The Culturalist: Liberty and Equality

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Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

And hello, Victor.

How are you doing today?

Very good, Sammy.

Great.

We're looking forward to talking to you about liberty and equality, or specifically the tension between those two, especially in revolutionary times.

But before we do that, I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow of Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is also available on social media at Facebook, and his handle is V D Hansen's Morning Cup and on Twitter at V D Hansen and also on Parlor at V D Hansen.

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Welcome back to the listeners and we are on to a subject that is for the time very cogent, liberty and equality and the tension between the two.

Before we go into that though, Victor, I would like to ask you about your training as a philologist.

We often hear that you're a philologist, but I was wondering if you would explain for the listeners what that means and then also the significance of it, especially as we in these revolutionary times that we're in start to look at language and the meaning of language, which is very important to understanding the left's play

for egalitarianism in their terms such as diversity, inclusion, and equity.

But let's talk for a second first about your training as a philologist.

Well, ostensibly, philology, the etymology of philology is a lover of words, and it's the mastery of Greek and Latin language.

So my degree was not in ancient history or archaeology, but in philology, classical languages.

And the theory behind that is that if somebody knows the language in which people spoke who were being studied in antiquity, then they not only know how they describe reality, but they know their mindset.

They know how they they use adjectives and nouns, formulate sentences, and that allow to understand when they read classical texts a little bit more in-depth understanding of the mentality.

I'll give you an example of how philology kind of works at its best and worst.

If you say that you're going to study philology, but there has to be a word for something or that idea does not exist.

I'll give you an example I've done before that when I was a military historian in graduate school, if I gave an oral presentation on the Battle of Leuctra, the Battle of Delium,

and I would go through the text of Thucydides, then if I mentioned 50 shields, I would get stopped.

And an Austrian professor would say to me, is that your idea they were shields?

Or is that in the text of Thucydides?

And I would say, yes, aspidone in the genitive plural is the word.

If I said the general, general, he said, you mean a political leader or a military leader or what?

What's the word?

What's the word?

Strategos.

And so it was an effort to ground reality with words and not to formulate or imply

your own vocabulary for something way in the past.

Now it can be ridiculous in the worst case is, as I said to the professor, I won't mention him because he's a very reverent philologist, but you could say, well, okay,

until Newton, did we really have a word called gravity?

No, so if I want to describe antiquity and there's no word for gravity, does that mean gravity didn't exist?

Of course it did exist, but people were not aware of it as an empirical idea.

But philology is a way then to unlock the past through the text of words.

And most classicists, if they're a philologist,

can look at a sentence or a paragraph and pretty much tell you who wrote that and how to date it and and what was the general use of that vocabulary, syntax, and grammar in that particular time.

And they can also impute within general parameters the mentality of the author by the words he uses.

And so

it's very valuable.

And the idea that today classics departments such as Princeton are not requiring Greek for the classics major or we're not really requiring Greek and Latin composition.

That's the ability to write in the language.

It's not because anybody's going to read them, but because it forces the student to have an active vocabulary, which is usually, you know, one-fifth of a passive vocabulary.

But once you have to actually produce words out of thin air rather than recognize them on the page, it really hones your skills as a reader of Greek and Latin.

Okay, can I ask you then, because being a philologist, then you assume an objective reality and that words are connected to that objective reality.

I don't know if you can do this in short, but how is that different from a Foucault who believed that words were power?

And how do those things contrast?

Well, Michelle Foucault and Lacan and Derry Daw believe that people construct reality by their vocabulary and the words are not necessarily tied or grounded or tethered to material or real things.

And so it's performance or what they use, that word construct.

People say there's a law against this,

they would say, well, the word law is a word that is used by a particular class of people to protect their own particular interest, and they dress it up with authority by using the word in Greek nomos, for example, or in English law or Lexon.

So it's a subversive idea that language does not correspond to reality, but it corresponds to one's race or class or status.

And then people use language for their own particular career trajectories.

You can see it in feminist theory says that ideas of beauty are

descriptions of the female physique.

These are constructs of male sexism, and they don't really correspond to what's actually beautiful in the real physical world.

They're used to oppress women.

And the same thing is true about race, but it gets in very murky territory.

When we talk about race in the ancient world, here's how philology can help you.

So we're right now in a revolution where classic scholars at Princeton and other places say, we don't want to study classics anymore.

We want to destroy it because it's a tradition of racism that goes back to this emphasis on whiteness.

A philologist would counter, okay, what's the word for whiteness?

This idea of ospro or ospro

doesn't have an abstract meaning in the ancient world.

And by that I mean nobody that was Greek or even Roman ever said, I am white.

or whiteness is better, or I'm going to adjudicate people by their racial appearance.

Everybody is chauvinistic.

Greeks thought they were better than Romans.

Romans thought they were better than Greeks.

They thought they were better than everybody.

But the idea that you would adjudicate a person you don't know by his race was pretty much non-existent.

The great African-American classicist Frank N.

Snowden showed that in a series of articles and books from the early 1950s all the way to the 1980s.

And the Ethiopians who were black, the face of fire, these were very, very highly regarded in classical texts.

People like Terence or Septimus Severus the Emperor were not what we would call white.

And

in contrast, if you wanted to deprecate an entire people

as savage, they were usually white.

They were usually the Germani across the Danube and the Rhine, or the Gauls, or the Vandals, or the Huns.

And they were considered inferior tribal peoples, not because of their skin color, but because of their lack of a stationary, agrarian, municipal civilization.

But the idea that someone is bad or good because they're white or black, that didn't really come into Western canonization until people in Europe began to, I think you could make the argument, they began to travel beyond Europe in a way that they had not done in antiquity.

And then they found people who they felt were not as sophisticated as they were.

And then they went back to the Aristotelian idea that slavery or inferiority should be based on a natural tendency or natural proclivity.

But forgetting that Aristotle was criticized in antiquity for the idea of a natural slave, because slaves could be anybody, any race, any occupation, any class.

They were completely separate from the idea of race, something that Aristotle objected to, but it seems to be have been in the minority.

Yeah.

So, in other words, then there was no objective reality of racial differences

based on, you know, a status of some sort.

And so they didn't have a term for whiteness and blackness as a rubric of a people.

No more than the natural birds of a feather, as Socrates said, flock together.

By that, I mean, the people of Thebes thought they were better than the people of Athens, and Athenians thought they were better than Boeotians.

And all Greeks that spoke the same language thought they were better than Persians, but they didn't think they were better

because they were racially different.

They thought they were culturally different, but they perfectly attuned to the idea that Persians could be richer, they could have more monumental architecture.

No, there was no idea that a particular race would be an edible mark on somebody, a stamp

that would forever make you different, either better or worse than somebody.

And that's what's so ironic about the culture wars today and the attack on classics, because it's a study of a discipline that was pre-racist.

I guess that's the word we would call it.

All societies that we think of in the modern world are pretty much racist.

I mean, you or I, or many of your listeners who are not Chinese or not Japanese or not Mexicans would have a very difficult time announcing that they wanted to immigrate to Mexico City or to Shanghai or to Tokyo and be fully accepted as a citizen, a legal citizen of that state, they could maybe get legal citizenship, but the majority of the people would never accept them because their superficial appearance was so different from the majority.

Okay, so I wanted to just talk about that because I feel like in our current time, we're looking at words that seem not to

or are defined in a way that's very different from what their original intent was.

So I thought it was sort of applicable to look at the skills and the training of a philologist.

And now I would like to turn with that to the tension between liberty and equality in our current society.

And not quite in the current society yet.

I'd like to look at it historically first.

I see quite often in your writing that you refer to the French Revolution or even the Russian Revolution at times and that

you know, words change their meaning in revolutionary time.

And I think some some of that comes from Thucydides, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but book three, where he's describing the Corsiran revolution.

And he says about it that words had changed their ordinary meaning, and to take that which was now given them.

Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally.

Prudent hesitation, specious cowardice.

Moderation was held to be a cloak of unmanliness.

ability to see all sides of the question, ineptness to act on any.

So he's saying that all these things that we would normally admire were now seen as flaws, human flaws.

And I think that we see words changing time and changing meaning in our time.

Remember what that passage at 369 says.

He's trying to say that in times of war, and that's thematic in the history of the Peloponnesian War, whether it's plague or war, that a thin veneer, thin, thin veneer of civilization is ripped off, and then people exhibit their innate savagery.

And one of their innate savagery, as he points out in that passage, they have no respect for tradition.

They have no...

respect for abstract law that they may need in extremists and they have no respect for the idea that language is immutable and it stays firm and static and inert.

We know that it changes to the time somewhat, but so he's saying that people then reinvent the meaning of words.

And so that's his point, and we're doing that.

I don't know what

racist means anymore.

Apparently, if you want to define racist in contemporary terms, it means when a white person stereotypes people who are not white in a deprecatory fashion for purposes of political or cultural or economic control.

It does not mean, apparently, a universal meaning as it is intended.

It doesn't mean that if a black person attacks an Asian American, he's a racist, because we understand that we're not outraged, really, to the extent that African-American males are attacking Asians because we feel, we, the society, feels that they're not possibly racist, and that term, that word should not apply to them.

And we could go on and on.

This whole cachet of words have been untethered, separated from reality for political purposes.

It's what George Orwell spent most of the last decade of his life trying to remind people.

As far as you mentioned freedom and equality.

Yeah, liberty and equality.

And

I don't know if you could we go to the historical examples first and then apply it to our modern.

So what is it that was the tension in the French Revolution or I think to some extent in the Russian Revolution as well?

I mean, these revolutionaries are always

saying they want freedom, or maybe actually a lot of them don't.

They just give up freedom and look for equality.

But could you give us a little bit on how the French Revolution manifested itself that way?

A couple of things to remember: that no one until really the 18th century, and specifically in America, thought that freedom

or liberty, and there's a difference.

Freedom is the German Freiheit, that idea that the Romans admired, that they were completely

free to do what they wanted.

Free to roam, free to drink, watered, free to do anything.

They were unbound by the constraints of civilization.

They were noble savages.

This freedom, this innate idea, and it was honed and focused into the idea that all men are given freedom by their creator, the natural state of man.

That's what Rousseau was talking about.

Liberty is the freedom that civilizations, it's a Roman word, it's not a German word, it's libertos in Latin, doesn't exist, that same concept does not quite exist in Greek, but it means your freedom under the statutes.

You have freedom to do certain things if they fall within the bounds of a consensual society's laws.

But they're always antithetical to equality, because obviously

if you want everybody to be equal, you're going to have to take away the innate freedom of some to achieve that, or the liberty of some to achieve that, because we're not born into this world equally.

And I mean by that, some are short, some are smart, some have high IQs, some have low IQs, some are lazy, some are industrious, some have great families and support networks and inheritance, some don't have any.

So

we say we want an equality of opportunity, equality on the front line, because that preserves freedom.

But if you want an equality, as the modern left does, on the back back end, an equality of result,

then you have to take away somebody's freedom.

I'll give you an example.

So a Black affiliated, Black Lives Matter-affiliated group in Dallas has decided that even with radically restructured and recalibrated admissions to Ivy League schools, that are resulting, I think, in the incoming freshman class, especially at Princeton, whereas

proportional representation and not pure merit as defined by grades and test scores has defined their quotas or the percentages of particular groups, they've decided to have reparations in the sense that they're going to overrepresent people of color beyond their percentages in the population.

But in revolutionary style, that's not going to be enough.

So, this group has decided to take equality into their own hands, and they're pressuring people in very affluent enclaves of Dallas, mostly liberal people

as they charge, that their children should not apply to the Ivy League because that would result in inequality, i.e., they would dominate the school or they would use their years of privilege or the oppression they've caused others to their disadvantage, whatever it is, but they want to deprive the freedom of some people to ensure the equality.

It's discussed at length.

I think the place to look for it is in Aristotle's Politics.

And he has a very disturbing statement.

He says that the problem with democracies, I don't know if he uses the word problem, but the characteristics of democracies is that when a man feels he's equal to others to vote, he naturally assumes that he would or should be or is equal in every respect.

And he's talking about the innate tendency of human nature as it is expressed under democracy.

So what does he mean by that?

It means if I'm in Selma, California, and I vote, and my vote is determined to be exactly the same as it must be by somebody who's living in Beverly Hills, my next logical assumption is, but he has more money than I do, and that's not fair.

If we're the same person, we're the same political rights, why does he have more economic clout?

Or why does he live longer or less?

And so

there's a a natural evolutionary process and it's it's discussed at length pessimistically so by tocville alexis de tocqueville and he says you know the what can arrest this is a constitutional republic and a middle class of agrarian autonomous self-sufficient farmers that are not part of an urban easily swayed uh uniform mob so to speak an aucklaws but they're always at tension and now we've upped the ante because we don't use the word equality on the left anymore we use the word equity because equality can connotate an equality of opportunity that we all have to be free.

That was the great mantra of the civil rights movement.

Just give us a chance, Martin Luther King said.

Get rid of all these racist

prohibitions to voting or education, and you will be astounded at the equality that follows.

And in part, that was realized, in part, it wasn't.

So now the third generation of the civil rights movement says, ah, we don't like that.

We want equity.

And equity means that we,

five generations out from being slaves, if people can even identify a member of the slave class and their ancestry, and you, five generations out from slave owners, maybe you came from Italy in 1920, maybe your family fought and died in the North.

It doesn't matter in these stereotypes.

But we want equity, and that means we're going to have an equality of result.

We want this many people to be admitted, this many people into pilot training, this type of income, et cetera, et cetera.

That's called equity.

And that's where we are now.

It's very different than equality.

Yeah, it seems that the drive for those things on the side of the left has led to big tech censorship and the critical race theory.

And did you have any thoughts on that?

Well, there's a couple of things that are ironic here.

The tech people came into their own

with these innovative young hipsters, the Mark Zuckerberg, the Google people, the Bill Gates, all of these young people in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000, turn of the century.

And they were the flip-flop tie-dye group.

And they were going to be different.

These were not going to be the Rockefellers or the Mellons.

They didn't get their wealth from the grubby professions of oil or gas or coal or construction or manufacturing or mining or timber.

They were pure.

They were going to work for humanity.

They weren't subject to the appetites of human nature, the Jeff Bezos and such.

And so they systematically decided they were going to be hip.

You know, we always think of Apple

and the people surrounding Apple, that this was a kind of a hipster 60s type of culture as opposed to, say, Microsoft, but especially something like IBM.

Okay.

They're human.

So the more successful they got, the more the economy was globalized, the more money that came in, the more they decided that they wanted monopoly.

So I think Facebook owns 200 different companies.

The goal of a young entrepreneur is to go into Silicon Valley and create some type of online communication, social media, and then to get a particular percentage, a very small percentage, two or three percent of the market, and then have Facebook come to them and say, we will buy you out for X number of billion dollars, and you're set for the rest of your life.

So that's what they do.

They're a monopoly.

And we saw what they did to parlay, parlay, as I call it.

They just tried to destroy it, and they may well have because it was a threat to Twitter.

And so Silicon Valley people are very, very wealthy.

We've never seen that staggering level of riches in the history of civilization.

They're very left-wing and they're very hypocritical.

They don't believe in the First Amendment.

They want to censor speech.

You mentioned

if you say a particular thing,

if I go on tonight and I say,

Sammy, you post on Facebook the following.

I think it is terrible that the people who rioted for 120 days, which led to $2 billion of damage, 25 deaths, and 14,000 arrests, that they all have to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, given they destroyed a police precinct and almost burned the police up in it.

They burned down or destroyed a federal courthouse in Minneapolis, and I want action.

And then I said, and then if we're going to apply those standards of laxity, if we don't have action, then I don't understand why the Capitol riot would be treated so differently.

If I had said that, that will be blue marked or whatever term they will use.

If I keep saying it,

it will be taken away.

They do not believe in the First Amendment.

They call that hate speech.

And so that's a great danger because it's instantaneous electronic communications and it's monopolies.

And these people are right out of George Orwell's 1984 animal farm.

Yeah, and it's so self-righteous.

Remember one last thing before you go on, and that is

the traditional check on the accumulation of riches and power was supposedly the populist left and the media, and they were the watchdogs.

But whenever the populist left and the media is enslaved to the powers on their side, you get not fascism, but totalitarianism of a much even more dangerous sort.

I mean, count how many people Stalin and Maokie, they even outdid Hitler.

And the reason was, is that they had complete control of all dissidents.

They had control of the media.

They had control.

And they had, more importantly, most importantly, they had a far better propaganda.

We are doing this and suffering for the people.

We work for the

We are revolutionaries for the people.

Whereas Hitler's was, I'm for this crackpot race, or I'm going to get rid of the Catholic Church, but I haven't got rid of it yet, or that stupid journalist had an underground.

So he didn't have as much control.

Not that he wasn't any less evil, he was evil or more evil.

But once you have the media and the sources and institutions of all dissent with you under the banner of equality, it's very hard not to be abusive.

Yeah, and and I wanted to remind our listeners that the

big tech finds its protection in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which is part of a Telecommunications Act of 1996, where it says that as long as they are, quote, acting in good faith, they can take down content that quote is considered to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.

And so that's the clause behind which our big tech industry is hiding.

But the issue, and that's the issue they'll never face, is are they a public utility?

So let's say that Twitter has 90% of the short communications on social media.

And let's say Parlier comes along and Parlier says, We're not going to have any restrictions on content or expression.

And conservatives, suddenly, 20 million of them sign up.

And so then Twitter and Facebook and Amazon and Google deliberately go out to destroy Twitter.

And by that, I mean they do not allow their apps to be on their appurtances or they do not allow their platforms, the parliament label or platform to be used in any way.

And you can't get on Parliament very easily.

And they shut it down.

And they say to us, well, you're,

we just don't want anything to do with it, but you're welcome to go to Parlier.

Almost as if they're southern racist lunch counter owners and the African-American in 1960 in Alabama comes in and said, I want a sandwich.

And he said, private domain.

I'm free to

refuse service to anybody.

We can go to anywhere else.

I'm not saying you can't eat a sandwich.

And the African-American person says, but there is nowhere else.

It's only you in this little town.

Well, I'm sorry, this is my free ride.

That's what they're doing

by trying to destroy all competition.

And then you have to ask yourself, what would happen if PGE,

and they remember, they've divided up realms of influence.

So, and here in California, it's either Southern California, Edison in some domains, and Pacific Gas and Electric in the others, said to us, We're going to start investigating the manner in which you express yourself.

And if we don't like it, we're going to cut your power off because we just think you're an insurrectionist.

You may be an armed insurrectionist.

You sympathize with those people on January 6th.

Oh, by the way, if you don't like our PGE utility, go get another one.

And you say, well, there is none.

And so what I'm getting at is Facebook.

Twitter, Google, they say, well, go somewhere else.

But it's very far.

Who can you communicate if you're not within Facebook on social media or Twitter?

Or it's very hard to get a search without Google because they have 90% of these markets.

And then you can say, they could say, well, we're not a public utility because you don't need to communicate.

Well, we've already said by statute that phones

were at one time utilities.

Power is.

Water is.

Sewage is.

Communication is an elemental fact of life.

And so I think that the fact that they're illiberal and they're a menace to free expression and their monopolies, I think they're going to have a rendezvous with some type of accounting.

And they're only skating by now because they're pouring in multi-billions of dollars into the coffers of the progressive movement and the Democratic Party.

And the Democratic Party is saying basically in private, Well, we don't like these corporate SOBs, but at least they're our.

We own those SOBs.

So let's just lay off them and let them use their money to, let's get Mark Zuckerberg on the phone, get him $500 million, get his gang out here so we can plant them all over key precincts in these swing states, get some drop boxes, get that voter harvesting processing gear, and maybe we can pick up Michigan and Pennsylvania in the 2020 election.

That's how it operates.

Man.

The other place, if we can move on, that I see these egalitarians compromising liberty is with this critical race theory.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were on critical race theory itself but also just the future of it especially schools and universities and i i say critical race theory i talking to the philologists i don't feel like it's very critical at all in the sense of the word

remember that it starts out in the frankfur school as critical theory and what that means is dissident academics are going to be critical of norms critical of the establishment critical of the government.

Then you just plug in theory

because they're going to advance a counter narrative.

They just know facts.

But then you plug in the proper noun or adjective.

So if it's critical legal theory, you say, hmm,

I don't really think there should be a crime against shoplifting.

That is a construct that the wealthy classes created to protect property.

But actually, if a poor person steals a loaf of bread, he eats, but a wealthy person doesn't need it.

So, of course, he's not going to steal a loaf of bread.

But yet, we act as if this law applies to protect everybody.

And then the traditionalist says, well, it does, because once you start stealing a loaf of bread and you steal from the store owner, and then you're going to steal a candy bar, and then you're going to get your friends to steal, and then there's going to be nobody anywhere once this contagion in COVID fashion takes form.

Whole Walmarts and whole targets.

Yes.

So critical race theory then just means the way that we look at race is a construct, and we have to be critical of it.

So what do we say?

So if an African-American student does not speak the King's English, that's because the King's English is no better than a dialect of the inner city.

Forget about classical rules of grammar.

It doesn't matter.

If a person is a math professor and people in his class, let's say Asians, do far better than non-Asians, well, that's because the rules are rigged to appeal to a particular type of student.

But we shouldn't think that these test scores or the ability to do a theorem or something matter at all.

And that's what it is.

It's a nihilistic, chaotic, anarchistic way of destroying society by saying there should be no rules because all rules, race, legal rules, they're all reflections of people in power who have no authority or should not have any authority.

And you can see how ridiculous they are

when the architects of these critical racial theories are sort of like 19th century snake oil salesmen peddling elixirs out west.

Nobody really believed that they cured you, but given mob mentality and popular imagination, they bought these bottles of lead and mercury and everything.

And that's what we're doing.

We're buying these elixirs and Kendi, Mr.

Kendi, is $20,000 for a reference.

If I'm the head of Coca-Cola and I'm kind of worried that maybe somebody will come to my house after I go home and picket it because I wasn't vocal enough about the Georgia ID law, then I can call Mr.

Kendi up and say,

I'd like to have a little seminar with you for an hour about what I should do, and he'll charge you $20,000.

And then you can tell everybody, I've been woke by Mr.

Kendi himself, and you buy woke insurance.

Or Ms.

Quellers can say, we need BLM, $100 million and woke insurance pours into the BLM coffer.

She buys four homes, puts a $35,000 security fee.

So I'm pretty cynical because human nature being what it is, that's what usually happens with these movements.

Yeah, you know, you just said that you see big tech having a reckoning at some point.

What do you see as far as what will happen with critical race theory?

Well, when these revolutionary movements do not win 50% approval, they come to a fork on the road.

So, all of the critical issues of our time, critical race theory, reverse racism, you can be a racist to stop racism, you can discriminate to stop discrimination, we want not proportional representation, we want reparations representation.

That's not sustainable

because when you get on an airline and you ask all 150 passengers, we had pilot training and people thought it was racist and the questions weren't fair and they represented an aeronautical, aviational bias.

And so we're going to let the people who got the lower scores jump over the people who got the highest scores to be pilots.

Do you agree with that?

And everybody in the plane will say, nope.

Not at all.

I don't believe that.

It's completely relativistic.

I want somebody that has skills and has done better on tests of various sorts.

So it's not sustainable.

And

when you start to see this nihilism go forward,

what are you going to do when you change all these names?

20 names in the school district.

I go to the Hoover Institution one day, Father Sarah, who adjudicates when a name is changed or not?

And are we going to say we're all going to be

Olfego Baca or we're going to be,

I don't know, Malcolm X.

For every name I just mentioned, I can find a litany of

what, crimes or bad behavior, or sexism, or racism that, according to their standards, they don't meet.

It's not going to be a

consistent

philosophy at all.

And I think we're starting to see that already.

That people, you can't destroy a person's career by going back 20 years and taking a word out of context for a careerist or a political or an ideological agenda, finally, people will say to themselves, this doesn't work.

I'm not saying it's inevitable that it's going to fail.

If you take two revolutions, the Jacobin Revolution of 1793 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, they were very similar and their nihilistic agendas.

They were very similar and they had a minority, we think, of the population in France and likely in Russia.

But they almost both succeeded.

The Bolsheviks did because they went to the next step and they intimidated people with terror and violence and killed thousands.

And the Jacobites started to do that.

And then the Thermidors, you know, crashed their party and started doing the same to them.

Well, they, yeah, they guillotined Robespierre.

So it's sort of the question of will there be a guillotining of Robespierre or something of that man and I think what's going to happen if somebody just stands up,

that's why we're doing these podcasts, that's why we're writing, I try to write 4,000 words a week, it gets very depressing.

But if all of us stand up, each one of us according to our station, and says,

this is a fraud.

Our military did not win in Libya.

It had no idea what it was doing.

After 20 years, they could not give us a strategy to victory in Afghanistan.

They are buying naval ships that don't work.

There are intrinsic problems in these $200 million planes.

They don't have one second to start internally auditing people on the basis of race as they are doing.

And this is going, and they say to apply that same standard to the Woke CIA, the Woke James Comey, former James Comey director, his FBI, they do it to the IRS.

And people say, all of you, Hollywood, NBA, the American Olympic team, start doing your job first.

Win a basketball game, win a a soccer match, produce a good movie, graduate somebody from your university that can think and write and read.

But don't just be sloppy and not do your job and then brag that you're going to be woke or you have you're a big fan of equity and diversity and inclusion.

You know, the Heritage just did a study, I think, with 45 universities, or maybe it was 30, and there were more diversity coordinators now than there are members of the history department.

And I I don't think anybody in America believes that when you send your child to school, you want somebody to instruct them, advise them, instruct others who advise them and instruct them and monitor them as Soviet commissars about their skin color versus somebody who knows history and can teach them history.

It's a big economic drag to have somebody over your shoulder all the time trying to adjudicate what you do.

I know that in our case of of three of us at Stanford, when Neil Ferguson and Scott Atlas and I were brought up on proverbial charges by the Stanford faculty, I don't think the point was that they thought that they could fire us because we had tenure and we had done nothing wrong, but I think the point was that

you are all too visible.

So get off Fox News or get off podcasts or toe the line or what, and that was the purpose.

And if you say no,

then I don't think that they can hurt you.

I'm not suggesting that the untenured professor, the young person that works at Starbucks, all the people with vulnerabilities in our society can speak out forcefully against this.

But each person can find an eddy or a contour in which they'll find the right voice at the right time.

Yeah, I think we're seeing some of that with Tucker and Epoch Times, Candace and Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and even Hillsdale College, right?

So we do have

the vanguard.

But remember, this is suicidal because for most of my 67 years, the people who really attacked the CIA, sometimes for good reason, but mostly in just fear and hatred, and attacked the FBI and attacked the military, were on the left.

And the people who dutifully said, we need an investigatory body, we need an intelligence body, we need oversight, but we have to have a military, a standing military in this dangerous nuclear.

We're people that were conservative.

If we look at the dead in Afghanistan or we look at the dead in Iraq, it's about 85%

white males in Afghanistan.

It's about 83%

white males in Iraq.

They represent of the general population, about 35%.

So they're dying at more than twice their numbers.

Is

Secretary Austin saying, as he said in front of Congress under oath, I want the military to act and look like America.

Is he saying, you know what?

This is intolerable.

You can't have one gender and one race dying at twice what everybody else is proportionally.

That's got to stop.

We're going to pull those kids out.

No, he's not doing that, but what he is doing is saying that people who fit that white supremacist model, and I don't think there is a model, but he says there is, we're going to root them out.

And what they're doing is they're destroying the traditional support for the military, multi-generational and Midwestern, southern, rural families who send their youth to the military and who die in far-off, horrific places for our supposed safety.

And you're alienating those people and you're alienating conservative.

When you have all these generals who are politic and say you've got to read critical race theory, and they don't even have any idea what it is, and they conflate it with Mao or something.

And think of that, General Milly.

You've got to read it because I read Mao.

Well, you read Mao because you said he's an enemy and we got to learn about our enemy.

But now you're telling us that critical race theory is our enemy.

Is that what you mean?

We got to learn about our enemy.

No, you don't mean that.

You're reading it.

You're recommending it so I can read about something good to emulate it.

And yet he doesn't even know the difference.

And every time they open their mouths and get out of their assigned tasks, their assigned tasks bleeds.

It gets weaker and weaker.

And that's what I think really gets people mad.

Just make good movies first, play good good basketball, win the Olympics, win wars, graduate students that have superb skills, and then, then politic, but don't reverse the order.

And that's what they're doing, and they're going to destroy it.

They have destroyed.

I've talked to the biggest email I get a response from people that I don't know is I've had it with these institutions, meaning the military, the CIA, and the FBI.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our time here.

And actually, I think that's a good note to end on, because you sound very optimistic about the possibility of the U.S.

population just very intolerant of these illiberal ideas, critical race theory of the.

I have innate sense that while the American people can be fooled some of the time and some of them can be fooled, you can't fool them all the time and all of them.

And that's what the left has to do because

their agenda is so nihilistic and so irrational that it does not appeal to 51%, and it will never appeal to 51%.

And they have to use every type of dissimulation and threats to get it through.

I think the people will finally say,

not this pig, no more.

Yep.

And thank you very much.

And this is the Culturalist.

I'm Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody.