are fired up to vote against Newsom.

So it could be a suicidal ploy on their part.

They don't even know it yet.

But I haven't met very many people over the age of 30 who are Hispanic that like Newsom.

Well, Victor, let's talk about two.

Well, one essays.

One is an essay.

The other collectively is an essay.

Are we in a revolution and don't even know it?

This is an essay you wrote this earlier this week for American Greatness.

The title asks a question, but the premise is, yeah, we are a revolutionary epoch.

You go through many ways of how this revolution is manifesting itself in America today.

I'm going to pick one of them, one way, and that has to do with crime.

And I'm quoting here briefly what you wrote.

Again, folks, go to Americangreatness.com and you'll find the original piece.

Also, it's on your website, Victor.

People can go there and link to it.

The revolution has already redefined crime as a construct in the eyes of the bourgeois beholder.

Our woke elite told us to cool it for 120 days of last summer's riots, looting, and arson, since, in the words of the 1619 project and former New York Times reporter Nicole Hannah-Jones, quote, destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence, end quote.

Torture a federal courthouse, a church, or police precinct?

And why worry over mere brick and mortar?

Take over a few city blocks and presto, we have a summer of love.

So Victor, this is if you'd like to talk about the crime aspect or any of the other ways in which we're in the midst of this something that seems maybe is equivalent to Russia in 1917 and other periods of fast coming major change in society.

I think when you're in a revolution, a hardcore totalitarian revolution, you're not sure that you're in a revolution.

So during 1917, 18 and 19, people didn't really fully understand what Lenin was all about.

And they had no idea they had a rendezvous with 20 million dead in the Great Famine within a decade, or with the show trials, or the liquidation.

of the officer corps or the collectivization of farms or the destruction of the kulaks.

And the same thing was true of the Nazi Revolution.

The same thing was true of the Jacobin Revolution that hijacked the French Revolution.

And so what I mean is, because maybe partly because of the lockdowns and COVID and the George Floyd stuff and the recession and all of that stuff, that we got inured to unusual things.

But what I'm getting at is if you take certain areas of revolutionary concentration, let's take the economy.

So if you had said five years ago that the United States government could unilaterally just swear swear that landlords could not collect rent.

Nobody would have believed you.

And if the Supreme Court said, okay, the CDC somehow got that ability, but that's over with, and the President of the United States had said, sorry, I don't believe there is a Supreme Court can tell me what to do.

I'm going to fight them and not even obey it, even if I'm eventually forced to capitulate because it'll give more people freedom.

And then if you had said, The United States government is going to ensure that if you stay home, you can make more on a daily wage than you can working.

Or the United States government is going to borrow $2 trillion at a time.

It owns $30 trillion within $2 more trillion to be borrowed for infrastructure.

People would say, this is a revolutionary act.

Historians would say that.

They're redefining the principles of capitalism.

They really are.

Or we're going to arbitrarily forgive student loans.

And that's how revolutions are.

You wake up and everything that's bizarre and aberrant is everyday stuff.

And that's happened.

If you said, Jack, if you're going to Chicago, if you told a family member, if you're going to Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, just don't walk anywhere downtown after dark because you can be attacked.

And if you're attacked, you can be sure that if you're robbed, assaulted, beaten, raped, shot, that

the perpetrator will probably not be fully prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

And the media may contextualize your fate by saying that you were of a particular race and your perpetrator was a particular race.

So it was systemic.

And the crime, while not quite justified, was symptomatic of a more collectively guilty society.

And nobody will care about you.

And that's where we are now.

If you're Asian American, I talked to some Asian Americans the last month in July, and they really feel that if you're walking in parts of Oakland or San Francisco, you're fair game by, let's be honest, by African-American young males.

And they also feel enormous pressure that they have to say that they don't know who the perpetrator was and that the community at large, the American community, will contextualize the fact about who's attacking them.

Or if I say, if you want to have dinner outside and you're Jewish American in LA or in Beverly Hills or Mall, be careful because people can drive by and call you all sorts of names and overturn the table.

So crime is in a revolutionary flux.

The economy is in a revolutionary flux.

If I told everybody five years ago, you said to them, I'm going to describe American five years, where you can go into a park, take a chains, tear down a statue, and nobody will arrest you.

You can throw paint and deface an American monument, no one will arrest you.

You can take six blocks out of a major urban center and declare it a liberated free zone, and nobody will arrest you.

Nobody would believe that.

And so, I could go on, but everybody gets the idea that society has radically changed.

I go through my email on a given day, and I get three or four emails.

I got two today, and they go along the lines of, dear Professor Hansen, is there any way you could write about this?

Or is there any way

you should know about this?

Or is there any way you could help me?

And they're all the same story.

I've been canceled.

A co-worker called me a racist.

I'm fired.

I'm afraid to say anything.

I'm on some list at my university.

And it's not America.

And so we're in a revolutionary fervor.

And we're either going to win or lose.

But as we see in Afghanistan or on the border or with critical race theory, this is a hardcore group of neo-Marxists that want to hijack this country.

And they have contempt for the 55 or 60% of the population who oppose them.

And they're getting some bucks, righteous bucks from some people, Victor.

How dare you mention Phyllis Phyllis Queller is the co-founder and cultural Marxist of BLM with her, what, fourth home?

Yeah.

And then we have Mr.

Kendi who charges $20,000 for an hour like this.

Megan Markle is peddling her wares of a discriminated grandee and she's got all sorts of fashion lines and things.

It's everybody is into this and they're all

the Obamas are so outraged and so angry about the racial inequities in this country, and they lectured us that their daughters aren't safe on the street and we all have to wear masks.

And it's just so horrible.

And then they have what a 60-year-old birthday party for Barack, where they have 500 guests and a multi-million dollar bash at their price of that estate, by the way, Jack, keeps going up 12, 14,

because the true price is much higher than it is, probably 20 or 30.

But he liked, he was sold, I think, for 12 or 13.

He keeps mentioning that, but that wasn't the market price of that house.

So that's what's going on right now.

Yeah, related to that, Victor, you wrote towards the end of this piece, a final reminder of why the revolution has already turned society upside down.

The canniest members of the aristocracy always cut deals with the revolution and indeed often remain the nomenclatura.

What unites Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the Silicon Valley.

Valley billionaire crowd are the exemptions they purchased from revolutionary justice.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, look at Jeff Bezos.

He went from $80 billion during the lockdown and times of sacrifice to what, $160 billion.

And then he decided, well, I feel so bad about that.

The revolutionary,

like AOC, who shut down one of my proposed ideas in New York, might go after me.

So I got an idea.

I'll get the Civility, Unity, Inclusion Award, $100 million.

And I'll find a guy that just happens to have the best record on bringing us together.

Oh, it's Van Jones, the CNN and former Green Czar.

So, Van, you get $100 million.

And he gave it to me.

Do what you want with it.

And I'm thinking, okay, I'm trying to find out what he said.

He said Republicans are all assholes when he worked for the government.

And he got fired for that.

And then he said that George Bush, the president of the United States, so the truther, he was a truther.

Van Joan was.

And he said that he was responsible for 9-11.

He knew of it in advance.

And then he said that all these mass shootings, even though the data shows that they are basically proportionally representative of the ethnic group of the perpetrator, he said white people do all this.

And then he said that the election that Trump won was whitelash.

He's been one of the most divisive people in the world.

And yet Jeff Bezos finds medieval penance by giving him $100 million.

Or Mark Zuckerberg says, hey, don't go after me.

I gave $500 million to warp precincts and pour in my money and my workers to persuade government to to monitor the election in particular ways that might enhance might nod particular candidates and so that's what they do that the ruling classes always try to hedge their bets by cutting deals with the revolutionaries you can be sure that in afghanistan there's a lot of very wealthy afghans who are coming up to the taliban and saying you know what i really believe in social islamic justice and that you know that rare earth mine that i'm i have a concession for i'll cut you guys a deal And that's what the plutocratic classes do, and that's what they're doing right now.

Well, in a lot of ways, the sentiments expressed in this essay, again, it's at American greatness, come out in different and interesting ways.

And another piece you wrote.

So, this is exclusive premium content you wrote for victorhanson.com.

But we'll talk about the piece anyway.

It's titled 10 Easy Ways to Unwind a Nation in Just a Few Months.

And I'm going to give the list of the 10 Easy Ways quickly.

And I'm just going to talk about one of them.

They are destroy the law, excuse crime, incite racial tribalism, ruin the currency, institutionalize government lying, trash the productive class, politicize the military, destroy the free media, erase customs and traditions.

question all elections.

There seems to be, yeah, damn, all this is, this is what's happened the last few years.

So, but I'm one of them, Victor, just so so we can talk a little bit about one of these parts.

And this is about almost a 5,000-word essay done in over four sections.

Erasing Customs and Traditions, one of the latter ones you wrote, ending a nation requires discrediting its past.

Start with the year zero, reinvention.

That is, 1776 and 1787 to 89 are no longer our foundational dates.

Instead, in 1619, a made-up date, supposedly when the first African-American slave stepped onto North America, marks the foul birth of the now despised country, which is to be stripped of any noteworthiness of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S.

Constitution, make saluting the flag, singing the national anthem, or even waving the American flag a counter-revolutionary act, etc.

Victor, would you like to talk about anything here, this particular section or the piece in general?

and why you wrote it.

Well, I wrote it because I'm worried about the fate of the country.

And I want to reassure readers and fellow Americans that while things are very bad, we know the symptoms of decline, and we can address them.

So that was one reason that I did it.

But this year zero mentality that what's what revolutionaries do.

So when they say we're going to re-found America at 1619 rather than either 1776 with the Declaration of Independence or 1788, 89 with the writing and ratification and implementation of the Constitution, that's what they always do.

And that's what the French Revolution did.

That's what the Soviet Bolshevik Revolution did.

And then this idea that all of these noble traditions, Thanksgiving, Christmas, God bless America, saluting the flag, all of a sudden indict you as a counter-revolutionary and we're not going to allow that.

And the people who are miscreants, the mediocre athletes that come in 14th and won't salute the flag, or joint chiefs that accuse all of us of racism and essentially by saying there's an epidemic of white supremacy.

That has to be challenged because that's what revolutionaries do.

They try to write, rewrite the history.

And the history is, while they're saying this, the reality, I should say, is that people are falling off jets in the air at 10,000 feet for what?

Just the chance of getting to this supposedly toxic country or 2 million people.

Or whatever you think about illegal immigrants, they're taking a great risk

on the way because they get attacked by rapists and murderers and the cartel, but they feel just the chance to get into this country is so rare and singular.

They don't believe Colin Kaepernick.

Now, when they're here, they'll probably be indoctrinated by the host, but right now, they don't believe like Colin Kaepernick or Ilyan Omar, who would make you think that the United States is much worse than the resettlement camp in Somalia in which she came.

And the danger is if you don't believe that your current society is better than the alternative and that you don't have to be perfect to be good, then you're not going to make it if you're not united.

Part of the problem we're having trouble in Afghanistan is for all of the medieval mindset of the Taliban.

They believe in something.

We don't believe in anything.

We don't think every day of those poor Americans that are over there and we don't support them.

We contextualize everything we believe.

Our statues important of Thomas Jefferson, yes, of Lincoln, even Robert E.

Lee, you can have a statue and you can then learn about his complexities and his faults, but you don't go down in the dead of night and destroy something and take that conversation and Trotskyize it out of American history.

And then the question is: this, and this is what the left had better be very careful about.

They don't understand that once you start making these rules that you have to be perfect according to contemporary values to be permissible, then it boomerangs on you.

Who are going to replace these statues?

Malcolm X, former felon?

Martin Luther King, womanizer, plagiarist, Cesar Chavez?

He was in Cinnanon, Synanon, and he was an organized go down to the border and beat up illegal aliens.

Right.

He was against, right, right.

Yeah.

And then we've all the money in the Robert F.

Kennedy Medical Fund started to disappear.

So you, you name the icon that you want to present to us.

Is it going to be the founder of BLM?

Maybe we can have her do it.

And she can, you know, have a picture of all four homes with good Marxist fashion behind her.

Maybe it's Al Sharpin that, you know, or Jesse Jackson and their record.

Jaime Town.

Yeah.

Jaime Town, anti-Semitic, both of them.

So what homophobic statements?

So what I'm getting at is if you go down that route that you're sanctified, then you'll find out you have feet of clay.

And the second thing is it's very dangerous for this revolution to talk about people and collectives.

Whiteness.

I hear that all the time.

Whiteness, white people.

Joy Reed is is so happy that white people.

So my point is: okay,

so now we're going to say that the guy, you know, that's on a tractor out in Texas and the metrosexual in Minneapolis that lives next to the University of Minnesota campus and the old salty Yankee 80 out in New Hampshire small town

and the guy in Bakersfield that's a third generation from the Oklahoma dad, they're all the same.

And they're all white, and therefore they're all responsible.

And so then people say, okay, I guess that's what we do.

So all Hispanics are the same, and all African Americans are the same.

And we don't look at the positive attributes.

We only look at the negative.

And so we say to all African Americans, why do people in your community commit violent crime?

51% of the percentage of all violent crimes when you're only 13%, it's your fault.

Or why do we say that of Latinos, why do you represent disproportionate numbers of people in federal prisons above your numbers in the population?

And then we can do the opposite side too.

We can say, well, which particular group gets Nobel Prizes versus the other?

Why don't we just say, well, Asian Americans get Nobel Prizes or they perform in the professions disproportionately to their group, but therefore they're superior.

Do we want to do that rather than look at individuals?

And that's what they're doing because they're racist.

They're racist to the core.

Yeah, there's lots of projection there.

Yeah, you have to have a civic tradition.

When you get up in the morning for citizenship to work and to have a collective citizenship that binds people by ideals and not superficial appearances or ethnic pride or chauvinism, this is a multiracial democracy.

It's a very volatile experiment.

It's very rare.

It's never worked really in history very well.

But for us to work, we got to get up and say, what unites us?

My gosh, I can remember when I get up every morning, I think, wow, I...

all of us of every different ethnic background paraded the flag around and sang America the beautiful every morning in first grade at a predominantly Mexican-American first, second, third, fourth, and on school.

And I remember I can also think during the hostage crisis being on a tractor and I was on, you know, the border of three different farms and the Armenian American and the Japanese American.

And the Mexican-American farmers, we were all sitting on tractors and we were all pissed as hell that the Iranians would do that to us.

And so, but we didn't think about our tribal affiliations because we had common civic education and upbringing that suppressed our ethnic tribal chauvinism and replaced it with a uniform love of what the United States allowed the individual to do.

And that's not a natural idea, Jack.

You have to have songs, you have to have myths, you've got to study Lou Gehrig, you've got to study Booker T.

Washington.

You've got to, you know, I know I admit, you look at the bad, you can look at Jim Cole, you can look at the Japanese internment, but you have to put that in a context that we were better than the alternative and we were self-critical and we were always striving for moral perfection and when they don't do that they lie and when they tear something that took years and decades and centuries to build they can't replace it with anything else the one reason that the soviet union collapsed was it was based on lies, but more importantly, its legacy didn't collapse.

The reason that Russia is such a screwed-up country is for 70 years, people erased their czarist past, they erased erased Tolstoy.

They erased all of their history and traditions and language, and they replaced it with this bankrupt Soviet year-zero ideology and mythology.

And so what they're trying to do is destroy all confidence in the United States.

And you know what?

I spoke to some Stanford students the other day.

And when you, it's very sad when you talk to some students and they have been indoctrinated and you very politely remind them of what they're saying makes no sense.

And it came to me in talking to students after that talk,

there's a whole generation of Americans that they don't know who Lou Gehrig is.

They have no idea the difference between, you know, America the Beautiful and God Bless America and the Star-Spangled Banner.

They have no idea what Fort Sumner is.

They don't know what Antietam is.

They don't know what Shiloh is.

They don't know what Iwo Jima is.

They don't know what the Bulge is.

They couldn't tell you what a B-17 if you asked them.

And yet they're so arrogant and so haughty in their presentism because they know apps or something or they know a certain logarithm.

So these people, they don't understand what they're doing.

They're unwinding two and a half centuries of work.

And they're doing, and they think they're imaginative and original.

They're just following the old tired script of every revolutionary since antiquity.

And, you know, they have a word damnatio memori in Latin.

And it means when an emperor, maybe he's bad, usually they were bad, but sometimes not completely bad, when they wanted to get rid of him and they wanted to get usher in, and then they just forbid all mention of his family, like Trotskyization in the Soviet Union.

And then they just took statues and cut off the face.

I mean, they were economical.

They wanted to keep the body, and they did some little adoptions.

They put a new face on.

And that's what we're doing here.

We're putting a new face and we're damning to memory all of these wonderful Americans.

I know you tell me you were going to Stanford.

Were you teaching a class?

We had a special event where members of the Hoover community were going to speak to students.

Most of them were extremely bright, inquisitive, wonderful people.

But I felt bad for a few of them that I talked to because I gave this talk about contemporary politics and contemporary ideologies.

They seemed to be bewildered, like, wow.

You know, when we get into contemporary affairs, we talked about the January 6th.

And if you say there was nobody arrested with arms, so how could it be an armed insurrection?

Or that the iconic loss of the day was actually Ashley Babbitt

and not Officer Signet.

You know, it's like a blank stare, and because that's not what people are telling them.

And so, I think everybody who's listening, all of us, we're coming to the 11th hour, and we get no immunity from history if we don't follow history's lessons.

And the lessons are: if you are a multiracial democracy, you've got to supplant ethnic chauvinism with a common story, a common origin, common rituals, common tradition.

And everybody has to give up something of the person for the public good.

And we're not getting that in education.

We're not getting it from the Super Bowl, the national anthem, the NBA.

And I'll just finally finish this rant with, I think there's a common denominator.

I think that is money.

We have so much affluence that people feel that they have all of this laxity or latitude that no matter what they do, they can always avoid any ensuing complications or contradictions or paradoxes because of their lifestyle or their money or their influence, and especially among our elite.

And so LeBron James, you know,

he can say whatever he wants or Colin Kaepernick can say or the Olympic athletes, because there's always going to be a sponsor.

There's always going to be a home.

There's always going to be a security guard.

And so it's kind of performance art or theater, but it filters down in a very negative way to the average person.

People have to be optimistic.

They have to love the United States.

And when some young person says, well, you know, know we had slavery and you say who didn't have slavery right and somebody said well we were racist i said

have you ever been to mexico have you ever seen what japan is like how many black people live in south korea or north korea or how many white people live in haiti and are fully accepted as haitian citizens right most people whatever their race and traditions are monoracial but so they have these complaints or indictments against America with complete oblivion or ignorance about what the norm is everywhere else.

Or they're looking in Plato's cave at the reflections on the wall and the imagery, or they're looking through a keyhole into reality on the other side of the door.

And it's like, wow, those Afghans are hanging on a jet engine.

Wow, that plane took off.

Wow, they didn't let go.

They want to go to America.

Or wow, two million of them are lined up for miles trying to get to America?

Geez.

Or wow, that guy that hates America so much, I saw him down at the immigration office.

He's trying to get his whole family here right or that guy who says america is racist and mean he's trying to get everybody he knows that's related to him into america so wake up young people look at reality don't look at what people have told you as gospel well victor i'm inspired by that you came out of a meeting with stanford students and no punches were thrown and no

sued anybody no no i felt for the few people who disagreed with me because they seem to be thinking like wow yeah you're some heretic.

How'd you get away with saying that?

And yet, I can't contradict you.

Why is that?

Wow, where's my professor of ethnic studies?

I'm looking around for him to help me.

Well, maybe they'll think they were robbed of an education because they certainly were.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have to talk about substantive things.

I do want to thank people on both our behalf, those who leave ratings and comments on iTunes.

By the way, somebody left a comment about Donald Kagan, and I'd like to, whether you knew him or not, and I'm confident you did.

I'd like to talk about him.

I would say very quickly that I did know him.

I spent a year with him at the Center for Behavioral Studies.

And I have a long obituary, 3,500 words, about Donald Kagan and two other great classicists that tragically died all within a few months of each other.

John Lynch at UC Santa Cruz is my first classics teacher.

And Leslie Three, the great philologist at Revolutionized Greek philology with a monumental two-volume grammar of Attic Inscriptions.

Wonderful people.

And I've written for Roger Kimball The New Criteria, and that should be out very soon.

Oh, okay.

When that comes out, we will discuss it then.

So somebody left a message on iTunes, five stars, classic sponge is the name of the person.

Thank you, Jack and Victor.

My husband and I met both Jack and VDH on a couple of national review cruises several years ago.

We agreed this, I think they were drinking when they wrote this.

We agreed that Jack was exceptionally warm and eager to engage with the members of the audience and of course victor was his unstintingly brainy self on the panel so grateful we could partake and now you are together for these wonderful podcasts be still my heart and went on to write other things so we we thank you classics sponge appreciate that and everyone else who left comments so that's about all the time we have today to listen to this the classicist the traditionalist and with the great sammy wink the culturalist Those are the three shows under the umbrella of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor, thanks so much.

Thank you very much, Jacques, and thank everybody again for listening.

We'll see you next week.