The Classicist: Democratic Policy and Culture

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Hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson show, The Classicist.

We are recording on Thursday, July 8th in the year of our Lord 2021.

The namesake of this program is the Martin and Ely Anderson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Victor Davis-Hanson is also the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

A lot of what we're going to talk about today, you can find on his website, Private Papers.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

We recommend our listeners go there because there's a trove of original material that Victor writes.

You're not going to find it anywhere else except on VictorHanson.com.

But if you can't get enough of Victor, I suggest if you're on Twitter, follow him at at VDHanson.

If you're on Facebook, there's VDH's Morning Cup.

Back to his private papers website.

Go there.

You'll You'll find a link for Victor's forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen.

It's out in October, but you can order it today and it'll show up at your door on publication day.

Victor is also the editor-at-large of Hoover's very important online journal, Strategica.

He's a farmer, a classicist, a military historian, an essayist at American Greatness.

And today we're going to be talking about two pieces he's written for American Greatness.

And I'll tell you about the first one, but first, listen to this.

We're back on the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, the classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I am the co-host, blessed to be the co-host, director of the Center for Civil Society at Americanphilanthropic.com.

On today's episode, we're going to talk about a very important piece Victor's written for American greatness.

It's titled Scapegoats, Boogeymen and Hobgoblins.

He's written another major essay for American Greatness

titled The Genesis of Our American Collective Meltdown.

Victor has also a piece from his website.

It's titled, it's from Eeyore's Corner.

This is the

glass is half empty, Victor, Eeyore's Corner, from hippies to yuppies to our puppies.

And maybe we have a little time for for a third item.

So, Victor, let's begin by talking about the shorter of your two American Greatness pieces, and that's amgreatness.com.

And go there, read the pieces, please, folks.

Strongly encourage that.

So scapegoats, boogeymen, and hobgoblins.

Subtitle for this piece is the Biden administration, the bureaucracy, military, media, academia, Silicon Valley, and corporate boardrooms across America don't know how to explain, much less solve, our mounting crises.

That's plural.

Victor, let me just quickly read the very beginning of this piece, and then would you please expand on it or expound on it, elaborate?

You begin, the world may be increasingly baffled by 2021 America and its sudden scapegoating of white supremacist hobgoblins for problems it cannot or will not solve.

Roughly 400 Americans were shot over the past July 4th holiday weekend.

About 150 of them were killed.

The majority, both of the shooters and the victims, were inner-city African-American males.

The level of violence approaches the bad casualty days of the recent Afghan and Iraq wars.

Meanwhile, during the carnage, progressive black leaders from Representatives Maxine Waters to Corey Bush blasted America's foundational holiday and the country at large for its white supremacy and the current supposed lack of freedom for African Americans.

Victor, this piece again is titled Scapegoats, Boogeymen, and Hobgoblins for American Greatness.

Victor, would you please tell us more about this article?

Well, I was just thinking that, you know, there's this truism of American culture in general that when you can't address the felony, then you go after the misdemeanor.

That means where I live, take example very quickly, if DUIs and

leaving the scene of an accident when you plow into somebody's vineyard, you can't, there's no way you can stop that.

Then you go after the guy you think is going to pay the fine is five miles over the speed limit.

And that tells you that you're doing something, you're important, and you have revenue.

And the others are a lose, lose, lose situation.

And that's kind of where we are.

So when you have an existential crisis like 100 people being shot over four days and 16 being killed, maybe more, and 400 nationwide, 150 dying, and the majority are African American males.

How do you deal with that?

If you're an African-American leader,

I'm just saying African-American because that's the mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, and much of the police hierarchy.

And the same is true of Baltimore or San Francisco.

And so the old idea was...

There was this carnage and violence because you had guys like Frank Ritzo or Sam Yorty in L.A.

or Ritzo in Philadelphia or Daly in Chicago.

But once you had African-American sensitive politicians, then this problem would disappear.

And it didn't.

And it's endemic to these inner city communities.

And we think the answers, we being most people in America, it has something to do with a greater, not just a unique rate, but a greater rate.

of single-parent homes, the absence of fathers, a gang culture, people having children in their teens without supervision and a stable family environment, et cetera, et cetera.

So that is a hard

problem to address.

And there is racism in the sense that these inner-city schools are deplorable and people cannot go in there and reform them.

If you try and you say we're going to have some uniforms and school attendance and we're going to master English grammar, then that's considered racist.

So there's no solution that people can come up with.

And so when you have that situation, you say

you're Maxine Waters or Corey Bush, you say, this is not 4th of July, it's not our week holiday.

It's a racist and people don't have freedom who are black.

And then if you're in Chicago, your Lori Leich says, compared to 20 years ago, it's not that bad.

Well, compared to the nightmare of the, you know, escape from New York, escape from L.A.

years,

I guess you could say it's not quite that bad yet.

Right.

So that model holds true about everything.

If you don't know how to confront the Chinese that are on the verge of absorbing Taiwan, I think, and they've got 100 missile silos are building, hardened missile silos with 9,000 mile range nuclear missiles that are going to go into them.

And Iran is now back with flush with cash and subsidizing everybody from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Syrian.

A sad kleptocracy.

Okay.

Then what do you do?

Will you say the main

strategic threat if you're General Milley or your

head of chief of naval operations or your defense secretary, it's got to go through the ranks and look for white supremacists.

Or if you don't know what to do about 120 days of looting and arson and rioting and death and $2 billion

and 25 dead and 14,000 arrests and torching a federal courthouse in Minneapolis or a police precinct in Portland or taking over, I guess it was called Chaz, that whole downtown area of Seattle, and you are clueless how to stop that.

Then you go to the one-day riot in Washington.

You say, you know what, we need 20,000 troops immediately.

We need to put barbed wire.

We need fencing.

We need to put these guys in solitary under, you know, indefinite incarceration.

We don't even know if we'll try them.

Got to do that.

And so you always go for, and what are we going for?

It's what's the

hobgoblin or the scapegoat?

It's white supremacy.

And yet when you look at this buffoonish riot, and it was a terrible thing on January 6th, everybody knows that, but you don't, I mean, they're so desperate.

They're going after a guy with a Lego set of the Capitol.

I get stuff in the mail from people all the time.

I think I have a ceramic White House.

Somebody sent me with a clock on it.

It's very nice.

It was a congressman.

Beautiful.

But I'm supposedly, if they come into my house, is the FBI going to take that and say oh he had a model of the white house so that's what we're reduced to it's it's buffoonish it's ridiculous but uh nobody says anything because if you object then you're a white person objecting to the treatment or the scapegoating of white people and then you're insensitive to this monolithic idea of white people.

So you can, you know, you can live in a northern state.

You can have no association with slavery other than your ancestors fought for the Union Army.

And you can talk to people who have no ancestors who were slaves, who came from Jamaica or Nigeria or whatever.

It doesn't matter.

You can't do that.

That's why everybody's scared.

And it's kind of sick.

I don't like comparisons with the 1930s because people use them, but it is the idea that if I just shut up and

not say anything,

when the revolution is over and they're in control, then they're going to treat me as a nice little collaborator and let me do what I want as a token.

And if you object to it, they're going to go after you.

I'm serious.

You'll go work for the bulwark if that's the case.

Well, Victor, I'd like to pick up on a theme you just

at the beginning of your comments here.

And

you remember

a year ago when we, this version of this podcast was back on National Review, we had Shelby Steele on to discuss this

documentary he and his son Eli

done.

It's terrific.

It's titled What Killed Michael Brown.

And it was about much more than what happened in Ferguson several years back.

But Shelby went on at great length about

the liberal destruction of emerging black middle class in American cities.

destroying communities and literally just leveling them to put up these high-rise hell hell holes.

I thought I read something by you.

I can't find it.

You touched on this somewhere recently, but I know we can't go back in a time machine and eradicate the eradication, but I got to believe this.

No question, had the leftist busy bodies and neighborhood destroyers not done what they did, America would be a dramatically...

different and harmonious country.

I think so.

I've been very fortunate to be at the Hoover Institution for 18 years.

And my two closest friends have been Tom Soule and Shelby Steele.

But I've tried to, we go out to dinner all the time and talk about these things.

And one theme that's been prominent in all of our discussions are

that the African-American community by the mid-50s, against all odds and endemic prejudice, was starting to have a trajectory of parity.

By that, I mean when you look at terms of income and abortion and divorce and family, it wasn't that different

than people of the same economic status and different races.

And then two things happened.

One was the great society that said, you don't really need a close-knit family.

We're going to liberate women.

We're going to liberate you.

We're going to give you money.

We're going to tell you that all that self-improvement, hard work.

And that's what Mr.

Kendi, remember, said in his, you know, the anti-racist book, that he attacked his own parents for their discipline and work and don't blame the man, look inward.

He said that was, you know, that's what created him, of course.

He grew up very affluent and in a stable family, and then he turned on the people who allowed him that benefit.

But the great society destroyed that idea.

And then the second thing was 60s.

And so all these upper middle class or middle class white kids went around, smoke pot, tear it down, do your thing.

You know, that's just promiscuity, drugs, all the stuff that they imbued.

And then suddenly around, I don't know, 1972, 73, oh, that's over with.

I'm going into the yuffby facts track.

And, oh, wow, look at that pathological legacy we left in the inner city when people didn't have a second chance or reserve or any type of protection from our ideas.

And so the underclasses absorbed that and they didn't rebound so easily.

And so here's what we are.

We went in and destroyed those communities.

We built these ugly progressive high-rises.

City planners were going to tell us that everybody's going to be, we destroyed every all sense of community, the whole shame culture.

we're reaping what we sowed.

And then the progressives who did all this, those white racists did it.

And they did it.

And they did it because Jack.

Why do they do it?

Because they do it.

If you want to really understand the woke movement, just remember it starts with upper middle-class professional, wealthy white people.

And they do not hang out with, put their kids in school with, go out to dinner with, associate with poor people of any color in general, but particularly not poor Hispanics and poor blacks.

And they feel terrible about that.

They feel awful about that.

They feel so awful they want critical racial theory in their prep school when Junior's on his way to Stanford.

They feel so bad that they want to give $5 million to Yale for a critical racial theory seminar.

symposium.

They feel so terrible that they want to make sure that this corporation has X and number of black people in their commercials.

And that is a psychological penance exemption, indulgence that they sign on to, I guess, with God or Satan, one of the two.

Geez, Victor, well, maybe somewhat more of the same for the next

piece of discussion here on the classicist.

Every week you write a significant essay for American greatness.

This week past, the piece is titled The Genesis of Our American Collective Meltdown.

And one of the aspects of this is our observers abroad, observers means enemies.

Had they thought up ways to divide and impoverish America, they could not have improved on our own collective meltdown.

I'm just, I'm going to read quickly

two little pieces from this essay.

Again, encourage our listeners to go to American Greatness and read the pieces, but not everyone does.

One of the sections you titled Policies and Politicians, and here's what you wrote, Victor.

The truth is that the necessities of life safety affordability of the essentials transportation power and fuel are now iffy if 15 years ago americans more or less saw each other as fellow citizens rather than as members of rival tribes now they are re-segregating into dark age bands in place of oral bards and mythic sagas we have dry and racist critical race theory.

There's no media credibility left.

After assuring us for years years that the steel dossier was the gold standard, that Robert Mueller's dream team would prove collusion, that Donald Trump sicked the federal police on demonstrators for a cheap photo-op stunt, that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, and that only conspirators could make a loony connection between COVID-19's ground zero origins in Wuhan and a nearby level four virology lab with ties to the Chinese military.

And one very quick last piece, Victor, it's under the section abroad.

And after this, please expound on either of these two sections or the piece in its entirety and its themes.

You wrote, meanwhile, our enemies and rivals, China, Iran, and Russia especially, are giddy at what America has become.

The American left, they believe, has done a much better job of denying Chinese culpability for a Chinese-engineered virus than had the Chinese communist media.

Victor, the peace again, the genesis of our American collective meltdown this week in American greatness.

Let me just very quickly talk about the effect and the consequences and then the causes.

I'm not saying that people did this deliberately, but let's just say you have.

One side there is the Chinese and the Iranians.

and the Russians.

And they say, you know what, America is too powerful.

So the Chinese say, you know what, we're racist

and we are a mono-racial society.

We put people in camps that we feel are minorities, but let's just say that the United States are racist.

Let's just encourage that and say that they went after us because we're Asian.

And let's just hope that that lethal military turns on itself.

So instead of worrying about the Spratly Islands or our new silo program or the Belt and Road, they start to cannibalize themselves.

They go through their ranks looking for white racists.

They get their top four-star generals dividing the country.

They get critical racial theory in the ranks.

And all of these traditional lower middle class, middle class families, rural people, South, they just don't want to go in the military anymore because they feel they're not wanted.

That would be a great idea.

And then the Russians pipe up and say, you know, that's a good idea too.

But

they look over at the Middle Easterners and say, you know, we got a problem.

We need to get oil prices higher.

And the Middle East regimes, Iran, the Stase says, let's get them back in the Middle East again.

Let's get them intervening and getting bogged down like in Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya or Syria.

So let's make them vulnerable to oil.

So let's just say, you know, that they're polluting the planet, that they don't, they're not good custodians of the Earth, that they're raising the planet's temperature.

So they start cutting back on gas and...

and oil and get the price high to hurt their economy.

And that would be really good.

And then the Russians say, yeah, I got a better idea.

Let's just start hacking, hacking, and we'll have deniability of culpability.

And remember how Barack Obama just said, cut it out, Vladimir, and what a joke that was.

And Biden will save less.

That didn't happen, but it wouldn't matter if it did or not, because the result's the same.

Our enemies are delighted.

And so the biggest question I get, Jack, is, have we reached peak wokeness?

And when will we get there?

And to answer that, you have to say, well, how did we get into

and of course very quickly there's two or three there's a long-term explanation and people do it all the time frankfurt school gramsky postmodernism the academic uh tragedy and the universities that said you know there's no no truth etc etc critical theory critical legal theory click racial theory so we were headed that way and then the obama administration said you know if you're non-white no matter what your class is you're diverse so we're not going to go to a 90 90-10 binary.

We're going to be 70-30.

And you walk one foot across the American border from racist Mexico.

If you're an indigenous person from, you know, the Guatemalan border, suddenly you walk across into the United States.

And guess what?

You don't have as much money as a white person.

And you are a victim of racism.

And therefore, you need compensatory and remedial action on the part of the government.

So all of that helped.

And then we had the immediate cause.

And that was,

gosh, we had the pandemic.

People lied about the origins of it.

China lied about the transmissibility.

Fauci gave us a noble lie about herd immunity and masks.

It was a mess.

And then we had our first lockdown.

And when that was a lie, it was supposed to be flattening the curve.

And then as soon as Trump tried to say, you know, if you protect everybody, you protect nobody.

Let's concentrate on long-term and not children in school.

Oh, he's a murderer.

He's a butcher.

Scott Atlas killed 600, that kind of stuff.

And then we went into our first recession, destroyed the work of three years.

And we were in election year.

And then there's George Floyd, 120 days of writing.

We had a Zoom culture.

Nobody saw another person physically, didn't see their expressions, didn't feel human contact, and just let their conspiracies and paranoias heighten on Zoom or Skype.

And then we had the election.

And, you know, if you said, hey, this is a little weird, 62% of the people are not going to show up on election day.

You know, that's 102, 3 million ballots.

And the authenticity rate or the legitimate rate or the audit rate that rejects ballots has dropped from 4% to 0.4.

That could be, you know,

gee, that could be 4 million votes.

Oh.

Don't ever question that.

And then we had the capital riots.

And that was one too many straws for the camel's back.

And then finally, in that, just envision all of that, not in the old days of getting in the newspaper at three in the afternoon or

being very careful to call your friend because it's long distance, it's going to cost you five bucks.

But instant communication worldwide on Facebook and Twitter and Google and all of this social media, and it's anonymous.

And you can be a proverbial mobster, lynch mob out, you know,

in a western, a John Ford Western, or you can be out in Tombstone and you can swarm the jail and say, I'm going to hang that guy.

He just canceled.

And there's no sheriff.

There's no guy with a double-barrel shotgun, except unless you think Mark Zuckerberg is.

And I don't.

So you add all of those and it was one too, it was a bridge too far to get over.

And that's what happened to us.

And that's important to understand.

Can we get out of it?

If we get back into a normal social cultural matrix where we're not locked down and people are not wearing masks like they're bandits and if the virus starts to bump up against herd immunity which I think it is despite all the variant fur

and if the economy starts to and I don't know about that because he's doing the absolute worst thing about inflating and printing money when it has natural demand and stimulus already and if we get confidence in elections again

and if the left doesn't have Donald Trump to obsess over within another year and has to face the consequences of its own own ideology, then I think we'll get back to a little bit of normality and it will be sort of like Me Too.

Notice, Jack, that Me Too is with us.

It had some lasting positive effects, but Senator Hirono is not saying he must be, she must be believed.

Right.

She must be believed.

And you think, well, what killed that?

Well, that was Joe Biden sexually assaulting likely Tara Reed 30 years ago.

And she must be believed, except asterisk, not Joe Biden or why did we really take out Al Franken?

He was a valuable left-wing senator.

We don't want to do that again.

And was you know bringing back all of these people.

And so they think me too got a little bit out of hand.

And I think the left then will say, you know what?

We're on the, some of us are going to get canceled.

This is not fair.

Why would they go after Andrew Cuomo?

My gosh.

All he did was play a little handsy here, a little footsie there.

Totally forgotten.

Well, not forgotten, but.

Yeah, absolutely.

So that's where we are.

And I think that BLM and wokeism will go the way of me too.

It'll be here.

It's sort of like COVID.

It's never going to go away.

It's going to mutate into various, but people are going to be vaccinated again.

So when you're going to get to the point when your suburban swing voter goes to a

PTA meeting or school board meeting and says, I'm a little bit worried that my kid came home and said he has to apologize for being white.

And they said, racist racist racist the mom is going to say

come on that means nothing to me that word has no currency anymore and when we get to that point it'll be like me too

victor one final aspect of this essay from american greatness if you could just comment on it briefly.

We have one other thing to talk about.

You write about the billionaires, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and you say we can conclude America's richest are placing their bets on a Chinese communist-controlled 21st century and will adjust accordingly.

Victor, so I guess what I'm just curious is your thoughts on in the adjusting accordingly, could that have profound impact?

Oh, it's happening right now, first of all.

So

is it having or could it have profound impact on America?

Negligible impact or somewhere in the middle?

Well, it's going to have a large impact.

And what you're referencing is something I wrote that if you take three of the richest men in the world, although Charles Munger is not as rich as Warren Buffett.

Recently in an interview, I think he was sitting right next to Warren Buffett, though.

They were asked about Bertrand House, the way it was asked about investments in China.

And then he, Charles Munger, whom I've met and I like.

I think he's been very generous to various causes.

But he said something very interesting when they talked about Jack Ma, the richest man, I think, in China, or second richest, with his Amazon-like Alabama company, who's disappeared.

I mean, he's vanished, and they've seized a lot of his assets as if he's some kind of Russian oligarch in the Yeltsin or early Putin years.

And

he said something.

He said, you know what?

I wish we could run our financial system like they do.

And they just said to Ma, and he started smiling.

He said, hey, sonny, it just ain't going to, you just ain't going to do that.

You know, as if we got to start doing that.

But he was in admiration of the way China used the government to destroy people when they expressed sentiments that they didn't approve of.

And then we had Michael Bloomberg during, you remember the primary, and he said, you know, or actually it was a quote that came up during the primary.

He said, yeah, I just think that Qi is,

and all Chinese leaders are accountable to the people.

And so they're not that much different.

I mean, they have to worry about public opinion.

You're thinking, what planet do you live on?

And so you know that Berserker Hathaway has these huge investments in China.

And then you know that Bloomberg gave, I don't know what it was, $10 billion or something around that figure to help the Chinese

get capital to make these startup companies go on the international market.

And then we had Bill Gates.

I mean, think about it.

Right during

the beginning of this COVID disaster, the Chinese gave us lies.

They said, oh, it's racist to have a travel ban, as they banned everybody in Wuhan from going anywhere in China with the implicit message, hey, go to Europe, the United States, but do not go anywhere outside Wuhan inside China.

They didn't tell us whether it was transmissible in the sense that they said it was not transmissible.

We had to swallow the bat story, then the pangolin story, then the corrupt WHO.

And so in the middle of all this, then they gave us these cooked figures about how they'd really done so well, and they were going to be ahead of us on the vaccine which their vaccine i think you could say unlike the russian vaccine is probably dangerous and ineffective but nonetheless bill gates said they're doing a pretty good job bill gates with sizable investments it all reminds me of steve kerr the

nba coach when people complained about uh their self-censorship when a general manager had criticized China's human rights, especially the way they operate basketball camps.

And they all went after him.

And then Steve Kerr goes, well, you know, we have mass shootings.

And I think what we have about 100, an average of less than 100 per year die of a mass shooting

committed by about three or four nuts who are mentally unstable.

And the fact that that exists in a country of 330 million people is morally equivalent to putting a million and a half people or harvesting organs from dissidents.

So why do these people all say this?

Why does Dianne Feinstein not worry about

having a Chinese spy as her chauffeur for 20 years or her husband with massive investments in China?

Or why is Stanford University

going after Scott Atlas while they hire a visiting lecturer in neuroscience who happens to be attached to the Chinese military that they don't tell us about?

Or why don't they report that they got, I don't know, 30 to 40 million dollars in gifts to Chinese because of money.

Money, money, money.

Cornfucius societies are on campuses everywhere.

And that

380,000 Chinese students in the United States, joint ventures, joint campuses, joint media outlets.

And that's why.

And our wealthiest and most powerful are knee-deep in it.

And that's why people ask ourselves, why do they hate Donald Trump so much?

Because after all, if you look at his program, a lot of it was what the left wanted.

They said they didn't want optional military engagements in the Middle East.

They said they didn't want us dealing from an inferior position, no blood for oil, i.e.

we shouldn't be in that position.

They thought, well, working people in the Democratic Party

they need fair trade.

He did a lot of things,

and it was a hatred, but the hatred originated, I think when he said

they ain't ever going to democratize and you're feeding a monster with all of these asymmetrical trade intolerance for cheating patent infringement copyright abuse dumping currency manipulation and stop it and that offended the elite and I think that was the one issue and now they're furious

at Donald Trump, but they feel that he's out of the way now and now they can kind of gloat.

And they smile when they say this.

Munger was kind of smiling.

So it's business as usual with China as they build 100 missile silos.

Well, Victor, we have just five minutes left for this episode of The Classicist.

And I'd like us to

go to VictorHanson.com, your website, Private Papers, where you have a new piece.

And you can only read it here, folks.

And this is the beginning of a three-part series.

It's in Eeyore's Corner.

It's called titled From Hippies to Yuppies to Our Puppies.

And you've written part one, Hippie Dom.

Could you just tell us briefly about the arc of these three parts and what you say in part one and hippie dumb?

Yeah, very quickly.

So

there is a subset of the American population, mostly white, upper middle class.

Not always, but that is the primary group I'm talking about.

And the first generation of protests were brought up by parents who had survived the Depression and survived World War II in brilliant fashion.

And when they came back from World War II, I mean metaphorically out of the factory or literally out of war, then they actually indulged their children.

They said, we're not going to go through war.

You're not going to go through what we did in the Depression.

And they had the money.

Remember, everybody else was flattened.

And the United States was a colossus from 1945 to 1965.

And that generation was affluent for the first time as no other generation had been.

And we had the hippie movement.

I don't like the materialism.

My parents are square.

My dad's irrelevant.

My mom

badgers me.

Just do your own thing.

Let it all hang out.

Let's get better curriculum.

Some of it, I guess, was legitimate.

They were trying to piggyback on.

They always, remember, these group of people now in their 60s and 70s are narcissists.

So according to theirs, the Bill Ayers people, they created the civil rights movement.

They didn't.

It was there in the 1950s with people like Bayern Rustin and Martin Luther King.

But according to them, the 60s did all these wonderful things.

In fact, it was a narcissistic, self-indulgent, let it all hang out, take drugs, have sex, don't have any commitments, don't have any responsibilities, and they gave us a lot of trouble.

And then suddenly

we had the oil shocks of 1973.

In 1971, we ended the draft.

We had no longer,

we had the

lottery system and then the volunteer army in 72 and then no combat operations on the ground in Vietnam.

And this hippie thing just blew up.

It was time to go get, cut your hair.

And you could still wear bell bottoms and a mustache and you kind of wear platform shoes if you wanted you get your wire rimmed glasses but you're going to be channel that self-indulgence into yuppie-dum and so from about 19 i don't know 78 carter years especially the regan it was get make money make money make money you know be an urban metrosexual uh have neat clothes and be off-the-wall anti-establishment uh wealthy.

So talk about going on a weekend to Napa or get an argument over the best little micro brewery or compare stainless steel refrigerators or

do you have oak number one flooring or oak number two?

So instead of just sitting in your dorm room and smoking dope and then going having sex with two or three different people.

a week now it was i'm going to make a lot of money and then they did.

And now we are in the third cycle of these neurotics.

The grandparents brought forth the yuppie, the hippie grandparents birthed the yuppie children, and they participated in yuppedom along.

And

remember,

Euripides saw this, and so he wrote a play called the Bacchae, where we have Tiresias and Cadmus, and there's all these new fangled Dionysic cults, and they dress up like they're, you know, in leopard skins or spotted deer skins, I should say, and they're going to be really cool and hip and they look ridiculous.

Right.

Yeah.

And so now we're into puppyism.

And puppyism tries to merge all of these things together in the sense that

you're still having the culture of you want to smoke dope, there's no such thing as,

you know, I'm going to still be promiscuous.

You're still going to use the F word.

You go on social media.

I've never seen the F word used like it is.

Only now they say yo all, you all.

F you, you all.

But puppyism, like these other movements, adds something to these neuroses.

And what they added was Victorianism.

I'm going to hook up tonight, but

I was thinking about that stupid SOB never called me.

I saw him the other day with another woman.

So they were talking about age-old male pathology, right?

Predators, that's what they are at that age.

And they're not governed by social concern or in the Enlightenment in many cases.

But now they criminalize it.

So you had sort of Fear of Flying

married to Jane Austen novels, where everybody was worried about this and that, and they criminalized what was 60s behavior.

So the 60s were saying, wow, there's only one good thing about the 60s, Jack.

You could say or do whatever you wanted.

Some good music.

But, you know, Mario Salvio said, I should be able to scream and yell at the free speech area at Berkeley.

I was at UC Santa Cruz in 1971 when two people got up in class and Jasper Rose's art class and said, F you, you're decadent stuff.

And he tried to talk to them and da, da, da.

But the point was he engaged them.

And

if I said,

if I was a professor today and somebody said, hey, I don't believe critical theory,

they would arrest the guy.

You know what I mean?

They would escort him out.

so there is a censorship, they don't believe in free speech, and they're very vulnerable, like little puppies, yeah, puppy dogs.

Oh, help me!

I went out and I occupied Chaz in Seattle.

Then I drove down to Portland, and I and I participated in that Antifa thing at the precinct.

And then I also had been involved in that courthouse deal up in Minneapolis, and somebody is accusing me of rioting or conspiracy, and that's going to be on my record.

And what am I going to do?

And this is horrible.

I'm a victim.

Give me a, that's how they act.

Yeah.

So I came at the tail end of the hippie stuff.

So I went to college in 71 when it was all ending.

But I did notice that these people had some of the fumes of their parents' values.

They were getting married and having children.

But this puppydom, maybe it's the economy, the student debt.

I don't know.

Housing prices and real dollars has gone up about 10 times what it was in the 50s.

And when you look at 1.7 trillion in debt, but they are not getting married.

Puppies aren't.

They don't get married to about 33, if at all.

They're not having children at 27, the age of the first child on average.

It's about 32.

And the size of the families

shrunk from about three down to 1.6 or 7.

And they're not buying homes.

Home ownership is on the decline again.

So all of the traditional catalysts for conservative behavior, puppies are not engaging in.

And what are we left?

So in that piece, I have a nice picture of kind of a Woodstock nation dressed up in funny clothes and long, let it all hang out.

And then you'll see, I think, tomorrow, where the yuppies have that weird kind of high-ankle,

you know,

floater.

We used to call them floater shoes or whatever.

And they're, and then puppies are what?

They're pajama boy.

Or maybe Greta Thunberg, you know, with that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Arrested development or children, adults listening to children.

But whatever it is, it's a failure to thrive, a failure to engage, a failure to do the citizenship rights of participatory homeowning, child raising, marriage, all that stuff.

Somebody's got to do it.

Prolonged infantilism.

Victor, I'm glad you came at the tail end of all that in your youth because I cannot cannot picture you with long hair, bell bottoms, and love beads.

Although for all I know, maybe you tried it out once or twice.

But anyway, that snark will have to be the last word on this episode.

We've run out of time.

I want to thank our listeners for doing just that.

Listening, remind again, please visit AmericanGreatness.

That's amgreatness.com.

That's where you'll find some of Victor's writings we talked about today.

VictorHanson.com private papers.

That's where you can read this piece on the yuppies and puppies.

And

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