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Hello, hello, folks.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the traditionalist.

We are recording on Monday.

First time we've ever done a Monday, July 19th.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host of the show.

I'm the director of the Center for Civil Society at AmericanPhilanthropic.com, And I have the great joy and pleasure to be in the sweltering Central Valley of California here today with my good friend, the namesake of this show, Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale.

He's a lot more too.

I'm going to tell you about that in a minute after this important message.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, The Traditionalist Victor, today.

By the way, first of all, thanks for having me here in this sweltering 105 degrees.

I hope the window's open where you are so you get a little fresh air and you're not, we don't want you passing out during the show.

Victor, let's talk today about Cuba, about Afghanistan, and about some of the pieces you've written for American greatness.

And if we have the time, about how all of a sudden it's racist to smile at black people.

So, Victor, we have Joe Biden kind of on a continuum or continuum with Donald Trump about withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan.

So, Victor, my interest, and I believe it would be the interest of our listeners.

is your gut call on this.

Do you think this is the right policy?

And then maybe one or two other related questions to it.

Do you think 10 years from now, with some time off with a little bit of perception, that America might think that the withdrawal was not in America's interest?

And on top of that, was our whole involvement in Afghanistan in America's interest?

But that's 10 years from now, how America might think about that.

But your thoughts first, Victor, on the policy of withdrawal itself.

Well, it's always unfortunate when you withdraw without victory or without stability.

And we're going to withdraw without stability.

And there's going to be defeat of Western forces.

And we know that it's going to be analogous to the helicopters on the 1975 American embassy in Saigon.

So that's just a given.

And there's people who were born 2002 that were one year old and they know nothing other than American and Westernized efforts in Afghanistan, the major cities, especially Kabul, and they are going to be in peril when the Taliban take over, and the Taliban will take over.

So my point was that the people who want to stay say it's going to be analogous to South Korea.

They had a dictatorship for 50, you know, from 1953 for 30 years, 40 years in the 70s and 80s, they started reforming.

And now look at them, it's a tiger.

So that 70-year commitment was worth it.

We don't lose troops.

We still have people there.

It's cheaper to put an American soldier overseas in Korea than it is in the United States.

There's always question then is, is Afghanistan either like Korea, was in the 1950s, or does it have the potential in 70 years to be like Korea?

And is it our problem?

And so I guess what I'm saying is that The military had 20 years to come up with a strategy and successfully communicate it to us, and they did not do that.

They talked about surges and resurges and nation building and not nation building, terrorist suppression, et cetera, et cetera.

And we've had all of these illustrious commanders that various capacities.

We had Jim Mattis, who was a theater commander, who was sort of forcibly let go by the Obama administration.

We had Stanley McChrystal,

who the Joe Bite me incident got him, lost his job.

We had

David Petraeus, and he had his biography.

We haven't had a continuum of leadership in Afghanistan that could communicate.

But that doesn't matter now, Jack, because the question is, it's a cost-benefit analysis.

Is it worth getting somebody from Dayton, Ohio killed so that lots of Afghan patriots will not be butchered by the Taliban?

And why, and then the second question is, why don't the Afghan army that has about three times the size of the Taliban, what is so hard for them to fight for their freedom and defend themselves in the plains?

And we're not talking about the mountain.

So all of these things go in my mind.

And then finally, is there a compromise position?

And the compromise position is sort of what Trump said in his Jacksonian moment about ISIS.

He said, we're not going to go into Syria and nation build.

We're not going to get between Kurds and Turks, but we're going to bomb the SHIT out of ISIS, from the air.

So my point on all this is he kind of agreed with that when he left office.

He said, we're going to get out of there, but you know what?

He allowed U.S.

air support.

So if we had the Bagram Air Base and we had a thousand or two thousand Marines covering it and we had air support for the Afghan army, I would think that would be a wise thing to do rather than just allow them to be defeated and give up.

Victor, you mentioned the generals and Our generals were supposed to be preparing for the withdrawal as ordered by Donald Trump, the withdrawal in May, I believe there was supposed to be significant withdrawal.

But the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and this is, by the way, this is a little bit of a softball, I think, Victor.

General Milley has been too busy doing other things than prepare for the withdrawal.

Would you like to comment on that?

Yes.

The purpose of the U.S.

military, as embodied in our history, our traditions, and codified in the early 1950s with the Uniform Code of Military Justice is very clear.

The military has three roles.

One, to win any war that's asked to fight by politicians and civilians.

Not what they choose to fight, not what they choose not to fight.

Once they're given the order, they have to win that war.

Number two, in between wars, they are supposed to have a level of military readiness.

that ensures that our enemies don't dare attack us.

And that's called deterrence.

And deterrence is a multifaceted word.

It can entail armament, technology, but psychology and mentality.

And three, it's a stay out of politics.

My view right now is they violated all of those because as General Milley is lecturing us and as the chief of naval operations is lecturing us on recommended reading of critical race theory and haggling with our legislative officials, China has now started to use the Spratly audience as a genuine military base.

It's intruding to Taiwanese sea and airspace.

It's very aggressive.

It's got

100 hardened silos under construction with 9,000 mile intercontinental missiles with nuclear tips on them aimed at us.

And we haven't won in Afghanistan.

We can debate Iraq.

No need to go into Libya and Syria.

So I look at General Milley and I said, okay, now you want to opine on something you know nothing about because you are so successful in your responsibilities.

But I looked at the United States military and I say, we are losing deterrence.

We have not won the wars and you're into politics.

Let's examine what you're doing in politics.

You said

that you want to read critical race theory texts.

and you're not neutral on it because you put it on your recommended reading list.

And you did that because you used the analogy of learning about Marx and Mao.

That's a stupid analogy because those are enemies of capitalism and freedom.

And you're learning a text that you would never recommend as a reproved reading, but you're reading them on your own to outsmart the enemy.

And yet you're comparing them with Mr.

Kendi.

So is Mr.

Kendi an enemy?

No, he's a recommended author.

So don't confuse and conflate the issues.

And so when any of these guys get up in front of Congress, it's a blank, blank disaster.

When Stanley McChrystal says that he all of a sudden, at the age of 60, he's in the Atlantic, a vision came on him, Jack.

He looked at Robert E.

Lee.

I mean, I wrote a book 20 years ago saying that William Tecumseh Sherman was a true liberator, not Lee.

So I'm not invested in Robert E.

Lee.

In fact, I got a lot of heat from loyal patriots in the States that felt that Lee was disparaged by me.

But nevertheless, I didn't walk around with a picture of Robert E.

Lee.

He did.

And all of a sudden, as the corporate grandee, he throws it in the trash.

I put it in the dump.

And then all of a sudden, you know, David Petraeus, Petraeus, who I suppose was comfortable with Fort Hood and Fort Bragg for 20 years, why all of a sudden in 2020 did it come on him like on the road to Damascus?

Oh my God, they're named after mediocre Confederate racist generals.

We got to change the name.

And all of a sudden, General McCaffrey says, wow, I just discovered that Donald Trump is like Mussolini because he canceled a newspaper's prescription.

And then he came out the other day and said, well, you know, he's not quite a Nazi, but he's more like Nazis in the 30s.

But we've got to remember that Germany was not like that in the 30s until Hitler.

What?

Yeah.

Does he know any blank, blank thing about history?

Why did he think that all of a sudden when Hitler hijacked the vice-chancellorship and became chancellor on the death of Hindenburg, that there was no prerequisite for that?

Does he ask himself, did the Germany ever come to terms with their defeat in World War I, or did they escape goat Junes in the 1920s and 30s?

I mean, this guy is historically illiterate, and yet he didn't learn anything from talking about Mussolini.

Now he's lecturing the country on Germany history to make the argument that Donald Trump was a Nazi.

And I'm thinking, okay, let's be empirical about this.

Did Donald Trump, as Joe Biden is, work with Silicon Valley to monitor the communications of Americans to see if they were on target or on board with the vaccination?

Did he weaponize the IRS?

Did he weaponize the CIA and the FBI?

No.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is that these guys in the retired military and in the military are entirely ill-equipped to weigh in on contemporary policy analysis.

And then they have two other liabilities.

One, they have enormous contacts.

with people in the active military who listen to them.

And so when Mr.

Milley or General Milley says that they're going through, as Secretary Austin took, going through the ranks to weed out people who might be insurrectionary, i.e.

alt-right white males who died disproportionately in Iraq and Afghanistan, I get really upset about it.

And I'm thinking, why don't you study the Chinese military mind rather than some guy who grew up in rural Tennessee and whose father and grandfather fought or his brother was killed in Afghanistan.

And he's not the enemy.

The guy in China who's a strategist trying to destroy us, he's the enemy.

And why don't you read about him instead of going through and trying to psychoanalyze your own troops?

And so why are they doing this?

Why, why, why?

And the answer is that we have created a toxic environment in Washington in which promotion to one star, two star, three star, four star entails two considerations.

One, how well you navigate as a sophisticated political fish within the waters of the Capitol, the White House, NSC, all of that, CIA.

And two, how well you avoid controversy and mouth what is considered at the moment, 51% consensus.

So when you go out of the Pentagon, you can take that wealth of knowledge about procurement and that very tortuous labyrinth of how the Pentagon works and go over to Raytheon and General Dynamic and say, you know what?

If you've got that battery or you've got that missile system or you've got that cybersecurity product, I know who to talk to.

And so please don't lecture us about your superior morality.

And I think they have really hurt the Pentagon and hurt the military because what they are doing insidiously, incrementally, they're telling middle America that we suspect you.

And we are your moral superiors.

And we can tell you who is your president of the United States was emulating Mussolini, or he was like the Nazis who created Auschwitz on the border.

And those are pretty stern charges that they can't back up.

And these are the very same people when the left went after them and said, you know what, you had torture in Guantanamo.

You know what?

We're going to fire you for insubordination with the conservative community back.

I think they've destroyed the support for, I hate to say it, for the top brass in the Pentagon active in the military for a generation in the conservative side.

Yeah.

Rictor,

I think you've made this point today, and you've made in some of the other podcasts that for the leadership, it's not only the military career, but it's the post-military career.

That's this, so there's a continuum here.

And I think America's on to that now.

I think, and I'd like to make exceptions.

I mean, General Keene can get on Fox, but he doesn't say, you know, my security clearances

from these secret sources, I know this in the way that John Brennan,

excuse me, James clapper did or michael hayden and i don't hear hr mcmaster going out there and say here's a tell-all book or i'm going to give it be a source for this guy or this guy right whatever differences he had he kept to himself and so

i i get really emotional about this and angry because uh yeah i i know a lot of people families, two, three traditions in the military, and they never complain.

And they are the most wonderful Americans.

And then all of a sudden to make them under suspicion of being racist

because they don't fit a particular profile that might enhance your Pentagon career, it's made a sea change in me, Jack.

I was very supportive.

And when there was controversy about Trump appointing three generals, General Kelly, General Mattis, General McMaster, I was very supportive of those exemptions.

And I don't think I would do that again today.

Victor, I'd like to see some of our leading retired generals worry about suicide rates of veterans rather than whether current troops are reading books by Kendi.

Well, before we move on, I do want to tell our listeners that VictorHandson.com is your website.

It's known as Private Papers.

And there's a cornucopia of original material published there during the week.

If folks can't get enough of Victor, that's where you go.

And when you do go there, look for two things.

Here's two little tasks.

One is to find the link for subscribing to the weekly newsletter by Victor.

It's called The Week in Review.

And also, you'll find a link there for the forthcoming book out in early October, The Dying Citizen.

You can order it now and it will show up at your doorstep on publication date.

If you can't still can't get enough of Victor, follow him on Twitter

at VD Hansen on Facebook, VDH's Morning Cup.

And there's a wonderful fan club, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, not affiliated in any way with you, but good people who are putting up a lot of content.

Victor, let's talk about Cuba now.

Of course, there's still demonstrations in the street, historic, at least historic for the last 60 plus years.

But Victor, of course, we hope they prove victorious in bringing down the communist regime.

But I'd like to get your opinion opinion on why the allure for 60

plus years, popes, presidents, political hacks, media types, they have adored this mendacious, brutal, oppressive, and in fact, racist regime.

And I'm wondering your take on what is the core motivation of that.

And then also, if you look back over the six decades, do you think america should have done

something drastic to take down a castro and his fellow hoodlums why do hollywood elites why do progressive politicians why do professional athletes why do they romanticize this killer castro and they did it with shea you know you know i'm 67 jack and Basically, almost 50 years ago when I was a freshman, Shea was over, plastered all over the dorm rooms at using Santa Cruz.

I think he still is.

What explains this?

And I think there's two or three reasons.

Number one, it's cheap performance art virtue signaling.

When the Pope or a professor or a politician like AOC in between latte says, oh, I love the Cuban Revolution, what they're saying is there's no way in hell I would go down there and get one of those dingy apartments.

and work half the day to keep a 1956 Chevy running and then worry about whether my landlady was ratting me out or whether I had a third cousin who objected to Castro who may implicate me.

That's not what they want to live at.

So

it's a vicarious left-wingism that makes them feel good about their own privilege, that they can be revolutionaries in the abstract, play acting.

That's a lot of it.

Because they never go down there.

I mean, in the sense that they never stay more than about a week.

When Jay-Z and Beyonce went down there, they did want to say, you know what, this is an egalitarian paradise.

We're going to have a second home and live here for six months.

And if they would do that, they'd have a concession.

And one thing is,

in all of your litany about the Castroites, remember they're corrupt.

And the litany of corruptions includes fraud, embezzlement, billion dollars, and absconded government fund.

The whole Castro family is wealthy.

The second thing is that they are really masters of public relations.

They don't look like 80-year-old ossified, calcified apparatus on the May Day stand that we used to watch in the Soviet system.

They don't even look like pudgy Mao suit Chinese.

Che and Castro had the beards, they had the fatigues, they had the moustaches, they were,

and they had the Spanish language, which we felt in the United States was the language of the oppressed, not like Russian.

And so they really played into 60s protests.

As if you looked at Shea or you looked at Fidel, you could have fit right in on a campus about 1968.

Well that was a part of the allure

as well.

And then I think also there was the sense that Cuba had been kind of a backwater of the United States.

It had been, you know, under Batista, there were a lot of mafia money there.

There was a lot of private capital and it broke away from the Americans.

It was a

a pawn in the Cold War and they thought, you know what, they defied the United States.

They were much more successful, even than Daniel Ortega.

And so, all of that warped the reality that this was a brutal regime that probably killed over 20,000 people, it destroyed the middle class, it stole from its people.

It's a racist regime.

Most of the people in the street are not people with pure Spanish ancestries, as many of the elite of the Castor regime.

So, it's a very illiberal regime, but it has these romantic, brilliant public relations trajectories and propaganda strategies that protect it from normal scrutiny.

Victor, you have written,

thank you for that.

We're going to move on from Cuba.

We're going to look at some of the pieces you've written recently for American Greatness.

And folks, if you want to know what Victor writes, outside of private papers, twice a week, AmericanGreatnessamGreatness.com is where you'll find at least one significant essay and then a shorter piece, though it's not short, but it's shorter than the essay.

Let's talk about the shorter piece that you wrote recently, Victor.

It's called Class.

The word we dare not speak.

The subhead is the left does not wish to admit it has become the party of wealth.

And I'd just like to read very two little sent three little sentences here.

During the 80s, 1980s, cultural war, the left's mantra was race, class, and gender.

Occasionally, we still hear of that trifecta, but the class part has now increasingly dropped out.

The neglect of class is ironic given that dozens of recent studies conclude class differences are widening as never before.

And then dot, dot, dot.

So why are we not talking about class?

Victor, why aren't we talking about class?

Well, we're not talking about class is because the party of the little guy, the party of the oppressed, has become the party of the rich.

When I was a student, when you were a student, when your listeners, my listeners, all of them were students, we all heard eat the rich, we were told, and we're out for Jackson Brown.

Remember the pretender who was out for the legal tender, the sellout?

What was the image of the rich by the left?

The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Guggenheims, the Fords,

and what happened?

Well, with the new globalization project in the last 20 years, the rich were left-wing.

Go look at the Fortune 400, look at the names, the Zuckerberg family, the Bloomberg family, the Gates family, the Buffett family, the Munger, even name them.

They're all left-wing.

And most of Silicon Valley is left-wing.

Corporate Bordens are left wing.

Goldman Sachs is left-wing.

And why?

Because

they have created a level of wealth that's staggering in consideration of past civilizations.

And they have so much money that you could do anything to them.

And you could not touch their wealth.

And they feel that they're exempt and they can buy or do anything they want.

And now they feel pretty guilty about their privilege.

So it's a fashion.

It's sort of like flip-flops or tie-dye t-shirts for a zillionaire in Silicon Valley, to take one example.

And they're the party of the rich.

And am I saying this?

No.

If you look at the top 20 zip codes based on wealth, 17 of them, 17 of them went Democrat in 2020.

If you want to look at the top 20 congressional districts by a per capita income, all 20 went for Democrats.

How about donations to political campaigns?

Trump in 2016 was outraised about two and a half to one

by Hillary.

Same with Joe Biden.

If you look at all the races at the national level, Senate, House, presidential, in 2020, the Democrats were about $14 billion to about $6 billion.

If you want to look at per capita income by party affiliation, about 70%, Jack, of everybody who makes under $100,000 is a Republican, and 65% of those who make over are Democrats.

So it's changed and that explains a lot.

That explains why all of a sudden our elite, they love the CIA, they love the FBI, they love the retired military, they love the Pentagon Was.

They love the corporate boardroom, they love the network news, they love big media, they love big entertainment, they love big professional sports, because these are all the wealthy woke people are.

And it's really warped our political discourse.

And

they still try to say that the Republican Party is the party of Mitt Romney, white male with notebooks of women possibly eligible for jobs or that they play golf all the time.

And that's not true anymore.

And all the statistics show that.

The Republican Party, and you can see it with the Never Trumpers.

A lot of the Never Trumpers in the DC, New York area are very angry at Republicans because they feel they let in these smelly people from the Midwest or the lower classes.

And you can see it with a vocabulary.

I know the left is very embarrassed about the vocabulary.

They say, well, that was just used for Trump.

But if you start to collate Barack Obama's clingers and you add Hillary's irredeemables and deplorables, and then you get into Joe Biden with his dregs and his chumps.

you can see that they have contempt for what they consider are either Trumpers or Republicans, but they're basically talking about a new party of working class interests.

And so all of the issues are different now.

When I was a student, it was, oh man, the First Amendment is wonderful.

They allow you to watch Linda Lovelace and Deep Throw.

Oh, wow.

First Amendment, you can say God is dead on campus.

And those religious zealots can't do it.

You can go into a class and disrupt it.

and be a speaker and say FFF.

We love the, they hate the First Amendment.

The left does, the rich people do.

They want to ban free expression.

And we could go issue by issue, and it reflects the interests of a small elite.

And when you hear that Press Secretary Missaki says that she's partnering and proud of it with social media to censor the views of people, it's pretty scary, but that's a rich project with Silicon Valley that's been enlisted by the federal government.

A different world now.

Yeah, it's not playing well either.

You wrote briefly, but you've talked about before, it's not playing well with Hispanics and blacks.

Yeah, I mean, think what the Democrats are trying to do, the progressives, the leftists, are trying to say, forget about class now that we're the party of the wealthy and just think of race, race, race, because race is stamped on us from birth.

So, you know, Megan Markle, man, she's oppressed.

And multi-billionaire Opa, man, she's oppressed.

So is LeBron.

So are the Obamas.

And

the people who are really helping out are Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg and Warren Buffett.

These are our heroes we're we're supposed to worship.

And that's what we're told.

And it's not working out very well because people that are Hispanic and black are saying, wait a minute, I don't think the guy that I work with on the assembly line, or I don't think the guy that's that long-haul trucker that I meet once in a while for dinner at the truck stop, or I don't think that guy who's picking up garbage with me is my enemy just because he happens to be white.

I think that that guy has more in common with me

than he does with Warren Buffett.

I don't think he has any ties at all with Ezra Klein or any of the literati or any of those people.

Victor.

Yeah.

So I think that class transcends race, and that's what scares me.

They really don't want to do that.

They want to keep saying that everybody who's black is a victim, no matter how wealthy.

And they want to say everybody who is white is a victimizer, no matter how poor.

Well, let me transition to something, and then after this, we'll talk about your major piece.

I tripped over on Twitter a tweet by a woman named Melissa Chen, and she quotes from this infamous Robin DiAngelo.

She's the author of Nice Racism, How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm.

And the subject of this excerpt is titled Stop Smiling So Much.

And you'll forgive me for, I have to read this quickly.

Quote: I have heard black people talk about the awkwardness of white people over-smiling.

A friend described going to Whole Foods and feeling exhausted by the pressure to validate all of the over-solicitous white people making a point of smiling at her when she just wanted to get her errands done and get home.

She understood that the act was meant to convey acceptance and approval, but what it actually conveyed to her was a way for white people to maintain moral integrity in the face of racial anxiety.

Oversmiling allows white people to mask an anti-blackness that is foundational to our very existence as white.

Our fleeting benevolence has no relation to how black people are actually undermined in white spaces.

Some black friends have told me they prefer open hostility to niceness.

They understand open hostility and can protect themselves as needed, but the deception of niceness, I can't believe this crap, adds a confusing layer that makes it difficult to decipher trustworthy allyship from disingenuous white liberalism.

Niceness masks controversy and suppresses difference.

Victor, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Sometimes a smile is a smile, but this is the mentality of the progressive elite.

But I don't think it's the mentality of

a middle-class black person.

Well, anytime any issue reaches the apex of damned if you do and damned if you don't, you know it's bankrupt.

Yeah.

What she's basically saying is, if you walk down a street and you're white and you don't say hello to a black person, that's racist.

If you smile and say, how are you, then that's racist.

So what are you going to do?

You're going to have half your mouth smile and half the other side grin.

It's analogous to all of these little adjectives.

You can't just say racism because they can't identify or define it.

Even Kendi couldn't.

So they have to use systemic, the adjective.

Well, it's out there.

It's like the air.

You just can't see it.

So, but it's systemic or it's a micro-aggression,

a micro.

You can't, it's not macro.

You can't hear when a person's acting racist.

But if you're trained, you get little antenna that grow out of your skull and you can hear these little micro waves going by.

And that tells you that the issue is now bankrupt.

And when she says, you know, I don't like walking places, let me ask her if a guy came from Mars, an alien, and he said, let me see, which is a more dangerous thing to do or which is more insulting.

You're a black person and you walk into where?

Malibu, Upper West Side, I don't know, Cambridge, Massachusetts, you go into Pacific Heights, and you're really bothered by all of these phony white people that kind of wave, how, how are you doing?

Ha ha.

Or do you want to go, if if you're white, do you want to go to where?

South Central,

Oakland, the inner city of Baltimore, Chicago?

And how would you be treated?

And you think about that, that alien would say, you know, this is very weird because in the one case, you're talking about possible physical violence, and the other, you're over-imagining hurt feelings, and they're not the same.

So, one of the things that is very controversial about this whole racial discussion is that we are so obsessed on race, race, race, race, that what's happening is the purveyors of racism have made us think only in terms of race.

And when you start to say that an entire race is culpable without exceptions for individuality, like the white race, then you've established Jack a precedent.

There is no individuality, there's no complexity, there's no tragedy, it's melodrama, binary.

All white people, whiteness, whitens.

That's what they told.

Well, the logical defense is, and I guess everybody functions that way.

Everybody.

So we're all the same.

Is that what you guys are saying to us?

So then you look at the crime statistics in the last year, when you look at violent assaults, murders, theft,

and you have 12% of the population vastly overrepresented by their own.

definition, they're meaning not black people, but the self-appointed spokesman for blacks, then what?

Are black people all culpable for this rising crime rate and a way that white people are all culpable because some white people smile too much?

The whole thing is absurd.

And, you know, it's like a big balloon of hot air.

And we're just waiting for somebody to take a pen and it will blow up because it's so absurd.

And I think I feel really bad because I have a lot.

I've spent my whole life on the idea that race is incidental.

It's not who we are.

It's not essential.

And you shouldn't ever judge somebody by a superficial appearance.

And here,

getting in the last decade or so of my life, I see that the people who taught me that have all been attacked.

And we're supposed to have this new idea that all these wealthy and privileged people, and they are wealthy and privileged.

If you look at Kendi or you look at all of these Mr.

Ms.

Quellars, the architect of BLM or the co-architect.

They're not oppressed people and yet they're saying race, race, race, race, color, color, color, color.

You you know i nobody in my family has been a slave for 150 years

and nobody in your family has been a slave owner if ever for 150 years but you you

six generations later are oh me and that's that's not a sustainable proposition this emphasis on race and that you tie race with certain attitudes i turned on msnbc the other just for the hell of it and when you see these people that are network of all different races start to use these platitudes, white people do this, and then they lumped all these, what, 240 million people that share this pathology.

And that was what we were taught not to do, because you know what's going to follow?

Somebody says, well, if white people do A, then black people do B.

And it's going to start out, you know, maybe Black people are smarter, they're nicer.

We're told all this by black militants.

We've been told that.

But ultimately, somebody's going to say, well, look at the the crime statistics.

And that may be the biggest hurdle to racial relations.

If African Americans committed crime at 13% of the proportion of violent crime, then I think you might have an easier time to discuss things.

But as long as you're getting up to about 50% of some crime categories committed by 12 to 13% of the population, then people are saying,

and these are white people, wealthy white liberal people, it's saying, we're not going to talk about that but but in my private life i'm going to make the necessary correction and that means if i live in pacific heights there's no way in hell i'm going over to the downtown open i'm just going to avoid it i'm not going to ride the bart at 11 o'clock at night and if i'm up at 129th or 140th street new york i'm going to i'm not going to go there And yet we're told that this doesn't exist.

Or if I'm an Asian American, I'm going to say, oh, man, I got to watch out.

These crazy white people from Mississippi have come up and taken over San Francisco and they're attacking Asians.

And then privately, they're saying to themselves,

I do not want to go into an African-American area because they have a propensity, they being African-American males between the age of 15 to 50.

to attack Asians at a greater ratio than their population would otherwise suggest.

So whenever you have a civilization where people have one reality they don't talk about, this is, I'm talking about Eastern Europe for 50 years, and then another reality that's false, that they do talk about or they profess.

It's never sustainable.

Yeah.

It's like a vacuum that's going to be filled.

Victor, this leads into the last thing we're going to talk about on the

we're melting in the central alley episode of the traditionalists, but you have a terrific essay for American greatness called Trump Wins and and Biden Whirlwinds.

And it is an amazing cataloging of so much of the insanities we've endured over the last couple of years.

There's two things I'd like to you to talk about.

One of them is Hunter Biden, but we'll put that aside.

Based on what you were just talking about, you lead off this piece talking about victimization.

Here's what you wrote.

What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob?

In other words, why in our 233rd year of the Republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, drunk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws?

And here's a question I'd really like just to focus on: What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the content of our character, and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are?

What has the woke revolution offered us instead?

So, Victor, yeah, what was so wrong?

And how is this going to come back?

Larger point you make in the piece.

In 2022, this may be have turned into a political nightmare for the Democratic Party.

Well, we just discussed, Jack, that we are creating two levels of conscience.

There is a reality that people live by, and there is a reality that professional reasons to profess.

So I get a lot of email and people call me, and this is what I'm hearing now from people.

I liked what you wrote or I agree somewhat, but I'm not in a position to say anything.

In other words, that official sentiment may be not show up at polls, but that's very different than going into a polling booth and voting.

And so I think we're going to see in the midterm election something analogous to the 2010 Tea Party correction of Obama, because nobody saw that coming.

There were Democrats strategists that said Obama could keep the House.

Nobody saw that coming.

And I think we're going to see something like it, that people feel that they're going to vote in a way that they do not express their views publicly.

And they do that because they're angry.

Because the more you suppress free expression, the angrier people get.

And this is, especially if you're a democracy and especially an American democracy.

So you're living by the code of hypocrisy.

We tell everybody in the world we're the freest country in the world.

We're not.

And we all know that we're one word away, and not one bad word, one good word that somebody wants to twist and turn from losing our career, our reputation.

And then when we see people that we like and they're being destroyed, we just say, you know what?

I wish he hadn't have said that.

He knew what the rules were, or she shouldn't have done that.

We try to rationalize our cowardice.

And so it's not going to stop until all of us, according to our station, say, you know what, no more.

Again, reflecting on what you were just talking about a few minutes ago, about how we can't talk about certain things.

Well, one of the things that talks about certain things is the media.

And there are many things that they were too eager and overwhelmingly eager to talk about related to Donald Trump and are quite silent now about Joe Biden.

You're right.

In a blink, the National Press Corps molted its national enquirer exoskeleton and revealed its inner flabby prov de essence.

And then you come from that into talking about Hunter Biden.

You mentioned his recent artist scam.

And I think you make a really, have a really interesting reflection on what makes Hunter Biden Hunter Biden.

And it's not unimportant, I don't think.

He's just, you know, not a wayward son of a president.

He's a wayward son of a president who happens to be Mr.

10%.

So would you expound a little bit on your thoughts on Hunter Biden and

his reflection on Joe Biden?

So we have a tradition in America that the first family is no different than most families.

There's all kinds of weirdos in everybody's family.

So Richard Nixon gets in there and Donald Nixon tries to monetize his relationship to his brother, the president.

Roger Clinton tries to get exemptions for all sorts of things, drugs, everything from Bill Clinton.

And earlier, we all remember Billy Carter.

We do, yeah.

And the rule is that they're kind of the black sheep of the family.

The president's advisors try to advise them, talk to them.

But they pretty much are, they're low-key.

But this guy, Hunter Biden, he's not that way.

He has been under, he's left a crackpipe in his rental car.

He had a laptop that the Biden campaign took every lever they had, and they got over 200 CIA officials and intelligence officials to out and out lie.

I think there were 50 people who signed the letter, but there were more that supported it.

And these people said this was Russian disinformation.

That's ruined their reputations forever.

And then we have been seeing leaks of this laptop.

And nobody in the Biden family ever said that it was not Hunter Biden's.

They all said, well, it could be this, it could be that, sort of, maybe kind of.

But we all know it was Hunter Biden's.

Okay, with all of that scrutiny, and you know what?

When he says the 10% and the big guy, what he's basically talking about, Jack, is money that Hunter and his partners leveraged from foreign governments, from Ukraine to Russia to China, to give on the assumption that Hunter would tell Joe, who was vice president and one day might be president, to be a little bit favorable in a way that he otherwise would not.

And that would be worth.

billions of dollars.

Okay, so that money was there.

So my question is, when he says Mr.

10%, is the IRS saying to Joe Biden, okay, you never worked in the private sector.

How in the hell did you build that monstrosity of a house?

Did you inherit money?

Did your wife inherit money?

Where did you get that beach house?

Where did all this money come that Hunter's throwing around?

And here's what I'm getting to, though.

Whereas the old black sheep of presidential families were reined in, this guy's not reined in.

And it's almost as if he's cooked up this more outrageous thing.

It's brilliantly corrupt.

He says, you know what?

I'm going to fool around.

I think he blows paint on a canvas, i.e., maybe it's, hey, this is what I used to snort or something.

And these horrific pieces of art.

And then he wants to sell them.

And they say, oh, wait, that's unethical because somebody has no market value.

So when they're paying half a million dollars, they're really, really.

paying so you can get a list of all the names of people and then your that money will go to the biden family and maybe mr 10 will still get his 10 10% now after he's out of office.

So you can't do that.

So you have to make them anonymous.

Nobody believes that.

But what I'm getting at is Joe Biden can't control Hunter Biden.

He can't call him up and say, cut that out.

You know why he can't?

Because Hunter Biden has the goods on the entire family.

And if you look at what he actually wrote, and those exchanges, what was the theme of Hunter Biden when he discussed the big guy?

Was it endearment?

No.

Was it when he talked about the family in general?

Was it love?

No.

It was always narcissistic, self-centered, anger.

I'm up on the cross suffering for your sins.

I go out and make the money.

I go out and support the family.

I do this and I do that.

And I don't get credit for it.

And then they kind of condemn me, like, how could you do that?

I think, in a weird, strange way, it's a form of blackmail.

And he's going to keep doing it because Joe Biden does not want to have a complete break with Hunter Biden for obvious reasons.

And so then Hunter says, you know what?

They keep acting like they're better than I am.

And I use drugs.

I fornicate with anybody.

I've got illegitimate kids.

Okay, I get that.

But I made these guys and they have nice things because of me.

If they think they're going to sell me down the river, I'm going to do this.

I'm just going to keep money.

I'm going to concoct this crazy art scheme.

And if they dare say anything, I am going to blow the whistle.

And And that's what he's doing.

Well, Victor, I can't help reading this and thinking of Hunter Biden in these kinds of situations and not reflecting back on the scene from the Godfather when the five families met and they're all worried about getting their beaks wet because that's what's uh that's what's happening here.

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

It's been a great pleasure to talk with you anytime, but in particular this week from the beautiful, it's hot Central Valley, but it is beautiful.

We thank our our listeners on the victor davis hansen show listening today to the traditionalist there's also the classicist which i'm fortunate enough to also host and then the great great sammy wink is the host of the culturalist so three podcasts a week folks uh subscribe to them on the platform that you find best for you if you do it on iTunes please consider leaving a review and leaving five stars for Victor's shared brilliance.

That's all the time we have today.

Thanks for listening, and we will be back in a couple of days with another show.

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Thank you.

And thank you, everybody, for listening once again.