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Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the classicist.

We are recording on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, also the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, where I write a new weekly email newsletter civil thoughts but who cares about that what we care about today is getting the thoughts and reflections of the namesake of the show victor davis hanson who is the martin and ely anderson senior fellow at the hoover institution also the wayne and marsha busk distinguished fellow in history at hillsdale college if you want to get a lot of victor the place to get it is at victorhanson.com.

That's his website, private papers, and on the classicist, as opposed to the traditionalist and the culturalist, the other podcasts in this under the Victor Davis Hanson show umbrella, we talk about, tend to talk about things that are originally published on victorhanson.com.

We also talk about California things, which we will discuss today, and Victor's pieces for American Greatness.

You'll find that at mgreatness.com.

And we'll talk about two VDH pieces that he's written in the last week for American Greatness.

But we're also going to talk about courage and we're also going to talk about Andrew Cuomo.

That's first up in the topics.

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We're back on the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

The classicist Victor, hello.

It's a busy day today politically.

A lot of news out today about Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of New York, has put out this overwhelming report accusing him of multiple incidents of sexually harassing women.

Cuomo has responded in kind.

I did nothing wrong.

I read an 85-page report.

I think 60 of the pages in the report were pictures of him hugging his mother and other

safe huggings.

But Victor, it's a big deal.

Maybe it's not a big deal.

Maybe he's going to tough it out.

What do you think?

Well, I'm shocked that we're not talking about my 8,000-word defense of classics coming out in the new criterion,

new archaeological information deriving in Greece, from excavations in Greece.

But that's a joke.

Actually,

I followed the news conference, and it made Nixon's checker speech seem like the Gettysburg Address.

It really did.

And it was pathetic and it was self-indulgent.

And I don't think it's going to work.

And here's why.

Number one,

these are not right-wing people accusing him.

These are attorneys for the state of New York that ran an investigation headed by a black female and supported by Democratic members of the legislature.

And remember what Senator Hirono said?

You know, women must be believed.

And then we had Mr.

Cuomo himself say during the Brett Kavanaugh that things are very serious and he should think of pulling out, etc., etc.

And we had Joe Biden in April saying if an investigation found that there was

culpable behavior on the part of Mr.

Cuomo, Governor Cuomo, he should resign.

So the left is now devouring the left.

It's nothing to do with the right.

And they're doing this because Cuomo thought he bought woke insurance, that he could be doing, say anything, abuse people, create any workplace environment that he wanted because he he was left.

Two, there's no more Donald Trump anymore.

He posed as the non-Trump and he got all his adulations.

Did he win a Grammy, Jack, or what was it, an Emmy?

For his press conferences?

An Emmy.

Yeah, I think after they watched the one today, they take it away.

It was so pathetic.

But he became the anti-Trump, even though Trump had been very magnanimous to him in sending a hospital ship and respirators, etc.

Three, he's very unethical.

His brother, Chris, covers him.

And there were reports today that they shared confidential materials in the allegations to craft a Cuomo family response.

This is a reporter, remember, who reports on his own brother for CNN.

Fourth,

he's kind of a crook in the sense that he got a $5.1 million book deal.

I think I just looked it up the other day.

He sold about 45,000 copies.

In other words, he got $115 per book.

That's about four times or more than that publisher gets from sales.

So you understand they were not giving him $5.1 million because of his talents as an author.

They were doing it for influence peddling.

And he's never talked about that very much.

Sixth,

there's over a thousand more dead per million population in New York than in Florida.

And everybody's been hammering DeSantis.

But if you actually look at the data, his deaths per million in Florida, a state of similar size and mostly retired people,

far more vulnerable people, is 1,000, you know, it's about 1,800 versus Cuomo's 2,700, 2,800 deaths per million.

So he did a lousy job on COVID.

That's what I'm trying to say.

Did Cuomo.

And then finally, this is the most intriguing job because I think about this.

So if he resigns under pressure, or if he sticks it out like the people in Virginia did,

it has something to do with Joe Biden.

For every woman who says she was squeezed by Joe Biden, you could bring out a teenager, some of them under 18, who said Joe Biden whispered in their ear, he squeezed them, he hugged them.

For every woman who said that she was directly confronted, you could bring out Tara Reed.

add into that mix that Governor Cuomo is a little crazy, Andrew Cuomo.

So he's a narcissist, he's an exhibitionist, he's self-infatuated.

So he gives these long press conferences and he says he's not going to resign.

If Joe Biden comes out and says, I told him in April, if we found the evidence that he had to resign because I believe women, and he resigns,

what will Cuomo do?

Will be play Samson, put an armor on each pillar, and said, I'm bringing down the Temple of the Democrats.

Everything I've been accused of, we know the president's been accused of.

So I ask him to resign.

If he has nothing to lose, why would he not do that?

So they're going to be very scared about him.

And you know, when you corner a wounded animal, they can be very dangerous.

And he's wounded now, and he's angry, and he's unstable, and he's unhinged.

And he's everything that Trump wasn't, but what he accused Trump of being.

And so

it's also a final reminder for all you wokeist out there who are left-wing.

And you think that you went into your local insurance office and bought woke insurance and you performance art, your virtue, or your virtue signal.

No,

if there are careerist elements, there are in this investigation, or if you violate certain canons,

then you're not going to be immune.

You're going to be more immune than a conservative, but not entirely if you push too far.

I think I said on an interview just now that he had nine lives and about 25 of them are consumed.

Well, he spent the last three decades tormenting people.

And as they say, payback is a bitch, whether you're a conservative or a liberal.

And many people have been looking for the opportunity.

And if this isn't one, I don't know what is.

Victor, let's cross the

nation over to California.

I saw an AP story the other day.

Democrats in California seem to be increasingly nervous about Gavin Newsom's recall, masquerading it.

Well, it may not be masquerading.

It's certainly a little bit of legitimacy to, oh, we're worried that democrat voters don't know how important this is we don't see any fervor there we oh yeah we need to get to the polls and vote against the recall and i think the date is september 14th so there is this uh beginning of nail biting going on and then also on newsom there's a piece the other day from american greatness by Ben Boychuk, and he's he's also talking about how Newsom seems to be backpedaling and now hiding behind some of his kids.

Let me just read this quickly, what Boychuk wrote.

I didn't know this until today.

Last week, one of Newsom's sons was spotted maskless at a summer basketball camp, which doesn't sound like much, except it happens to coincide with a renewed state effort, just shy of a mandate, to push masks and distancing in response to a surge in the Delta variant cases.

Quote, you want to come after me?

Come after me, Newsom told Nora O'Donnell.

They're attacking me and weaponizing my son.

We did nothing wrong.

Clearly, Newsom isn't above using his children as political shields on national television as he prepares to fend off a recall on September 14th, et cetera, et cetera.

So, you know, Victor, it doesn't look, it never looked like it was a slam dunk for Newsome.

I mean, after all, he is being recalled, but I see the beads of sweat.

Do you?

Yeah, I do.

I mean, he was 20 points in the no recall category just about a month ago.

Now he's about five or six, and he's losing at a geometric rate each week in the polls.

And why is that?

Because his signature defense or his signature talking points were, I'm not Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump's not an issue anymore.

Second one, I did a great job on COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.

Well, you locked down the economy of California.

You destroyed it.

And when you look at cases, per million or deaths per million, we're not that different than Texas or Florida, whose schools were not shut down, whose economies were not ruined, and who are doing better in terms of unemployment.

And yet we're back with COVID because COVID's here.

There's a lot of people in this state, 40% has got the largest Latino population in the United States.

And there are things that Newsom has done.

They don't, they, meaning the Latino community, like any community, don't like hypocrites.

So when they took their kids out of school because they were forced to and they had to stay home with them and they couldn't hire nannies like Newsom did.

Newsom put his kids in parochial private schools, very expensive, and they kept it open.

Newsom went to the French laundry.

Newsom is a hypocrite and that hurts him.

And then the Republicans, so if there are reasons why to recall him, but the Republican field was going to split.

Remember, you don't, as we discussed, you don't need a majority vote.

Once you say he's going to be recalled, then a guy could win with 10% of the vote.

I think there's 47 candidates.

So they didn't really have anybody that would draw attention.

And now you have Larry Elder.

He's a very well-known tacos.

He's leading the pack at 16%.

And there will be people who say, you know, I'm going to come out to recall Newsome because I want to vote for Larry Elder more so than in the past.

And so I think there's a 50-50 chance he can lose.

Remember one thing about California.

It is woke, it is blue, but it's weird.

And when people,

for example, the recent ballot proposition where everybody said it was going to be a shoe-in Silicon Valley for tens of millions of dollars that we should overturn Prop 209, we didn't.

In fact, overwhelmingly, people said they did not want racial preferences in things like hiring and school admissions.

Not that our bureaucratic caste system won't overturn that themselves illegally.

But the point is, they voted no for racial identity politics.

And they did recall Gray Davis.

It wasn't Republicans who recalled Gray Davis, and they recalled him for doing what, just upping the car registration fees.

Now, when you have a governor who I don't know what he runs on, oh, by the way, we have the highest sales gas income taxes in the country, and oh, by the way, we have a low property tax at 1%, but it doesn't really matter because our assessments are double anybody on the valuations of homes, so it's one of the highest property taxes, or we have the highest kilowatts

rate, or we have the highest gasoline prices, except in Hawaii.

Or maybe we can say we have the most homeless people, or we have a third of all the welfare recipients, or one in five people live below the poverty line.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

There's nothing there to run on other than high-speed rail that's an ossified Stonehenge or Blood Alley on the 99.

I don't know what he runs on.

The state's a mess that's been destroyed by Jerry Brown and the second term and as well as Gavin Newsom.

And all of their running on is we're not Donald Trump and we're woke and da-da-da-da-da.

And I don't think people in the privacy of their voting booth or their desk or wherever they mail in their ballot are going to buy that.

So now it's just a question of one simple fact.

In the 2020 election and in many of the congressional elections, there's a lot of missing votes.

The DMV said they couldn't find about 100,000 votes, so they were mailed out to the wrong people.

Will he be able to energize the huge Democratic machine?

And I'm talking supermajorities in the legislature, you know, only 12 Republicans out of 53 congressional districts, no statewide office holders that are Republican.

Will he be able to get this huge left-wing bureaucracy behind him and have the vote harvesting, third-party harvesting?

Absentee ballot, early balloting.

You know what I'm talking about.

That movement to go and win the election after Election Day.

Right.

That's something that he could do, win the election and sense it not be recalled.

Well, Victor, I promised earlier podcasts, the traditionalists, that on this podcast today, we were going to talk about courage.

So I hope you could put on your classicist and military historian cap here.

I think they're always on anyway.

Simone Biles, the American gymnast, created quite an uproar early in the Olympics where she withdrew from competition.

Actually, she took a pause because she actually won a bronze medal, I think it was yesterday on Balance Beam.

But her withdrawal created a lot of commentary.

Any number of people criticizing her for being essentially a quitter, offset by many people calling her courageous and a hero.

And there was a growing number of people in the middle who said, you know, well, look, she had to pull out because of whatever reasons, physical reasons, danger, good, but let's not call her a hero.

But Victor, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at the concept of courage and the meaning of courage.

And so, I'll pose a broad question here.

What was the sense of the understanding of courage in antiquity?

Also, was it one understanding as opposed to what love might have meant?

But was there just one common understanding of what courage was?

Did it last

over the ages intact,

even up to more recent times, even up to men running into the World Trade Center, you know, to

save people.

And has it been diminished?

If we're using the words courage to describe a gymnast pulling out of the Olympics, not knocking here, I'm not criticizing here, but it seems that the word has become pretty elastic, may have lost its meaning, and that may have a consequence for our culture.

So it's a big big blob there thrown at you, Victor, where you take it on any way you wish to.

I don't know the particulars of Miss Biles.

Her argument is that whether for physical or mental reasons, she didn't feel that she was up to Olympic class performances in this particular Olympics.

And if she were to compete, I think she did win a bronze at one of the events, but if she were going to compete, then she was going to lose.

And that would have been bad for the team score in general and nullified.

So then she feels that courageously she took her out self out of the competition.

The better question is why did she feel that?

There's a lot of issues.

There's sexual harassment or sexual abuse that took place by the trainers and the coaches.

I don't know all those answers.

I do know that we are a therapeutic culture

and we talk about ourselves a lot more than people in the past did.

And the idea that you just keep quiet and is sort of gone now.

But I can't comment on whether she's courageous or not because I don't know exactly the types of ailment she had and the degree to which she could have sucked it up and said, I can still win.

I'm that much better than the comp, you know, kind of a rashness or a defiance.

You say, you know, I mean, is she Lou Gehrick playing probably six months with Lou Gehrig's disease?

I don't know.

We know that Michael Jordan had the flu in one of his greatest games and kept playing.

But so I don't want to castigate her for that.

I will say, though, that of all these athletes, and Megan Rapento, who just lost, the women's soccer team was just eliminated by, and she made fun of Canada by Canada.

But the point is that when athletes of any type start to become social activists, like Colin Kaepernick, either because their careers are on the downside or because they're on the downside because they're editorializing, it doesn't work well.

LeBron James is not what he was.

And Ms.

Biles has been very vocal about a lot of different social issues, women's compensation, equity,

all of these other issues.

So I just think when these athletes do all that, they take their eye off the ball and they don't do as well as they might otherwise.

And the pressure mounts on them and people say nasty things to them and people praise them for the wrong reasons.

But they're athletes.

You know, that's what they're supposed to do.

And if they don't do that first, then they tend to be more vocal second.

I kind of wrote an article about what's going going on.

When generals can't win wars, they become woke.

CEOs can't make sure there's gas in the airplane, they become woke.

Hollywood producers can't make a good movie, they become woke.

When athletes feel or they have self-doubt, they become more tendency, have a greater tendency to become woke.

As far as the Greeks go, they had a lot of different words.

I'm just trying to recall them.

One of them was this kind of bad word, tharsos.

It just means you're rough or tough.

You know, you're kind of a person that you're in the phalanx and they're charging you, and you step forward first,

or

you take on something.

Heracles had tharsals.

You don't really care about anything.

You're kind of a swagger, tough guy.

And that's courageous.

And you just unleash the person,

they go after him.

You don't care about the consequences.

There's another word, and women wouldn't like it.

Today's emancipated women called andrea,

andrea, and that means manliness, but manliness in the sense that it's a more holistic concept, that a courageous person takes risk, takes the heat for the weak or for the ill or for the greater good, and that they always require certain people to be.

It's getting very close to what a tragic hero is in Sophoclean tragedy.

One person has to step up forward and take the heat, even though they know it's going to destroy them.

That's Andrea.

There's another word, eritae.

That's a bigger word.

It means virtue in the whole sense, sense, but central to erité is the idea of your courageous.

Remember, Aristotle and the ethics said courage was the most important of all

of the positive traits, because if you don't have it, you can't do anything.

You can't be honest, you can't be loyal, you can't be truthful.

Because if you're scared all the time and you're always trimming and weighing your decisions in a cost-benefit 51%

modality, then who wants you?

You're just working.

And as far as right now, it is an obsolete idea.

You could crush the woke movement in two seconds if people just stood up and said, not me, I'm not going to listen to this anymore.

I'm done with you people and spoke and wrote and defied it because it does not have 51%.

It's very absurd that here in the wealthiest, most leisured society in the history of civilization in the year 2021, very, very wealthy people, LeBron James, Oprah, people like that are whining about what an unfair country it was.

And yet they thought it was a pretty fair country when they were on the way up.

It didn't stop them.

And then when they're doing this, when we're having an epidemic of crime against people who are vulnerable, older Asian Americans, young black children.

We have 6% of the population are composed of black males, and yet they're committing over 50%

of the crime and more, I think, the last year.

And we need somebody to step up and say courageously, okay,

there's a lot of issues that we could haggle about whiteness and what it is to be anti-racist, but right now we want to save lives.

And we're going to target people who are committing these crimes and address this issue, either if they commit a felony, put them in jail.

But when you make allegations about a whole society and you stereotype 240 million people and you say, you all, you suffer suffer from whiteness.

That's a very dangerous thing to do.

That's like saying in Nazi Germany, that's Jewishness.

What is whiteness?

It applies to every white person.

You're going to do that and do that and do that and do that.

Then people are going to say, you live in a glass house.

So you take care of you.

If you're going to say that this is not a national problem, this is a black problem.

This is a black problem.

We have been victimized.

Not other people have been victimized.

We have been victimized.

And you are the victimizer, okay?

So you take it upon your shoulders to be the megaphones of blackness and you want all the other people to be the receptacles of whiteness, then you got to be very careful because once you go down that stereotypical road, then people are going to say, okay, you're responsible for crime in a very unfair way.

But it's very unfair to say that I'm a victim and it's because of my skin and all you people who do not look like me are culpable because your great-great-great-grandfather didn't stop slavery quick enough.

And so I think when people say we're all the same and our color doesn't matter, and you can call me any name you want, but I'm going to be unchanging in my attitude.

Good luck.

You do your worst.

I'll do my best.

And may the best person win.

That's the net stop.

Well, Victor, picking up on a point you just made, and we have about 15 minutes left.

We have three other pieces you've written to discuss on this episode of The Classicist.

One of the things we do is, as I mentioned earlier, is discuss some of the original material you write that appears on your website, victorhanson.com.

And one of those pieces is under your occasional Optimism Inc.

essays.

And this one you've written, a new one published this week, is called The Crushing Weight of Lies.

And I had made notes on this, hoping that you might talk about one of the sections of this piece that you call a borderlash.

But you just were talking about percentages and what does it mean to be white and black.

And you've written before about the military and our favorite chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley.

And in the piece on the crushing the weight of lies, you write about this.

Such a woke chair of the joint chiefs of staff would say, whoops, 82% of the combat deaths in Iraq were white males, and that doesn't begin to look like America, where they're only 35%.

Or, damn it, why was I not told that 85% of our combat dead in Afghanistan are white males?

And that sure as hell does not look like America.

Is that our collective future.

Victor, you could discuss that.

This is an excellent piece, The Crushing Weight of Lies.

And I'll just read how it begins and then you take off on whichever way you want.

One of the reasons why I remain optimistic, you write, about the impending end of wokeism.

and the failure of the cultural revolution is that the dangers they pose are unsustainable.

And by that, I mean that they require such dissimulation that the load of lies eventually will snap the spine of those asked to carry and disseminate them.

Well, that's a lot to talk about.

But if you go down their racial percentage obsessions, then you suffer because it's not going to be always favorable to your particular point of view.

And as I mentioned, when you say the military is going to look like America in every aspect, from combat units to pilots to prestigious promotions, every

percentage except what, those who die in obscure places and are forgotten in Afghanistan, Iraq, because if you look at these statistics, about 85 to 87 percent, 83 to 87 in Afghanistan and Iraq died who were white males, mostly from the middle and lower classes.

So is that a statistic that you want to say, wow, we got to be more proportionally represented.

There must be endemic racism within our ranks because insidiously, implicitly, Systemically, we are sending people to the most dangerous parts of the world and placing them in the worst combat zones on the idea that they're expendable white males.

Is that what we want to go?

We look at hate crimes.

I think today Joe Biden and Kamel Harris are demagoguing that El Paso Walmart shooting.

Remember two years ago where the majority of victims, not all, but the majority of victims were Hispanic and there was some white nut and some people on Twitter who were racist says something.

Okay, and you know why they're doing that because the Latino community is getting fed up with this economy.

They're getting fed up with open borders.

They're getting fed up with people from all over the world coming across the border, they're getting fed up with critical rest theory, they're getting fed up with the Green New Deal and the destruction of jobs and all that.

Okay, so he's going to go down there and demagogue it.

And the premise is what?

All of these white people are committing hate crimes.

You look at hate crime, and African Americans are about 12% of the population.

They commit well over 25%, double their numbers.

If you look like Latinos, they commit more hate crimes than the proportion of their numbers in the general population.

If you look at whites that are about 67 to 71 percent, they,

depending on which particular hate crime you're defining, 55 to 60 at most.

So, you're basically going down there and going to lie and say, We have a white epidemic of hate crimes that have targeted Latinos.

That's just a complete lie.

And so, getting back to all of this stuff is that Joe Biden and the left can say whatever they want, but what they do not say is these are the statistics.

This is the group that's overrepresented.

This is the group that's underrepresented.

And if they do that, then I'd have no problem when they go to the next step and say, but these data points don't matter because there's a systemically racist society that forces one because of 150 years of insidious racial pressures to commit more hate crimes than their percentages in the general population.

And we know that although interracial crimes like happened two years ago in Walmart are rare, if you really want to look at the statistics of blacks killing whites as a proportion of the population versus whites killing blacks or Latinos and whites, it doesn't reflect well that whites suffer more violent injuries and deaths per population than do African American Latinos by another group.

So African Americans are more likely to be the offender in an interracial crime or a hate crime than they are to be the offended.

That's a fact.

And then theorists can come in with critical theories and explain why that is so, but they cannot change that fact.

Victor, one other thing you touched on in this piece has to do with the border.

Well, you touched on other things, but you called it borderlash.

And here's what you wrote.

And I think this is interesting because I'd like you to talk about, I would call it the loosening of the grip of the Democratic Party on Hispanic voters.

You wrote, so far, Biden has offered no defense of his open border policy other than to blame Trump's closed border policy and cry racism.

The Democratic Party is ever so slowly alienating tens of thousands of voters of all races, religions, and ethnicities and seem oblivious in their arrogance for the sort of comeuppance on the horizon.

The comeuppance is coming in part from Hispanic Mexican-Americans.

Would you have that as your contention?

It is, and I think it's a question that transcends race.

I've been very critical of the critical race theory people, but I have been just as critical of the bicoastal white urban metrosexual elite, the quote-unquote Karens.

And what I meant by that is for most of my life, when I went up to UC Santa Cruz at 18, the first thing I noticed that there was a particular wealthy, wealthy white kid from San Francisco Bay Area or from Los Angeles that thought that even though he had long hair and even though he smoked dope, that he was better than everybody else and he deserved a particular type of exemption from rules.

And when I went to graduate school, I met that same profile.

For most of my life, I met those people.

And if I can stereotype with that derogatory, those people.

So when you see these people, and we saw them with Lisa Page, we saw them with Peter Strzok, we saw them with Andrew McCabe.

And we saw them with the Dream Team and how they made fun of the poor Ty Cobb type of overweight elderly Trump lawyers.

We saw it with Adam Schiff, who was the Harvard prodigy, and Devin Nunes was the Tulare County Cal Poly graduate.

It's never empirical with these people.

They are snobs.

And what I'm getting at, Jack, is a lot of minorities, as they gravitate to the upper and higher classes, come in contact with these people.

And they make the mistaken assumption that those are, quote, white people in general, and they're not.

And so when you see working class white people, they get along with minorities and Latinos, and Latinos, minorities, and blacks know that.

And they don't get along any more with wealthy white people than they do with minority.

I mean, they get along with mornings most better.

Donald Trump, the people who hated Donald Trump and the people Donald Trump hated were white people.

Let's be fair.

And the people who liked him for not liking that were not just middle-class deplorable.

I know that for a fact.

A lot of people said, I like Trump because he fights.

And what they mean by that is that whiny, nasal voice, pajama boy, life of Julia,

self-absorbed, narcissistic, overeducated, underperforming, bi-coastal elite that gets in everybody's business, lives for Twitter.

They don't like that person.

And then their way, they had turned this bobcat Trump loose.

And he mauled them and he scratched them and he bit them.

And they think, well, that white person deserves it.

So that's an issue.

And sometimes it manifests itself when I talk to some people who say he's a hefe, he's a leader, he's a tough guy.

And they don't like this.

Wow, you know, and we don't want to say this.

You know, I saw you around the block and you only had one mask, and it's better to have two masks.

Or, you know, I just want to tell you that I'm very, very, very worried about my perception that you may have been smoking outside.

And I just, I just want to bring that to your attention.

That kind of stuff.

You know, my daughter was with her disabled child.

My granddaughter was very early in the pandemic, was walking, and Lila has trouble breathing because

genetic problems

when you're missing a gene, that particular gene in Smith-McGinnis is respiratory problems, chronic asthma, chronic inability to breathe.

And when you put a mask on a four-year-old and they do not know why that is there, when it's a beautiful spring day and you're walking with your own child, and people under 12 are not very susceptible to the early strains of COVID.

And so the mask is pulled down on Lila's chin and somebody driving in Santa Cruz in a very nice car who's very wealthy pulls down and says,

how dare you?

As if poor little Lila is going to sneeze and that little virus is going to go, you know, 100 yards and find its way into their air conditioning system in their car while they're driving.

That's the type of anal retentive

people who have so much money, so much influence, and so much power that they think they're masters of their destiny.

They think that we can control every aspect of our wonderful, perfect lives.

We did everything right.

We went to the right school.

We got the right advanced degrees.

We make all this money.

We live in the right zip code and we just deserve to live and die in our sleep at about 99 years old.

And we're not going to let anybody endanger that.

They have no tragic sense of how the world works at all.

And that's who runs the progressive.

left, bi-coastal elite.

And so what I'm saying is when I see a lot of minority people lash out at that, I say more power to them.

Well, Victor, these people are a primitive thing to say, I understand.

No, no, it's dealing with stereotypes, but I've dealt with those people my entire life.

And I can tell you that when I drive that 200 miles to Stanford, I notice that my heart rate goes up.

I tense up just about when I get on 280.

And when I get going the other way, and when I get over Pacheco Pass, I start to relax.

Right.

Because people in the San Joaquin Valley that are working class people, they don't don't have the luxury to act like that.

Right.

Hey, Vic, tell me a story real quick.

I was driving to Stanford once.

I think I told you, didn't I?

And I heard this, saw this smoky, this Hispanic guy in the landscape and he had a smoky truck.

And it wasn't that bad.

It's what I see every day here in Selma and Fresno County.

And I was behind him.

And I thought, I just said to myself, I think

these people are going to go stark raving mad because they have no allotment for human imperfection or poverty or anything.

They love these guys to come in, the Hispanic gardeners and do their gardening, but bam, they got to have, you know, like they want the equivalent of a Lexus truck that runs on electricity, not a, you know, an 85 Chevy pickup that needs a tune-up.

But when this guy, by the time I got to,

I saw somebody at Stanford and they said to me, did you see that truck?

It was spewing.

And I said, yeah.

And they said, well, I called, but there were already several calls

that had anticipated.

And they went berserk because that's the way they live.

There can be no imperfection.

There can be no deviation from the orthodoxy.

And they,

as masters of the universe, they control everything.

Well, I was going to absolve you of the sin of creating stereotypes because Pajama Boy is a stereotype, but he's one created by the Obama administration.

So the sin's on them.

Well, Victor, let's take these.

By the way, the piece that we just discussed was written before Victorhansen.com Private Papers.

Listeners, avail yourself of that website regularly.

You'll find various links, including to Victor's weekly email, The Week in Review, where he is on Twitter at BD Hansen, his Facebook link, VDH's Morning Cup parlor, link for his forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen.

Victor, you also write copiously and regularly twice a week for American greatness, and you've got two pieces that maybe we can have you discuss them as one because they're both involved with wokeism.

One is titled, What is Woke Really About?

And the subtitle for that is Wokeness is many things, but increasingly it seems a cover for careerism, profiteering, and utter incompetence.

And I think that, well, it does mesh with the other longer and delicious, if I may say so, essay entitled Incompetence plus Arrogance Equals Woke, politically correct ideology, is masking and contributing to the widespread failure of our institutions.

Victor, you write in this essay about one of your recent trips on American Airlines, a kind of a demi-fiasco.

It's the same airline, which is having all these problems dealing with their customers, providing the services that customers are paid for.

Meanwhile, their CEO and their board is very active and being quite publicly woke.

This is the incompetence that they're trying to cover up in part with their wokeism.

So, Victor, these are two related pieces.

Would you talk about them in any way you wish?

I'll just give you one example.

We talked about the Delta CEO, Mr.

I think his name was Ed.

Bastian.

Bastion, who makes $17 million a year and whose average wait time on his Delta Airlines consumer complaint call, I think, is anywhere from five to seven hours.

My assistant, Megan, called him up because they screwed up a lot of tickets.

And I think she said it was six and a half hours.

And yet he has time to lecture Georgia, how illiberal.

And then my favorite is Mr.

Parker, the CEO at American Airlines.

He never read the Texas new voting law.

That's chief item that apparently picked his interest was a voting ID, the type of ID you have to have to get onto one of his planes through security.

Right.

But I was on a flight from Fresno to Dallas, and

I noticed we were going in the wrong way, Jack.

I don't hear that well.

And they had announced that we're going to make a short little stop, 180 miles in the opposite direction to San Francisco because we don't have any gas in the tank.

And then we had to go get fueled up in San Francisco, then turn around and go back over Fresno 180 miles.

And then two and a half hours later, we were ready to start.

from scratch.

And then I went on the website and thought, there's a lot of canceled flights.

And I looked at it and it says, warning, new third world inhabitant, your third world airline cannot guarantee that you will be able to have fuel in your plane or that you can call up a consumer help person from the airline, but they can sure tell you that you're a racist, no-good SOB because they want to have an ID that we require to get on our plane.

Ditto the military.

Ditto the military.

Because of our brilliant victories in Libya and because of our 20-year pathway to victory in Afghanistan, we're going to go out and we're going to look and audit all those white racists that are enlisted because we have so much time.

And because the F-35 was such a steal and a cost-benefit analysis, and our Navy has got some of the most effective ships in the world for the money we paid for them, we have time to make you all read Mr.

Kindy.

And Hollywood is going to tell you, you know what?

We've got another Godfather blockbuster, Godfather One coming out, and we've got another another African queen.

We've got Shane.

We've got all kinds of great movies coming out.

And just because we're so good, we have all this time on our hands, we're going to tweet all day about how awful our audience is.

And I'm the women's soccer team.

We win.

I'm Megan Rapato, and I don't want to, you know, salute your blank, blank flag or stand for your blank-blank anthem because I'm so good and we never lose.

that I have time to tell you that the audience that supports me that I don't think much of you.

So I don't know whether all of this wokeism is an excuse for mediocrity or it causes mediocrity, cause and effect relationship, but they're intertwined in mysterious ways.

And it makes sense, doesn't it, that if you have an economy and a society and a culture where everybody's looking over their shoulder and investing time and capital and labor in things that are not productive, like bureaucracy and accounting and excuses, then you're not doing your job.

And that's what destroyed the Soviet system.

That's what destroyed the Eastern European economies.

They had this huge drag and this huge overhead.

That's what I'm really worried about, that these airlines are more worried about the composition of their corporate boardroom.

And finally, finally, we're going to get some person in the air traffic control tower who's woke and says, you know what, this person, this person, it's not going to have anything to do with the meritocracy.

Why the United States worked is because we didn't hire our first cousin over the better qualified candidate.

And that's what it pretty much is most of the world outside the United States.

And so why we would do that?

And this, Jack, just in finishing, this gets back to this existential question we've had on this podcast.

Why are they doing it?

I know that the audience will get mad and say, well, you idiot, Victor, they're doing it because they want power and they can get away with it.

They do it because they can.

I know that.

But why would you take the world's largest oil and gas producer who doesn't have to go into the Middle East to fight, who has good wages for fracking workers, who gives consumers a break and earns foreign exchange, why would you just try to destroy that industry?

Or why would you go after the people who make the United States fighting force in terms of combat sacrifices and efficacy?

Why would you go after them, insult them, destroy that family stream of soldiers that go into your military?

It doesn't make any sense.

And why would airlines suddenly revert to third world status and then start lecturing?

It doesn't make any sense.

And I don't know the answer to all this.

It's either chaos from the lockdown and the quarantine, or it's this paranoia we all have that, you know, somebody's, there's a Trump supporter under every bed in America.

I don't know what it is, but it's not going to end well.

Because finding when these things happen historically, they trim, trim, trim.

And as Adam Smith said, there's a lot of rot in a society.

And that was reverberated by Milton Friedman.

And so you can do this for a lot because we're a fat society.

But if you keep doing it and you keep substituting wokeness for merit, you're going to finally see that your airlines are not just sloppy and lathe, but they're deadly.

And your surgeon is not just...

you know, not as quite good.

You know, anybody can take out an appendix, they'll say, but maybe not a ruptured appendix at a critical time.

And so that's what we count on.

We count on excellence and merit.

And when you start to devour that, it's not going to end well.

Well, Victor, it's been another, for me, and I assume for our listeners, a great experience to hear you discuss these vital matters.

So we thank you for that.

Thank our listeners for listening.

Again, if you do listen on iTunes, consider leaving a review.

We read them.

And five stars for Victor's brilliance.

Five's the limit.

He deserves 10 or more, but that's all you can do.

Again, visit Victor Hanson, S-O-N, Dishvi Dishwe,

not S-C-N, VictorHanson.com, private papers, for a plethora of regular original material.

And I think that's about it, Victor.

I hope you have a great rest of the week.

And thanks again for everything.

We'll be back soon with another edition of either the traditionalist, the classicist, or with the great Sammy Wink, the culturalist on the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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