The Classicist: Destroying California and Other Things

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

The classicist, Victor Davis-Hanson, 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 has got a website that you have to go to because it's got a lot of terrific original material.

It's VictorHansenSon, S-O-N.com, VictorHanson.com.

Private papers, that's the name of it.

You'll find, as I said, original material.

Also, you'll find a link to his forthcoming important new book.

It'll be out in October, but you need to order it now.

It's called The Dying Citizen.

You'll find a link for Victor's important weekly email newsletter, The Week in Review.

Victor Davis Hansen is a farmer, classicist, military historian.

He's the head of the Hoover Institution's very important online journal, Strategica.

If you're on Facebook, you can follow him there.

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Victor, we've got a few things to talk about today on the classicist.

We're going to be

a little short today,

but

a little bit of Victor goes a a very, very long, long way for a lot of people.

So you've got a new piece on VictorHanson.com called The Paradoxes of Woke.

We've got a big gift from David Geffen to an elite school that I think is worth talking about.

The California Attorney General has gotten his woke on with the travel bans.

And you have a piece on American greatness about the cruel progressive creed undoing civilization.

And it's got some aspects in there about transgenderism and feminism that I'd like to raise with you.

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

We're back with the classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

I happen to be the co-host.

I'm blessed be that.

We are recording on Thursday, July 1st, a few days before our 245th birthday for these United States.

But let's talk about, well, the things I just promised we were going to talk about.

Victor, I'd like to start off about

this gift that I mentioned.

So David Geffen, the famous Hollywood agent, producer, et cetera, who's a multi-billionaire, gave a $150 million gift to Yale University for its drama school.

This will allow Yale to build a new drama center, theater, et cetera, and any current attendee and future attendees to the school will be going there for free.

Hey, it's Geffens money.

He earned it.

He can give it wherever he wants.

But just prompts me to ask,

you know, show my biases and ask a little bit about your thoughts on this.

Victor, you know, not to knock Fresno State or any other school that.

that's not in the IVs or the elites.

Yale needs a $150 million gift gift added to its $30 billion endowment like it needs a hole in the head.

And I just see this Geffen thing as, you know, this is what the elites do.

They give blessings to other elite institutions.

You know, I would assume a kid that goes to Fresno State could really use the tuition assistance, the kids that go to Yale,

not so much.

Am I just being a jerk here?

What thoughts might you have about this?

We were talking to somebody who taught 21 years at Cal State Fresno and I'm happy that he wants to give all this money to Yale.

But had he given it to Cal State Bakersfield or to a community college which could have used the money for scholarships for everybody,

I don't think you and I'd be talking about him today.

The elite or elite are elite.

and they gravitate toward elitism.

So they love the Ivy League because in their world, having your name on a building at stanford or harbor of yale resonates who you are he's worth i don't know seven billion dollars remember he had that i think it was 500 600 million dollar yacht 600 million dollars that bruce springsteen and the obamas go out on so he he spends money and that allows him If you have a $600 million lot, build it and they will come.

So then you get people like Springsteen and the Obamas who'd love to go on $600 million

yachts and not 20-foot sailboats.

The other thing is, I don't think that you could argue that if you look at the great actors,

whether in drama or in movies, I may be mistaken, but I don't think that they came out of the Yale Drama School or the Harvard or Stanford drama schools in the same way that you don't really see Steinbeck.

or

Dos Passos

or Faulkner coming out of Masters of Fine Art Creative Writing program.

In other words, in general, when the university tries to teach talent and creativeness and creativity, I should say, and arts of any sort, they have a problem because these are a lot innate talent.

They can sharpen and homewind skills, and I'm all for that.

But the idea that you're going to get the next 50 Oscar winners coming out of a Yale drama school or the best Broadway actors in the world coming out of the Yale Drama School or the best writers coming out of you know

the Harvard Writing Pro.

I just don't think that's going to happen.

Yeah, Mickey Rooney didn't go to Harvard.

Yeah, no, I mean a lot.

I don't think Robert De Niro did.

Yeah.

I may be mistaken.

I mean used to be that most Hollywood actors were high school dropouts.

I'm not just picking on share either.

And so that's something to think about.

But you give all this money and I think you're really giving it to professors and academia and administrators and nice building and you have your name on it but the the idea that out of that program because of your money especially in this race and gender obsessed university and woke university that you're going to re help redefine american art or american literature or whatever the fine art is i just don't think it's going to happen

victor on another uh subject uh back in your neck of the woods uh on on the classes as we try to talk about California things.

Earlier this week, and again, we're recording July 1st today, the California Attorney General Rob Bonta,

he added five more states to the travel restriction list.

So California passed the law a few years ago related to

LGBT.

Now it's QIA plus discrimination.

So states that allegedly discriminate in these ways, if If you were a state worker, you could not travel to that state on state business.

Bonta added five states to that list this week.

So, now there are 17 states in the nation that California workers cannot travel to, which I guess means if there was, Florida is one of them, if there was an important conference on fighting viruses that happened to be in Florida, a California government worker could not attend that because of LGBTQIA alleged discrimination.

Victor, do you have any take on this?

Well, I mean,

why not, if, I mean, I'm not going to comment on that particularly, but why not, if you're interested in human rights and equity and sensitivity, why not just say Californians are not going to go to China?

Because that's a foreign country and they've got a million point three people in re-education camps and gulags and they use slave labor and they force people to have abortions.

They harvest organs from people who are arrested.

They do everything that's antithetical to the whole liberal tradition.

Now, why don't they do that?

Because it's a matter of money, and this is again this virtue signaling performance art we talked about earlier.

The other thing is: so, this is a deliberate policy that people apparently would want to go to these states,

Florida, maybe, for a convention or a meeting.

But

people are doing the same to California, but not de ure.

They're doing it de facto.

And what I mean by that is the last time I was asked to speak in San Francisco before lockdown, a person said to me that the hotel remember doesn't recommend that you park in its own garage because there is an epidemic of crimes against cars in the sense that if it's got less than $1,000 inside, the police won't even come.

And I just saw

yesterday there's a 750% increase in property crime.

And then when I did go, I was reminded by the doorman to check my feet because a lot of people inadvertently they walk down market and they track inhuman feces onto the carpet of the hotel.

So my point is that before California starts lecturing people on their alleged insensitivities, they go after the possible misdemeanor because they can't, they have not a clue how to do the real felony.

That's China.

And their own house is not in order.

If you go to Venice Beach or you go to any major city and look at the homeless population or you look at the rates of DUI in Los Angeles County or you look at test scores, California is a mess.

And yet they don't seem to have any recognition that they took paradise and they made it into what we talked about earlier, desert.

A parking lot.

Hey, paradise.

Put up a parking lot, as Joni Mitchell sang.

Victor, a few other things we can talk about on today's episode of The Classicist.

Now, we also talked about this essay on the other program you and I do, The Traditionalist.

I believe that will have aired prior to when this, The Classicist airs.

But it's a piece from American Greatness.

It's titled The Cruel Progressive Creed, Undoing Civilization.

Speaking of deserts, I'm not going to ask you to repeat your talk about this as you did on the other show, but you wrote about in just five months, Joe Biden created a desert and called it progress.

But later in the piece, and

I want to get your thoughts.

I have a feeling our listeners want to hear them too, on the nexus of transgenderism and feminism.

So here's, let me just read a passage here.

Folks, it's amgreatness.com, American Greatness's website.

This is where you'll find this terrific essay.

You're right, Victor, transgendered sports are another example of the callousness of progressivism in all its glory.

It believes, quote-unquote science has rendered passe biological sexual differences between male and female.

The left then trumpets its liberation of the transgendered by popularizing a new third sex as mothers become birthing people and men need not have male genitalia.

But in the concrete, progressivism cares little that transgenderism is utterly destroying women's sports.

Those born biologically male compete with innately physical advantages over biological females in size, stature, and strength.

So, Victor, you know, the feminist movement

had many supporters.

I had a daughter who is a NCAA Division I varsity athlete at UConn.

I'm proud of my daughter's role.

She's a nurse.

She's terrific.

She's very intellectual.

But I was proud of that.

But it mattered to feminism.

And that's what the whole Title IX fight was about, to equalize roles for women in college sports.

Now college women's sport, and not only college women's sports, high school sports.

And I have a feeling it'll be in

Little League before we know it, where guys of transgender or men who are identifying as women are participating and just

blowing the doors off and utterly defeating the women athletes.

And in the face of all this, Victor, and I'm going to shut up in a second, the feminist movement seems to be, they're missing.

They may even be supporting this in a weird way.

I don't know, but it's kind of striking and shocking that America's feminist movement is not up in arms about what is happening to American women on an issue that America's feminist women fought for.

Anyway, Victor, do you have any thoughts about this?

Well, I think there's three, yeah, there's three things to keep in mind about the transgender issue in women's sports, like defunding defunding the police and the border.

Number one, we're essentially talking about a class issue.

So the avatars of transgenderism are usually wealthy, educated, bicosto elites that claim this is a national epidemic.

When you look statistically at the number of people born with a sexual identity that's not reflected biologically, it's a very small number.

And it's been known since antiquity.

If you read the Addis poem by Catullus or look at the characters in the Satiricon.

So it's an old problem, but it's not an epidemic, except to the fact that popular culture has given it a cachet, though a lot of people who are probably not transgender believe they are, and they're doing a lot of damage to themselves.

It's a very difficult and dangerous transition biologically and surgically and hormonally.

The second thing is that the left in general likes to create beautiful omelets and doesn't care how many eggs that are broken.

So if you defund the police and an African-American girl of eight gets killed at an increasing rate, people in that profile, they don't care.

And if you have women all over middle America who want to go to college and they're shot putters or hammer throwers or javelin throwers or track stars and they work and they work and they want a college scholarship.

And then some guy comes along and says, I'm transgendered.

I'm not being cynical.

Maybe he is transgender, but he's going to transition.

Then she's not going to be able to compete.

That's okay.

That's just a small little egg that was broken for the larger abstract theory of transgenderism.

And notice, too, that you don't see the opposite phenomenon.

Why don't we see a lot of women who are transitioning to males competing in now male sports and winning?

Because we're told that we're just all paranoid and it doesn't have anything to do with the male frame and male physicality, that they have fully transitioned to women.

And these are just a bunch of sour pusses and whiners.

But yet, we don't see any women who suddenly, because they've transgendered into the male sex, all of a sudden are much stronger and they're pastor and they're competing and being the pansoff male.

It's only one way.

And finally, once you go down the tribal intersectionality route, and you start identifying people by their sex or their

gender or whatever we call it, or their race or their tribe, and you try to create these huge,

we are the non-white, we are the oppressed, we are the victimized, then you have these intersectionality civil wars because people don't have common interests based just on their tribe.

They're human.

And so now we have the feminist movement.

that said that women's sports were shortered.

Title IX, when I was in the Cal State system, we had to have the same number of athletes.

We had a huge huge equestrian program at Cal State Fresno.

We had all sorts of new women's sports to give them equity with the basketball and the baseball and the football mega industry.

So this comes along and it kind of undermines that whole thing.

It gives biological males that absorb these sports and then they win.

And the women are in a buying.

They can't say, well, wait a minute.

This is sexist.

You're letting people with male genitalia absorb our sport at our expense because this is a protected group now called transgenderism that apparently in the last five years has more political capital and moral superiority or assumed moral superiority than does the feminist movement.

So now there's a kind of a civil war and that's going to increasingly be a pattern of the left as we revert to tribalism.

We're going to say the Hispanics, the Asians, and we've already seen it.

And the ability to say, no, no, you're all victims of white supremacy, sort of like the military is doing, is not going to work.

We see the anti-Asian hate crimes.

It's not white supremacy, believe me.

Statistically, data-wise, in the major cities, the people who are most overrepresented are African-American males.

And the people who are attacking Jewish Americans overwhelmingly are people with Middle East ancestry.

And so that's just a fact.

And yet, intersectionality can't accommodate that reality.

Victor, before we move on, I guess I should admit I shouldn't have been surprised because America's professional feminists have been quiet about what women have to endure in the Middle East.

They not even quiet.

They've egged on programs in China related to forced abortion, forced sterilizations.

So I guess it shouldn't be all that shocking that there's silence here.

But let's, we've got time for one or two more things, Victor.

So

on your your website, VictorHanson.com, private papers, you have a regular feature called Eeyore's Cabinet.

And folks who will remember Winnie the Pooh will know who Eeyore is, kind of a Debbie Downer type of character.

But it's a goodly name to house

some of your thoughts.

There is an optimism section in the website.

I haven't seen much in it lately, but I have to admit, there's two sides to Victor.

So you've written a piece called The Paradoxes of Woke Racism.

This is a two-part series, and in the first part, you list three of five paradoxes, five observations that you have about our current woke racial mania.

Let me just read the question you write to begin the first observation and you could talk about this, Victor, and the other two.

Don't give away number four and five yet because it's not up on the website yet.

But here's the question: you launched us all with: Are the non-white elite in government, universities, entertainment, and the corporate world who rail about whiteness, systemic racism, and pathological whites in generally more mostly referring to their own elite white colleagues?

Are not they doppelgangers of the same class without knowing much about so-called white working-class America outside their own enclaves.

Victor, you pose these questions, you answer them, and you have some other points in this piece that one can only read on VictorHanson.com.

Yeah, so if you're a black woman and you're a white woman and you're working as an LBN at a long-term care facility, and you turn on your CNN and you see Anderson Cooper and Don Lamon talking to each other about wokeness and unfairness and racism, you have to ask yourself:

Does the white woman have anything in common with Anderson Cooper more than Don Lamone because of her race?

And does the black woman say, oh yeah, Don Lamone's right, he's winning that argument because he's black?

I don't think so.

I think there's a lot of class distinctions that are being lost here.

That a lot of this wokeism

are very wealthy, bicoastal white people with letters after their name who have had a monopoly from because of the old boy network generations and they're being challenged by a new group of quote-unquote diverse people many of them not latino and black but from india and very wealthy and and accomplished people and other places such as that and it's a in-house squabble So the Dean for Inclusion, Equity, and Diversity is angry at the chairman of the English department or somebody who's a CEO is mad at another assistant CEO, but it doesn't affect people in the same degree lower down the food chain.

Another thing about it is if this is such a racist country, I just keep thinking that illegal immigration would cease because I think, wow, it's so racist and the left is so sensitive to it and they do and they say people are traumatized and yet if you're having 2 million people cross illegally from Central America and Mexico and 99.9 of them are not not white and some from Asia, then why wouldn't you go down there with a big stop sign, say, halt!

You don't know what you're doing.

You're going into a racial zone and they're going to ruin your lives.

Go back into that utopia where you were comfortable.

I think it was Elie Mazzell said, I don't want to see any more white people.

And you won't have to see any white people worry.

But why would they want to come up with 69% of the population white?

And the answer is either the left doesn't believe that it's racist.

It's all a con for their own political power.

Or they want to say it's racist, racist.

So then conservatives say, no, no, I'm not a racist.

Let in 100 people a day, an hour, 5 million.

Just do what you got to do so you don't call me a racist.

Or it's just a cynical way of trying to change the demography.

But whatever the reason is, you can't say that America is systemically racist and then welcome in 2 million people a year who are not white eagerly.

It doesn't make any sense unless you you think they're going to be crusaders for the woke takeover.

And i.e., well, you're going to come in here now and it's going to be racist.

But if enough of you come in, we can have a revolution and get rid of these people who are the races.

Maybe that's what it is.

But so far, it's very incoherent.

Well, Victor, our podcast today, this is the classicist.

We're going a little short because, you know, we've got some obligations on each other's

time.

But in a minute or two left, I do want to note, again, this recording it before

the 4th of July.

I'm assuming you're going up to the mountain, which you've written about recently on your website, about the fire devastation that you saw there.

But was it true that a year ago, if you were up there before the fire, you could only look at the water.

You couldn't actually go in it.

There might be a difference this year, is that correct?

Yes.

What's happened, there were 60 million dead trees, remember, in California, Central Sierra, and other places nearby that were

damaged, dead, sickly,

killed off by beetles and the effects of the drought.

And people begged, begged, begged, please cut these down.

They are very valuable wood.

Lumber is very scarce in California.

And then nobody did.

They were natural mulch, Jack.

Yeah.

But

and so when this fire broke out, they were like green napalm.

They went up

and they destroyed

cabins, they destroyed homes, they destroyed, they melted the asphalt places.

And so when I went up there and rode my bike around Grove, it was looked like Verdun in the Central Sierra.

And a lot of people, imagine this, they've lost their cabin and they're sitting in a forest where a lot of times the fire didn't destroy the lumber, it just burned off all of the fuel, the green needles, and it kind of dried out actually like a kiln.

And some of that lumber is very valuable, especially the firs and spruces.

And so they've cut some of it.

Now they've given a temporary revival of the lumber, yet people can't buy lumber.

So like one guy said to me, here I am sitting around looking at all these logs and I can't afford on $99 a sheet of plywood to rebuild my cabin.

And then you have a Democratic administration that doesn't like the idea that in the nation there's seven or eight thousand permits for ancestral cabins on federal parkland.

So every time one goes up, well, then there's the bureaucratic operator that says, well, you know, do you really want to rebuild?

If you do, you got to go to

you're going to pay property tax and you're going to have to pay an increased lease fee and you're not going to get a long-term lease.

So a lot of people are not going to rebuild.

And

it's tragic when you look at these forests that

in some ways were preventable.

And it's just a morality tell for the United States.

So then when the fire got going and it threatened to destroy things and they let and the cumulative conflagration put in more carbon load on the atmosphere than probably all the cars did for a year, then Gavin Newsom panicked because we couldn't breathe 100 miles away.

And so then they allowed our first responders, the fire people, to go up there.

And they did, as you'd expect, a wonderful job and they saved a lot of things very heroically.

But

it was a direct result of policy, just like the drought that I'm experiencing now in California.

When you let

hundreds of millions of acre feet go out to the Delta and you do not build reservoirs that have been approved by voters in a bond issue, you try to tie that up in court.

And then you think that

you're going to have enough water in a system designed for 16 million people when there's 40 million.

And now they're kind of panicky because before it was, well, we don't need agriculture.

We've got Facebook.

We can drink Google and we can munch on Twitter and have a great, you know, we can have a great fourth feast.

And all of a sudden it's now, wow, have you been to Whole Foods lately?

My gosh, grapes are $3.50 a pound.

The peaches are sky high.

The carrots are even expensive.

Well, these people have no water, so they're pumping, you know, at hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars per acre foot right and as the aquifer is diminishing and declining and sinking they have no surface water because we don't have the storage in a wet year which we had three years ago right we didn't store it and then when we do store it we let it out for fifty dollar fifty thousand dollar of a salmon fish so we can restore mythical salmon runs up to the Sierra

it's twisted i'd say it's

maybe satanic almost yeah let me just say if you sat in a room with four, with you got your Silicon Valley people, you've got your university presidents, you got Gavin Newsom's New York, excuse me, San Francisco political cadre, and you got all of your activists.

And you said, how do we ruin California?

I mean, let's destroy this beautiful state, the infrastructure.

Somebody would say, well, hey, mate, I got an idea.

Let's say we're going to build a high-speed rail and spend $13 billion and divert it away from the 99 or I-5 or all these critical.

That way,

we'll blow the money.

We'll never get the high-speed rail and there'll be more accidents and we won't be able to drive.

And another person says,

but people are having air conditioning.

Why don't we just mandate carbon credits and shut down this nuclear power plant, that natural gas, cut back on hydroelectric, let the water go out.

And maybe we can make sure that nobody can turn on their air conditioner.

Another person says, well, you know what?

We were number 10th in school rankings.

That's no good.

How do we destroy that?

Hmm.

Let's get rid of all meritocracies.

Let's drop all wills of attendance.

Let's give more power to teachers' unions.

Let's go after homeschooling, charter schooling, parochial schooling.

And maybe that'll work.

And then another person says, you know, we have too cohesive a population.

Let's get it more diverse and more acrimonious and more.

Let's open the border so that we get 27% 27% of the population was not born in California all at one time.

And then let's stress your native ancestry versus your commonality as a California U.S.

citizen.

And that's what they did.

And the result is you can't turn on your power for air conditioner.

There's brownhouse.

You can't pay $4.50 a gallon for gas.

Your kids are in schools that are lousy.

The teachers have no desire to come back during COVID, when COVID ends and the lockdown ends.

So

it's almost as if somebody dreamed up a way to destroy what had been a very effective state 40 years ago.

Victor, despite that grim picture, I am hoping that you and Mrs.

Hansen will have enjoyed a wonderful fourth.

I do want to thank our listeners for A, listening and those who subscribe to the Victor Davis Hanson show, of which there are three weekly now, the classicist, the traditionalist, and the culturalist.

Thank you.

If you subscribe on itunes, please consider leaving a five-star review for Victor.

And if you want to leave a comment, that's wonderful too.

We do look at them.

I just want to tell you one here quickly, Victor from

Stevie O,

who writes, great listen for my runs.

Professor Hansen is an outstanding intellectual.

His insights are profound, if you are conservative or at the least commonsensical.

And while I would probably shorten my runs over a boring music playlist, his show always keeps me going the full 40 to 45 minutes, exercise the body and the mind.

So, this is kind of like a Jack Lelaine aspect to this podcast, Victor.

I was, I, you know, I didn't know that was going to be one of our benefits.

So, anyway, that said, we thank our listeners and thank you, Victor.

Have a great fourth.

And we will be back soon again with another edition of the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Classicist.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

you.