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Hello,

ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis

Show, The Traditionalist.

We are recording on Monday, July 26th in the year of our Lord 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, co-host and the director of the Center for Civil Society at Americanphilanthropic.com.

The namesake of this show is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's plenty more.

I'm going to tell you about that, and I'm going to tell you about the five or six subjects we're going to be discussing today right after

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

The traditionalist Victor, how are you doing?

Very good.

Good, it's good to hear.

I'm back here in Milford, Connecticut.

Had the great pleasure and honor of being in the Central Valley and seeing you and recording a show last week that was a ton of fun.

But Victor,

let's talk about the January 6th.

Let's go from fun to Ajuda.

Let's talk about the January 6th commission.

After that, we'll give a little bit more about your bio.

But

something just happened earlier this morning within the last hour.

Kevin McCarthy was at a White House event, and as some folks know, there were a number of Republicans, two Republicans, excuse me, who Nancy Pelosi Pelosi does not want to be on this commission to investigate the capital tax on January 6th.

And it seems like Liz Cheney and

Adam Kazinger have agreed to join the commission, and McCarthy is attacking them as Pelosi Republicans.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this commission and what it means, how actually serious it is for America, or if it's much more of a Democrat ploy, and anything you have to say about the membership of these Republicans on this commission?

Well, I think everybody deplores the violence of our iconic capital.

But the problem this commission is having is that on one side, there were hyper-partisans.

And McCarthy thought he needed to balance them by people who were true blue Trump supporters, people like Jim Jordan.

And that would kind of balance it out.

And remember, he's starting with a disadvantage because Liz Cheney and Adam Kissinger are not Trump supporters at all.

Okay, so that's just the inside baseball of it.

But why the Republicans were skeptical were

there's a perception that there's going to be a lot of things that are off limits.

Now, one of them will be who shot the unarmed Ashley Babbitt in the neck, shoulder and neck?

And why was was he not identified?

And why was there a Star Chamber secret investigation of that murder when the last time we have federal statistics on murders of unarmed people in or nearing police custody, 2019, there's 25, I think, that were killed.

Every single one of them, the officer was identified.

We haven't had that.

Why is that?

And why when there were people outfitted in SWAT gear who were looking at her, they didn't think that she would pose an existential threat, a woman breaking the law by coming through a window.

So who was the person who shot her?

Why did he shoot her?

And why wasn't the investigation transparent?

And I don't think that will be an object of this investigation.

Number two, why did people say falsely

and who said that?

And who released it that Officer Sichnick was murdered by a Trump supporter to the extent that he laid in state as an honorific sacrifice to the struggle against so-called white supremacy.

And then why, when that story was corrected, was it falsely corrected that he had an allergic reaction to being sprayed by a Trump supporter?

And why did it take the autopsy report to tell us

much later, weeks later, that he likely died of natural causes and a stroke?

And why

did we term this an arms insurrection when nobody we know that has been charged with a crime either used or possessed a weapon except maybe a DEA agent who had a weapon on his person who was arrested?

And why aren't these people, if the narrative holds, being charged with conspiracy or racketeering?

And why are some of the people in basically indeterminate and solitary confinement?

And so these are questions that we really need answers to, but that's not the purpose of this commission.

Purpose of this commission is to solidify a narrative of an all-white conspiracy.

And it also occurs simultaneously to this strange kidnapping, so-called plot against the Michigan governor, Whitmer.

And we know now that the FBI played a prominent role in

what, I don't know what the word is,

voting, fueling, catalysts for,

and what was the role of the government within this this demonstration and whether that would be to help organize it or to make a decision not to provide limited, even limited security for the Capitol.

Yeah, Victor, I think that's, I spoke to somebody who's related to a defendant on January 6th and waiting for the videos to, if the videos could be shown, because that might show,

you point to the Whitmer thing, government agents encouraging people to enter the Capitol.

Yeah, well,

commit crimes.

The point is

something went wrong because this all took place in a larger landscape in which

we remember that on June 2nd to 4th, when Donald Trump was allegedly having a photo op because he had ordered the Capitol Police to clear with the use of tear gas grounds bordering the White House, Therefore, the military, both active, in the case of General Milley's editorialization, and retired, and they all came out and said, how dare you do this?

This is shocking.

We're being used.

This is a militarization of Washington.

We abhor the even mention of using federal troops.

And then we find out two things.

as a background to this.

Number one, the Inspector General of the Interior Department found that Donald Trump did not order anybody to clear the White House ground area, and he didn't do it just for a photo op.

And there was probably not tear gas used, but some other agent.

And that the same active and retired military that objected to the use of federal troops to quell domestic dissent

had said nothing after January 6th when 25 plus thousand U.S.

troops were occupying Washington and there was barbed wire and fencing and turning into a military garrison.

So a lot of people have questions about January 6th.

They said, you know what?

Okay, if it's against the law to enter a federal building, fine.

Let's charge these guys with felonies and have them quick trials.

But how about the people in Minneapolis that burned down, burned down a federal courthouse?

or tried to storm a

precinct, a state building in Portland and burn it with the officers inside it.

Have they had the same sort of a treatment accorded them?

So there's all of these quandaries that we have that haven't been answered.

Well, Victor, let me tell our listeners a little bit about you, like they don't know already.

But Victor, you have a website, private papers.

The web address is VictorHanson, S-O-N,

VictorHanson.com.

If you go there, you will find a lot of original material, some of which we'll talk about on another podcast we do, The Classicist, but you write a lot for that.

You link to everything you write from there, but you write a lot that's just for there.

Listeners who go there will also find two important links.

One is a link to your email, weekly email, The Week in Review, which encapsulates and provides links for everything you do.

And then, oh, the link for your new forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen.

It's out in October.

It can be ordered now.

Order it now through Amazon, and it will be there waiting for you at your doorstep when you come home from work that first week of October.

Victor Davis-Hansen, farmer, classicist, military historian, essayist, that American greatness,

and you oversee Strategica, the very important online journal for the Hoover Institution.

So did you know all that about yourself, Victor?

I didn't know all that.

I didn't know all that because...

I have no idea what I'm doing from one moment to the next other than I'm in a very isolated place some days with this Zoom economy and culture, but I really just try to ad hoc go day by day.

Well, you do.

You ad hoc

better than anyone else, as far as I can tell.

Let's talk about Hunter Biden's laptop.

Remember that thing that was a Russian plant or didn't exist.

We weren't allowed to tweet about it.

New York Post, when it broke the story about this laptop back last September or October, was suppressed suppressed by big tech.

Well, some news out

last week on just the news.

That's actually the website that also hosts this platform for the Victor Davis Hanson show.

And it's a piece by John Solomon and Natalia Middlestadt.

Let me just read the headline is Shades of Clinton.

Joe Biden used private email to send government information to Hunter.

Here's the first few sentences of this piece.

In a communications backdoor reminiscent of of Hillary Clinton's infamous private server, President Biden used a personal email account during the Obama years to send information he was getting from the State Department as vice president to his globetrotting foreign deal-making son, Hunter Biden.

Messages, sometimes signed dad, from the email account Robinware456 at gmail.com were found on a Hunter Biden laptop seized by the FBI in December 2019 from a Delaware computer shop owner.

owner.

Some of the messages from the vice president to his son were deeply personal.

Others were political in nature, and still others clearly addressed business matters, often forwarding information coming from senior officials in the White House, the State Department, and other government agencies.

Victor, we've talked in the past about this

Biden family racket.

This is much more evidence of the same, disturbing evidence.

Don't read much much about it in much of the media, though.

And we know we get in trouble if we say if it was Trump's family, but this is kind of outrageous to me anyway.

You outraged?

I am because when this thing emerged, the story of a technician who was trying to fix a laptop that Hunter dropped off, and that emerged in October, I think it was the 22nd, 23rd.

of last year.

Remember the day we're talking just days before the actual election day, voting, and during the most intense period of early voting and mail-in voting.

It wasn't just that we don't know about this, but I think it was over 200 former and active or former, I should say, intelligence officer headlined by the notorious and infamous James Clapper and I think John Brennan as well, told us that this was likely Russian disinformation.

And then there was a news blackout.

If anybody would take the time, I think, and just Google New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Hunter Laptop, October of 2020, they will see the news blackout in action.

We forget now, but the whole point of the media left fusion and the bureaucratic administrate fusion was to prohibit any discussion that the son of the current presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket and former vice president was an active, active participant in selling influence for money for his family syndicate.

And this belied or absolutely refuted all of his earlier claims that he had no idea what Hunter was doing.

And then there was an effort to suppress or to harass the New York Post story.

And then the key items that should have come out before the election, that Hunter Biden is an utter and abject racist who's used racist, the N-word against blacks, And he's also been very racist toward Asians, that there is pornography, that he has all sorts of other problems, and that members of the Biden family referred to our current president of the United States as Mr.

10% or the big guy.

And we had other members of the deal-making cadre who said that Joe Biden was the lynchpin for this very lucrative shakedown of the prize.

All of that was suppressed before the election.

And only now is it trickling out.

And it's very reminiscent of what?

Of the Trump tear gas people for a photo op hoax, that Trump colluded with a Russian hoax, that Trump met with Russian people in the Trump Tower hoax, that there was a machine pinging away to Moscow in the Trump Tower, all of those hoaxes.

And yet, you know, once the lie is committed, it travels at warped speed.

And then the refutation, the evidence, the fact, the narrative correction that proceeds at a snail's pace.

Victor, another old subject we've discussed before is our great friend Anthony Fauci.

Now, he got into it again with Rand Paul.

They had had a very tough back and forth a few weeks ago at a Senate committee hearing, Rand Paul going after Fauci, particularly about the NIH money sent to the Wuhan lab.

They met again last week, very terse.

And Fauci essentially called Rand Paul a liar.

Paul called Fauci essentially a liar, implied he was engaged in a crime, lying to Congress.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this latest chapter of Anthony Fauci?

One,

if Donald Trump in April of 2020, when it became apparent that what Anthony Fauci was up to, this is a man, remember, who assured the nation not to go on a cruise, that this virus was not transmissible to humans initially, and then praised the Chinese efforts at suppressing it.

and then suggested that the idea we wore a mass was ludicrous, then one mass was okay, but two might be better.

And then said herd immunity could range anywhere from 60 to 80 percent, and then said that all of these were noble lies meant for our own good that we couldn't handle the truth and then pessimistically in an election year assured the nation there would be no elect no vaccinations that were safe and effective until 2021 given all of that at some key point at april or may if donald trump had to put his arm around anthony fauci

had a photo up in the White House and said, Anthony Fauci is a distinguished public servant.

He's had an enviable record of public service during the AIDS epidemic, and I've relied on him, especially during this current crisis.

And now I think at 80, we all owe him a debt of gratitude, and he will be retiring as of this minute.

He would have probably been re-elected.

That's how much damage Anthony Fauci did, I think, to the Trump cause.

He was a partisan.

We know that because from the day one when the information was announced, he was emailing with people who were engaged or knowledgeable about gain and function research, trying to build a consensus or to get feedback from many of these people who were ethically compromised as recipients from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he headed, to make sure there was the group narrative that it could not have come.

from a gain of function type of research within the virology lab at Wuhan that had strong ties with Chinese military.

Okay, and we have some of those emails, but guess what?

A lot of them are in key places or redacted.

So if Anthony Fauci wants to be believable, what he should do is we should have a national CDC,

National Institute of Health, blue ribbon, bipartisan panel investigate the origins, as far as we know, of our involvement in A, dealing with the Chinese medical community, and B, any subsidies, however small he thinks they are, to the Wuhan lab, and then C, why people were not told of this.

And so that's what we need to do immediately.

And I don't think he wants that discussion.

So, what did he do?

He kind of quibbled over gain of function as kind of sort of maybe not this relevant in this case.

And you, Rand Paul, basically are not a medical expert.

You may be an ophthalmologist, but I am Anthony Fauci.

The argument from authority that never, there's always rhetorical fallacy.

And so I think that he has zero credibility.

And now he's a creature of CNBC and NMS NBC.

And he won't go on as he used to bask on Fox News.

He won't go on there.

He won't go on any disinterested media platform because he cannot respond to cross-examination and questioning.

without a bunch of psychophants and toadies posing the question.

Victor, we've talked about these things before, but about the gain of function, just to put a punctuation on it, it was also an illegal activity per the Obama administration.

Yeah, it was.

I mean, the Obama administration realized two things, that it was very dangerous to artificially re-engineer a virus so that it would be more infectious and maybe even more lethal for humans.

And so far, nobody's really showed in a cost-to-benefit analysis why you'd want to do that.

In theory, Fauci claims that you understand viruses more, and maybe you do.

But that's like taking a nuclear bomb apart, you know, without proper precautions and putting it back together.

You might learn a lot more about how it actually is set off.

Who would be stupid enough to try that?

We all have these decisions in our own life.

We can do things that might advance collective knowledge for safety.

I can go out to my,

you know, I can go out to my electrical panel and I can start switching off circuit breakers and switching them on or take the the panel off and touching things.

I can find out all sorts of information about how lethal they are and whether it's true if you touch this wire.

Well, who would do that?

Right.

Yeah.

So that was a fallacious.

I'm speaking 25 feet up in an old two-story house with a balcony on it.

I think I could jump off and find out all the statistics at what level humans die when they hit the ground.

You know, there's an elevation from 10, 20, 40 feet.

Why would I want to do that?

Why would he want to do something that the benefits way outweigh?

I mean, way are outweighed by the dangers.

Yeah, well, it's a Frankenstein kind of mindset.

Victor, we have two more topics to discuss today on the traditional list, one of the three podcasts you do.

The Classicist is another one I do with you, and then the great Sammy Wink does the culturalist with you.

But today, let's talk about the Olympics.

I don't know about you, Victor.

Growing up, I really enjoyed the Olympics because it did feel a patriotic, as a patriotic thing.

When

Mary Decker, the runner, got tripped by Zola Budd, I felt a nationalist response to that.

When the Americans got cheated out of that basketball game against the Russians, I think it was 1972.

The whole nation was in an uproar.

We cared about our athletes.

We saw them as representatives of the nation.

That is not the case anymore.

Not for me anyway, and I think likely a lot of other people and likely you, that the American women's soccer team lost

from my extended community on social media.

You know what?

There was a lot of pleasure in that.

And there was also a lot of pleasure, pleasure or lack of concern of who cares that the American basketball team lost to France the other day.

Do you care about what's happening in the Olympics, Victor?

And do you agree that there is a growing sense of animus towards our representative athletes?

Well, as a patriot, I think I am.

I think you are.

But he puts America first.

I want our Olympic team to do well, to be preeminent.

And if I happen to be channel surfing, I might bump into it.

But am I going to go hinge on any event?

No, I'm afraid I'm not.

And I share that sentiment with millions of Americans because it looks like the viewership of the Summer Olympics of 2021 will be at an all-time low.

And that shouldn't be because people are emerging out of a quarantine despite this variant.

If you look at the freeways, you look at the restaurants, you look at the airports, they are packed.

And so what's going on?

And what's going on is we've been all woked out, all woked out.

The major league all-star baseball game had the lowest viewership in 40 years.

In other words, there were fewer people turning into Major League Baseball's iconic event than there were in 1980 when we had 100 million less Americans.

The NBA's championship game, indeed its playoffs, was at low.

Ditto the Super Bowl, ditto NFL season last season, Ditto Grammys, Tony's, Emmys, Oscar, Ditto Summer Television, Ditto effectiveness of commercials.

And what is the common denominator here?

The common denominator is people either implicitly or explicitly do not want to be lectured that they are country or indeed they themselves are systemically racist or we have something to apologize or we have to be utopian, perfect.

just to be good and they're getting this lecture from some of the wealthiest, most privileged people in the world.

Specifically in the case of the women's soccer, I think it was in 2019 we were lectured how

unequal it is and how terrible it is that women's soccer players don't make exactly the same in a market-driven economy that's based on revenues, viewership, and gender or sex-blind criteria about earnings that they don't make what males do.

It's an old argument.

And then we went right into Megan Ripito and the World Cup antics.

And now she's become the Greta Thunberg of sports.

And that is, the more people tune her out, the shriller and angrier and more off-putting she becomes.

So people have had it and they're just not going to listen to it anymore.

And they're not going to be, I mean, they're not actively protesting, but they're passively protesting.

And they protest by turning off the television, switching the channel, going to another website.

They just don't want to hear about it.

They don't want to hear about LeBron's film movie Venture was a total bomb.

Nobody wants to listen anymore about a billionaire urging police to watch out when they're trying to protect the innocent.

They don't want to hear any more lectures from Megan Markle in her mansion or Opa in her mansion or the Obamas in their mansion.

They don't want to hear Bill Gates, you know, tell everybody the Chinese did a wonderful job handling the virus.

They think, well, you know what?

You powled around with Jeffrey Epstein.

I'm not going to listen to you anymore.

They don't want to hear Charles Munger tell everybody that he wishes that we had a financial system comparable to the Chinese.

They just had it with all of these very, very wealthy people talking down as if we are stupid and we're suspect.

Complicit, right?

Yeah.

And that's what's happened.

And this is a free market economy and the corporate boardroom will have to subsidize all this.

But you know what's happening?

And I have a theory, and I think you do too, and I think our listeners do too, that this affects the performance.

That when you have an athlete like LeBron that's tweeting and coming under fire and giving it back, and it's all extraneous to basketball, or you have Olympic athletes like this hammer thrower that is putting on her big eyelashes and bright

costume so that she can emulate the career of Colin Kaepernick.

There's a reason she comes in third.

And she's lucky to do that.

And when the

American basketball team loses a preliminary game at the Olympics, the women's soccer team loses for the first time in what, over 40 matches.

And baseball looks pretty mediocre today, as does other sports.

And movies in Hollywood are really boring, as they've been boring for 20 years, but really bad.

And commercials are kind of stereotype commissar skits where, you know, the person of color gives advice to the dumb white person, and then we all feel that we're so woke because 80% of the commercials reflect who we are, so to speak, to quote Obama.

And so they don't like this.

It's a drag on the economy.

It's a distraction.

It's something out of the Soviet or Chinese system.

And it's going to hurt us.

And when you hear, just to finish, today,

we learned that Black Lives Matter, or one of of its affiliate organizations in Dallas has sent a letter to all of their liberal supporters and they have said to them, we don't want you high achieving privileged white leftists to keep patronizing us unless

You know, it's okay to give us money.

We'll keep taking that, but we don't want your kids to apply to the IV League.

This isn't a year where rumors abound and we can, you can guarantee that the IV League or Stanford will not be very transparent in giving us a breakdown of people's GPA or grades or test scores and match with their ethnic background.

But nevertheless, the rumors are that white males were admitted to these prestigious universities at historic lows.

And that's not enough.

So what I'm getting at is that all of the people sitting on the fence, the traditional white liberal, the independent, thought that this Maoist Jacobin movement could be finessed or massaged.

It can't.

It's getting crazier and crazier and crazier crazier because it is an extremist, racist, racist movement whose whole premise is your superficial tribal appearance is what defines you.

It's essential, not incidental to who you are.

And we're going to drive this into the ground until enough people say, if these people continue, then we're nothing more than Yugoslavia.

We're what people have called a war of everybody against.

everybody.

Well, Victor, I agree with you about that letter you mentioned, the Dallas letter.

But, you know, for sanctimonious virtue signaling whites who have bought into and put the Black Lives Matter lawn signs up and accused Flyover America of being systemically racist, I'm kind of glad they're being called out.

Well, I mean, there's a lot of shadow for it, isn't there, especially about even to be more bleak.

or bleaker, I should say, the rising crime rate, because it's starting to affect people in the toniest areas of what, Upper West Side in New York, homeless people, crime.

Same thing with San Francisco, isn't it?

And Venice Beach, that when you, in your utopian bromides and your virtue signaling, your performance art, sanctimoniousness, you never thought it would come back to your neighborhood, that you had enough money and influence and virtue that you would be immune from the consequences of your own ideology.

It doesn't work that way in a revolution.

It cannibalizes people.

And so if your child from day four went to to Stanford

training camp or kindergarten and was trained to take the SAT and went to Castellaya, the Harper School, and got 4.5 and aced the ACT, you're not going to get into Stanford if you're a white male.

It's just the way it is.

You played by the rules, you did everything right, but you have to be sacrificed on the altar of equity, inclusion, and diversity.

I have great empathy for people who oppose that, but not for people who fuel the a fire on the premise that they could escape its consequences.

And that's what we're seeing now.

And yeah, I think this is why, historically, why the Jacobins failed, because they started turning on people who were their natural supporters in the bourgeoisie and upper classes.

And

they overreached.

This revolution is overreaching.

People that are revolutionaries have the greatest contempt for those who appease them.

They hate, but they respect people who who oppose them.

But liberals who try to massage them or contextualize them, they cannot stand.

And they will always go after them because they feel that these people will apologize, they'll crack, they'll weaken.

They do not like to go into central Oklahoma or into Berced, California.

or into Texas and take on a person one-on-one and say, you know what I mean?

That's how they don't operate that way.

Well, groveling is not a virtue that evokes uh any positive response victor we have time for one more quick take get your assessment of american pessimism uh this has to do with a new poll out i'm looking at the abc news website right now it says americans optimism about country's direction over the next year drops nearly 20 points since May.

A brief thing here.

The article begins.

As President Joe Biden completed 100 days in office, the country was optimistic about the coming year.

But now, just after hitting the sixth month mark, Americans' optimism about the direction of the country has plummeted nearly 20 points.

Majority, 55% of the public, say they are pessimistic about the direction of the country, a

marked change from the roughly one-third.

That said the same in an ABC News poll published in early May.

Americans were more optimistic than pessimistic by 28 percentage point margin.

Optimism is now underwater by 10 points.

It also seems, Victor, I don't even have this in front of me, that of course Biden's own personal approval numbers is down.

I think it's at 50 or just below 50.

So, Victor, any thoughts on this swift free fall?

Well, there's two or three things going on, Jack.

The first is all presidents have a limited honeymoon, so they go down a little bit.

And people, Biden started very high because nobody knew anything about him.

Remember that.

He ran a stealth campaign from his basement.

He was kept away from the public.

There was not an election day election.

It was 102 million that were mailed in or early rallying.

So everything was done in that censure.

The voters were locked up.

Biden was locked up.

And it was good old Joe Biden from Scranton that doesn't tweet like Donald Trump.

Not Joe Biden that can't finish the sentence or not Joe Biden that says put you all in change or Obama's the first clean and articulate.

None of that.

It was all sanitized.

No Joe Biden's mention on the Hunter Biden laptop.

Okay.

And now we see him in the flesh.

Not a lot in the flesh, but we see him in the flesh and the optics are terrible.

He cannot finish a sentence half the time.

He's cognitively challenged.

That is clear to everybody.

Even the independents now have a negative impression with Phil Biden.

He's below 50% with Republicans, of course, but also with Independents.

He's lost some Democratic support.

This transcends politics.

You cannot have a command.

You can have a commander-in-chief like Obama that people don't like from the right or people like Trump that they despise from the left, but nobody thinks that Donald Trump or Barack Obama was cognitively challenged.

Or when they do say that, they are not serious.

And we learned that in the case of Trump with his Montreal cognitive assessment, et cetera, et cetera.

This is different.

That's one thing.

So we now see that the real Joe Biden.

The second is all of these issues that are being pushed down the Americans' throat, higher taxes coming up, inflation, huge deficits, open borders, critical racial theory.

I could go on, but they have less than 50%

support.

Take away good old Joe Biden from Scranton that doesn't tweet, and you're left with a platform and a policy and a trajectory and an agenda that people do not like.

And it's ruining the country.

The optics are terrible.

Just one view of the border, and you will never, you won't ever vote for the guy because they've been telling you, Mr.

Becerra has been telling you, you're going to get vaccinated.

We're going to knock on your door.

And you say, well, wait a minute, 2 million people are scheduled across the border at a time of pandemic where one of the focus points was of the new variant was in Latin America and you're not testing and you're not vaccinating them.

So that's an unsustainable proposition.

And so the optics are terrible.

Joe Biden is now in the flesh.

And then the revolutionaries are being exposed daily as hardly revolutionary.

Miss Patrice Quaylars, the co-founder of BLM, the cultural Marxist, the hipster,

what is she?

She bought four homes.

She just put a $35,000 security.

fence around her new Topanka Canyon acquisition in lily, lily, lily white Malibu Hills.

And then we have Mr.

Kendi

who says that, you know, you can be racist to correct racism, that anti-racism is really discrimination.

That's okay.

Okay.

And then he says that capitalism, capitalism, capitalism is a catalyst of racism.

And what is he doing?

$20,000 a pop for his little instructional hour.

That's not even a formal lecture.

That's just a consultation.

So I'm ahead of Delta or Coca-Cola.

I said, Mr.

Kendi, how can I basically consult with you?

He said, well, I can tell you in this hour, it's going to cost you $20,000.

He can do five or six of those a day.

So what we're seeing is that this whole woke movement is a polished, more sophisticated, and far more encompassing and suave version of what we in the 1990s used to call the Al Sharpin, Jesse Jackson.

shakedown, where Al Sharpin would call up Toyota or Jesse Jackson would call up, I don't know, General Motors and say, listen, you either give us, you know, $5 million for Operation Breadbasket or for the Alliance Network,

or we're going to send in, you know, 100 rent a protesters outside your home.

And so they did.

It was absolute shakedown.

But this is the same thing, only it's dressed up with this academies critical race theory, which its promulgator, Mr.

Kendi,

can't even define coherently.

So I just don't think that you add all that up, Jack.

I just think that we're in real trouble because while all this is going down, we've got an ascendant China that's just sitting there and thinking, hmm.

Now, we have a lot of things on our plate, but deterrence always stopped us from getting them.

But it looks like the United States is cannibalizing itself.

They're trying to use our commissar system on themselves, which is good for us and bad for them.

It's necessary for us under our system, but for some reason it's optional for them, but they're doing it.

That's good.

They've invited in the UN

to audit their own racism.

And we humiliated them in Anchorage.

And they've cut substantially the defense budget and the next appropriations bill.

And they seem so desperate to win approval of the quote-unquote global community.

They want to go talk to Iran, again, one of our clients.

They want to get back in a the climate accord.

I don't think these people are serious in offering a deterrent to us.

And I think now they're making a very sophisticated cost-benefit analysis.

To what extent they pressure Taiwan and do they want to turn Taiwan into Hong Kong, which they got away with.

And there are people in the Chinese Politburo who are saying, hey, Ta-Chi.

What could be worse than being blamed for killing 5 million people and shutting down the world's economy with with this leaked virus of ours, because that's what they know privately.

And yet we survived it.

We did well.

And more importantly, we got deterrence out of it.

Because now we say to, off the record, we say to our intelligence counterparts in the U.S., we promise never, never, never, never, never, never, never will this ever, ever, ever, we promise happen again, smile, smile.

That's deterrence because they're basically saying, what of it?

And, you know, as somebody who went to pretty tough schools, I remember we had a character in sixth grade that didn't care.

And one day, Mrs.

Wilson said,

I'm going to box your ears in.

We all thought, oh, my God.

And she walked over to him and he said, what are you going to do about it?

Well, Mrs.

Wilson wasn't going to do anything about it.

Because this guy was a criminal and a thug.

And then she said, well, you can't talk to me.

And he said, what of it?

What do I just did?

And then she had to call in her.

enforcer principal that whacked the guy to a you know broke a paddle on his rear end and made him sign the remnants and hung up in their office.

But until that happened, that's what China's doing to us.

And we'll see how far this goes.

But it's very dangerous what we're doing.

On that recollection of the good old days and your sixth grade education, which has been nice to see with you on that.

Victor, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts on these important topics today.

I want to thank our listeners for doing just that listening.

I'd like to remind them about victorhanson.com.

If you're on Facebook, please try to follow VDH's Morning Cup at VD Hansen.

That's Victor's Handle on Twitter.

Also back on Facebook.

It's the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.

Great people, and it's a great resource for places where Victor has spoken, videos, all sorts of things.

So on that note, if you're listening on iTunes, consider please giving the show a review, five stars also.

For

Victor Deserves 10, but five's the limit.

Appreciate that.

And on that note, Victor, thanks again for everything.

And we will be back again soon next week with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show, The Traditionalist.