The Classicist: Getting Real

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson show, The Classicist.

Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He is the Wayne and Marcia Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

On The Classicist, we tend to talk about things that Victor has written, especially on his website, which is victorhanson.com, known as Private Papers.

I have recommended every episode, and I'm going to do it again, and I'm going to do it till the end of time here, that folks should visit that website because there is a ton of original material there.

You're not going to find it anywhere else.

So go to victorhanson.com.

That's private papers.

What else about Victor?

What are we going to talk about today?

Well, I'm going to tell you about it in a minute, but first, you have to listen to this.

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Okay, folks.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the co-host.

I'm the director for the Center of Civil Society at American Philanthropic, where we are very involved in trying to strengthen civil society.

You may want to visit americanphilanthropic.com.

More about Victor.

He is an essayist at American Greatness, and we're going to talk about two of his pieces from this week on this episode.

He's a farmer, classicist, military historian, father, grandfather, husband.

He is the editor at large.

That's the title we're going to give him for Strategica, which is a very important online journal published by the Hoover Institution.

Again, check Victor's original work at victorhanson.com.

If you're on Twitter, follow him at VD Hanson.

On Facebook, please look for VDH's Morning Cup.

Again, on Facebook, look for the Victor Davis Hansen Club.

It's not affiliated officially, but it's a great place to follow some of the things that Victor's been doing.

And what else, Victor?

I feel like I'm missing some.

Oh, yeah, back on VictorHanson.com on the homepage, you'll find a link to subscribe to the weekend review, which is the weekly email.

So today, lots to talk about.

Victor, you have a...

Well, this is going to be a compliment.

Don't

take it wrong, but some of your writing just makes me think of Florence King.

Now, Florence was

the late Florence King.

First, she was a woman, so you're not a woman, but she was a

no one knows these days.

I could be someday.

She was a bit of a misanthrope.

There's a bit of an angle there.

But

she wrote about in her columns way back in National Review, she would write about her personal life.

And for whatever reason, people really liked to know about her, and they found it intriguing and interesting.

And that happens for very few people, but it does happen with you.

We've seen some of our readers who respond and post critiques or reviews on

iTunes.

They talk about how much they love to hear about you talk about your life and growing up.

So on VictorHanson.com, you have begun a two-part series.

It may end up being,

I think it's two-part series.

We only see part.

Okay.

So part one is all I've seen.

I think the second part's coming out quickly.

And it's called A Child Garden of Animals.

And you talk about growing up on the farm.

You talk much about a man who's a Navajo Indian who was part of the farm operations who your family greatly respected and greatly respected your family.

Young boy, you're out there cutting the grapes and getting them ready to become raisins and you're interacting, of course, with all the nature that's abounding on a farm.

Would you talk about this piece, Victor?

Yeah, it's called A Hoop Snake and it was one of the stories that I'll I won't give you his last name because it's got relevance perhaps somewhere, but Joe, we were a free range.

In other words, we grew up on 120, 35 acres, but there were my grandparents were in this house I'm speaking from, we were in a little house.

We had farm people who helped us, laborers, that lived right next to us, and our houses were about like ours almost.

And when we get up in the summer, when we would get up on vacation, we just ranged around at six, seven.

There was a mountain view in those days.

The avenue was very lightly traveled.

So we just crossed the road if we wanted to.

And we kind of showed up at my grandparents at a certain time.

But in that process of free ranging, there were a lot of animals.

There were hawks,

weasels, coyotes, rabbits, foxes.

And that's how we learned of the natural world.

My grandfather would teach us opossums that Predat, you know, ate the chicken, the eggs in the chicken coop, et cetera.

And one of these guys was Joe Carey.

And I'm just looking back at my life, you know, 61 years ago, and I remember working with him.

And

I can't believe that a parent would give you so much responsibility to someone.

I'll give you an example.

When you pick grapes, nobody wants to pick along the avenue because the rows you pick on the left and then you put them on the right.

And of course, there's no other row.

So you have to double up.

And nobody wants to pile tray after tray after tray from two different rows into the same middle.

And so they had us do it because it's very, and you're getting paid by the rate.

And so think of that, putting a six-year-old out right next to the road.

all day long by himself with his six-year-old twin and his eight-year-old brother, you would worry about that, but not if you had Joe.

I call him Joe Cara in the book.

So he would pick right next to us.

And then every once in a while, he'd stick his head through the row and say, now, boys, those trays are not what your grandfather would expect.

And it was, so I go through in this piece all the things Joe taught me.

One of them was the hoop snake.

And I never know whether he was, he would say, now, every once in a while, when we would suck our vines in the spring, we would see these gopher snakes and they would be coiled up by the stump.

There are no rattlesnakes, not that they weren't native to where we are, but they were destroyed in the 19th century by rattlesnake hunts where people just systematically joined hands and they would cover, say, a 10 mile square radius and they would beat things,

make noises, and they killed every jackrabbit and rattlesnake they could and drove them up to the mountains.

Anyway, he said one day I saw one and he said, be careful.

He's going to grab his tail and swallow it or bite it and he's going to make a hoop and then he's going to run after you wheel after you.

And I said, Joe, but I've never heard that.

He said, well, i when i was on the reservation in oklahoma we saw whole hordes of hoop snakes and they're very dangerous and i had remembered that and then i didn't realize there's a whole american mythology of hoop snake i was a kid and i went to my parents and she kind of laughed and said it was kind of a paul bunyan story but for the next two or three years every time i saw a tire track out in the people with a dirt bike in those days, I'd run up to Joe and say, there's a hoop snake.

I saw his trail.

And he said, maybe, and maybe.

And I'm just thinking the other day about when he picked his, when he picked grapes with us, he made the perfect tray.

You got five cents a tray.

You could make maybe $1 an hour if you worked hard.

And

he didn't care about the wages.

I mean, he got a place to stay, but I'd always say to him, if you pick a lighter tray, you get more money.

He said, and they burn up and your grandfather has caramel candy instead of raisins.

If you pick a heavier tray, they rot.

He picked a perfect tray.

And then he taught me how to drive without hands by using my feet on the four Jubilee struts at seven.

So a lot of the wisdom, I remember once we had a, I didn't put it in the essay, we had a septic, we have all this sewage problem.

We made our own septic system and it was all bad.

And my dad, we were about eight and he said, you're getting down on ladders because you're light and you're going to climb down at the bottom and you're going to dig that crap out.

It's covering the sand and it won't seep out.

It went into the cesspool.

It should have been in the septic tank and it was horrible.

I guess he didn't have the money to pump it out.

So we used, we pumped the crap into the V.

It was horrible.

We had to do this every three.

And every time you could smell it, who showed up?

Joe.

And he said, boys, I'm going down there with you.

And I'm going to show you how to do it.

And he did.

And he lived right next to us and in a Kwanson hunt that my grandfather, and then finally we remodeled it when he, and then the county came and said it was substandard housing like all of our housing was, only he didn't own it.

So he left.

But I learned a lot from him.

about people's honesty and dignity and hard work.

And he was married to a non-Indian, a woman from Oklahoma.

That family we knew well also lived on the ranch.

And we had a guy,

I think I used the word Carlos Silvera.

He was from the Azores.

And all of them were there.

And his wife was white.

He was very dark, Navajo, but nobody cared.

Nobody said, you know, he's a person of color or this is an intersectional or whatever they use now.

It was just natural.

Race was incidental to who you were.

And I have in the piece, I ran up to my grandfather and I said, you know, Carlos makes fun of Joe all the time, grandpa.

He just says that he's stupid and he's honest and he's mindless.

And he said to me, I'll never forget it.

He said, Carlos can take apart an Oliver engine in an hour.

Carlos can take a Ford Jubilee or he can take a nine-inch tractor and he can rebuild the transmission as if it was a toy.

Carlos is a mean person.

Joe can't do any of those things, but Joe is a saint.

And I said, so you like Joe better, right, right?

You like Joe better.

He said, no, they're different.

Every person according to his station, each has something positive and negative.

and you have to judge that for yourselves, Victor.

So my grandfather was sort of like the character in Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch.

He was kind of a philosopher, and he...

He wore very nice, he didn't have any money, but he would wear a uniform kind of of a railroad bib overalls and a straw hat and he had little pencils in his thing.

And when he would go out and talk to people, he never would allow a swear word.

He never used a swear word.

He never drank alcohol.

He never had cigarettes, partly because his brother was an an alcoholic and a chain smoker.

But everybody respected him and they all liked him.

And I remember Joe would say, now, listen, Mr.

Davis is coming out here in an hour.

He always comes out here at 10 o'clock.

And if I see any of those berries on the ground, you're going to pay for it.

It was really a, I was very blessed.

I had, I mean, there was no money.

My grandfather never made me money.

But it was, I had a whole range of rich characters that kind of brought me up as surrogate parents.

And I look back at them and I think, wow,

at first I thought in the 70s, my parents were derelict.

I was not properly schooled.

And now I can see in my dottage that they were brilliant and they were trying to tell me, you may read a lot and you may be a bookworm with your thick glasses, but damn it, you're going to go out in the real world and you're going to meet the hard men and the rough men and you're going to learn from them because they have a lot to teach.

And they did,

still do.

Victor,

yeah,

we're going to talk things woke in a second, but one other thing you mentioned in the, I'm just curious now, we shouldn't spend but a brief second on it you you mentioned your uncle i guess he's a he's a plum expert i think the word is a pole molly

aside from grapes which were you grew for raisins i assume that's what they were grown for was there any other predominant yes uh crop well today i have almonds it's all almonds it's all specialization specialization means you take one crop you master everything, you have the same equipment, the same labor, the same everything, and then you become an expert at it.

Sort of like an author that writes only about the Civil War and nothing else.

No one knows more about the Civil War, but there's risk in that.

You don't know anything about anything else.

Well, there's risk in just having one crop if it happens to rain or it freezes, it blossoms.

So, in the old days, these were diversified farms.

And in our case, we had Bormosa, Santa Rosa plums, we had early and late and regular Alberta peaches.

We had hail peaches.

We had currants.

these were small little grapes you see in salad.

We had muscats, kind of a sour, they make wine out of muscatel.

And we had Thompson Cebas for raisins.

So it was a patchwork.

And we emulated that when I began farming.

So my brothers and I, we had, I think at one time, 20 different crops, all uneconomical in the sense that today,

if you look at my almond orchard, it's been GPS surveyed by the person who rinsed it and planted it, and it's synchronized with all the other almond orchards.

So when a guy gets in a tractor, he drives for a half a mile without turning.

That's uneconomical to turn, or it's uneconomical to have to change equipment.

So when I was farming, if I was in the orchard, I had 11-foot disc.

If I wanted to go to a vineyard, five acres, I had to take me, you know, 30 minutes to drive in, get the nine-foot disc to go down the vineyard roads.

And then if I was putting herbicide on, I had to switch.

Or in my head, I thought, oh, wow, today I've got to have thinning of the plums.

I've got to have suckering of the grapes.

I've got to plant the tomatoes for the the farmer's market.

And so it was a diversified, labor-intensive model.

And that's what I grew up with.

And so my uncle was, he was married to my aunt, my grandfather's son-in-law.

And he was a Berkeley forest Phi Beta Kappa.

He came back here and he knew plums like no one else.

He could look at a tree.

He taught Joe that when you went down an orchard and you looked at the plums on the tree that were ripening, he could tell you exactly how many boxes, 30 pound boxes, you would throw off in the berm so that the pickers would dump their, now it's all bins, et cetera, dump their buckets into the box, and then you would put them back on the trailer when they picked.

And if you got too many boxes, you were scattered all over the field.

It was a lot of work.

If you didn't get enough, they would not pick.

And they'd say, you know what?

I couldn't pick the tree.

There was no boxes.

But he would say, he had his hand and he would say, seven there, nine there.

And we were, he didn't even look at us.

He'd just point, point, and then bam, bam, bam, boxes back off.

And then if he felt we were too slow, he'd speed up.

And so finally, we were just

little eight, nine, 10, 12 year old.

It was really good.

We had a lot of friends when we, and by the time I got to high school, everybody wanted to work out here.

So we had all these guys from the town that didn't grow up in a farm and they loved it.

They would have worked for free in some cases because there were all these characters out here that were giving us our wisdom.

And

it was a really wonderful thing to do.

Well, it's fascinating, Victor, to know we that put the plums and raisins in our mouths, how they came to be.

There's a lot behind it, obviously, that so many of us are disconnected from those realities.

Let's talk about some other things that you've written this past week, Victor.

And in American Greatness, where you write regularly, you have two essays, so let's address them now one at a time.

And the first one is the shorter piece.

It's titled, Why Are They Woke?

And I'd just like to read two quick things here, and then you talk about this column.

The first is, you say that wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other isms.

Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection, fobbing one's own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them.

Then, the second thing I'd like to read, and I'd like you to talk to us about what wokeism never really was.

And then separately, you wrote towards the end of the article,

you talk about for next generation grifters, I love that, like Ibram Zolani Kendi, aka Ibram Henry Rogers, and Robin DiAngelo, to claim that America was, is, and always will be racist means more than just speaking gigs and book sales.

But Victor, they're grifters.

So would you talk about the grifters and you talk about what wokeism never really was?

I don't believe wokeism is what it was billed out as.

It was billed as that George Floyd was emblematic of a lot of innocent African Americans who are slaughtered while in police custody at an asymmetrical rate.

That's not true.

Not only in actual numbers that whites are killed more often than blacks, but in proportion to the number of people who are arrested of the 11 million, whites are not underrepresented as victims and nor are blacks overrepresented.

If you count the number of people in contact with the police vis-a-vis how many people were shot by them when unarmed.

So that was a myth.

So what was it about?

It was, as you said, the quarantine, the pandemic, the recession, the elect, all of those force multipliers made people go crazy.

I believe that.

I think we'll come to learn that this quarantine was wrong for a lot of reasons, but one of them is it drove the United States citizenry absolutely insane.

But

in this piece, I went through all the reasons that people are attracted to wokeism.

And one of them is the money.

I have some associations with schools that I've been a visiting professor or I taught at or where I am now.

Jack, I can't go a week without getting a memo, a statement of conscience from a college dean, provost, or president.

And it says something like, it's come to my attention.

And I want to make a statement of belief and da da da da da da da da.

It was come to my attention that somebody had reported that they were unkindly treated in the dorm.

And then to address that, I am now going to announce that Mr.

Blank, blank, blank has been the new dean, associate dean, associate vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This is from a university that's broke.

And then these new statements.

So it's a, and then you get a note and said, this is to remind you that your workshop, your mandatory three, or maybe it's going to be four or five hours now, your re-education North Korean brainwashing workshop is scheduled for you.

And if you don't do it, blah, blah, blah.

So there's an enormous industry that was fostered by wokeism that a lot of people are involved in.

And you can see it with the testimony of the chairman, the joint chief.

You can see what's happened in the military.

They are not buying missiles and they're not buying bombs and they're not buying bullets because they're hiring a lot of these people to come in and say and do things that don't are not just irrelevant to military efficacy, but they're detrimental to unit cohesion.

So that's one motivation.

The other is psychological.

And I think a lot of people are guilty.

Look at Sheldon Whitehouse Jack, our senator.

He was born in your city, New York.

He was a blue-blood aristocrat.

I think his father was very, very wealthy.

He grew up in prep schools.

I think it was St.

Paul's, the nation's most exclusive prep school, Ivy League educated.

And guess what?

He gives very moving speeches on the floor of the U.S.

Senate to substantiate his wokeness and to tell people that he's worried about diversity, inclusion, and equity, and he's going to fight for it.

And there's no excuses for it.

It's now.

And then he was told five years ago, but wait a minute, your beach club in Newport, Rhode Island, among the wealthiest enclaves of the rich, doesn't have blacks.

Jews, I think they quoted, remember they quoted somebody, Jews okay, blacks not so much.

So he was called on that again and he said he was working on working on it.

If you or I said I was working on that fact, no one would ever allow you to say that.

But why does he do that?

Why does somebody who lectures the country then prefer to be with white people?

And the answer is, I think that his wokeness is a psychological mechanism that he squares a circle, that he doesn't feel comfortable with non-white people.

just like Don Lamon will lecture you that you're racist and then live in, is it Sag Harbor, the all-white area?

Or why should I take seriously anything that Oprah Wimphy says about her oppressed state when she's worth over 2 billion?

Or why would I listen to LeBron James with his Legion of Security and his Los Angeles mansion lecturing us about the current status of racist America?

Or Megan Markle psychodrama about whether Archie will get to have a title or not.

So a lot of these people are attracted to it because for them and the Obamas who are the case par excellence, they feel their authenticity, their street cred has been injured by their riches.

And so they're now the capitalist oppressors according to traditional Marxist binaries and they don't want to be.

So they think this race thing is really good to accentuate.

Michelle came out and said, wow.

I worry about when my daughters walk outside.

I thought, well, why would you worry?

They live in the wealthiest area of Martha's Vineyard and Washington, D.C.

They've got legions of security.

And you don't live in Chicago in your Chicago mansion anymore that you bought from a crooked realtor.

So why don't they go back there?

And then they don't go back there because what?

700 people were shot, mostly African-American in Chicago.

And that's the chief danger that the Obama children might have to endure.

And it's a real danger that some inner city youth would say, you know what, I'm going to, I don't like your privilege.

But so this is the mechanism to avoid.

When Michelle says that I'm a victim of racism because a white woman asked me to pick up a package, that in itself is a psychodrama that illustrates there is no racism that she's encountered.

She was given affirmative action.

I read her thesis.

It was, I won't even get into it.

It was incomprehensible and she leveraged that to law school.

But the point is she was not penalized because she was African-American.

It was an asset to be so.

And yet we're going to have to listen to all of this woke lecturing from very privileged, wealthy people.

So, whether it's their career motivations, or whether it's their guilt, or whether it's their desire for authenticity, there are motivations and catalysts for people to sound off about their woke feeds other than systemic racism that they allege.

Well, you know, I think, Victor, we'll move on to the next essay that there's for many people, there's nothing worse than being accused of being racist.

And for others, there's probably nothing more thrilling than to accuse someone else of being a racist.

It's at the end of the day, it's not about race.

It's about, it is, as you say, it's about power to some extent.

We have a big, juicy, and typically wonderful essay for American Greatness, also published this week.

It's titled The Biden No-Go Zones, and it's a thorough indictment of American journalism.

So let me just read one little passage here, and I do mean little.

And you talk about this passage and about anything else here in this piece, Victor.

Again, it's on American Greatness website.

People, I hardly recommend that you go check it out and read it.

Reporters ignore the mounting lies.

This is about Joe Biden.

Ironically winking and an acknowledgement that most are the result of the lies, that most are the result of Biden's own cognitive deterioration, as if it is more reassuring that a president does not know what he is saying rather than it is saying something untrue.

Then you ask the question, Victor, which I hope you can answer here.

How can we explain this utter dereliction of American journalism?

Yes.

In that piece, I said there were certain no-go zones for presidents.

And you just mentioned one.

You had to be cognizant.

Remember when Nixon was drinking during Watergate?

Oh my God, he's drinking.

or Donald Trump is nuts.

Dr.

Bandi Lee at Yale said he's got to have an intervention when straightjack, get him out of there.

Remember Ron Rosenstein?

Yeah, he was going to wear the wire and find him

raging at the moon or barking like a dog or something.

And now we've got a guy who doesn't know where he is.

He has trouble getting up the steps of Air Force One.

He slurs his words.

He sounds like he has chronic respiratory problems or congestive heart failure.

He's addled and there's nothing, nothing.

He's dynamic.

It's so reassuring to see Joe Biden take the reins of power.

And then we have another no-go zone.

You don't get near race.

You don't say corn pop stories.

You don't talk about corn pop and all of these ghetto thugs that you face down and little black children who looked at your golden hairs.

You don't tell distinguished professionals that happen to be African-American, they're going to put you all in chains as if they have no power or free will.

You don't make fun of an Indian donut shop.

You don't say that Barack Obama is the first guy who took a bath, first clean, articulate black presidential candidate.

You don't tell an African-American interviewer, hey, junkie.

You don't tell another one, you ain't black.

I could go on, but no contemporary politician has said more racially offensive things than Joe Biden.

You don't lecture the country on insensitive language when your son, with impunity, feels that he can communicate with people freely using the n-word and says no yellow people.

Well, not when his father is lecturing the country about supposed white hate crimes against Asian Americans, which is a lie.

It's not a predominant rubric.

So that's a no-go zone.

He violated that.

So he violated the mental health no-go zone.

He also violated the female no-go zone.

Remember, women must be believed?

Was that Senator Hirono said that?

During the Brett Kavanaugh?

Britt Kavanaugh circus told us that if you were accused 35 years prior in your teens, that and you have no evidence, no corroborating witnesses, no recall of places or familiar reference that would confirm your story.

Nothing, no physical evidence, no logic.

It doesn't matter.

Women must be believed.

Okay, Joe Biden has a habit of breathing on, kissing, touching, squeezing, getting too near the private space of women, many of them underage.

She's been reprimanded by one or two and said, don't do that.

A couple of liberal columnists said, Joe, you got to knock it off.

Tara Reed said not that she was at a party and some teenage frolicker like Brett Crabten got on top of her and violated her space.

She said as a employee of Senator Biden that she was physically and sexually penetrated by him,

digitally penetrated.

And she wrote her mom about it.

And her mother mentioned it.

to people.

And there's a tape of her mention.

That didn't matter because that was a no-go zone.

that's not a no-go zone and so whether it's race or and lying too remember we said that

he's he's the king

bush lied thousand died even though the false information weapons of mass destruction came from george tenant and cia but the point is there was no tolerance trump had a lio meter where we're told that he exaggerated this joe biden looked at the united states and he said there wasn't one vaccination until i came in power right there's a picture of him getting one on December 21st.

He went overseas and said to the world that these Trump supporters tried to overthrow the government, stormed the Capitol, and killed an officer, Brian Sickner.

We know that is a flat-out yellow lie.

White lie, no, yellow lie.

We know from the autopsy report that he was not attacked and killed by a Trump supporter.

So why does he get away with that?

And the answer is, to answer your question, the media feels now that they've reached a new state of conscience.

And

there's no such thing as disinterested reporting, empiricism, because they're soldiers in the grand march of progressivism.

So if you're going to report an embarrassing story about Sheldon White House or Joe Biden, you are a traitor to the cause and you're going to do damage.

And these noble ends justify any means necessary.

We even means dishonesty or keeping mute about something that's very important to the country.

And that means if you have evidence that Hunter Biden's Biden's laptop will embarrass Joe Biden right before the election, you better not cover it because that will make you a pariah and your career will be finished.

I'm not just saying this.

I'm not paranoid.

This is exactly a paraphrase of what New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg said, what Christian Amanpoor said, what Gorgate Ramos at University said, that there is no rules anymore for traditional journalism.

And they're partisans.

So they're a prob to a state ministry of untruth.

That's their role.

That's their job.

And you can see it in the Washington press conferences, if you can call them that with Joe Biden.

Not one person that I can recall has ever said to the President of the United States, when you lecture people about proper discourse concerning race, are you worried that your own son repeatedly use racial epithets?

What would happen if somebody did?

Can you imagine?

What would happen?

They would be ostracized.

They'd say, thank you for that.

And we're going to get, we'll circle back.

And then that person person would get a call and say, you SOB, you will never set foot in the.

But Joe would threaten to take him out back, too.

Yeah, take him out back and wait

behind the gym, maybe, or maybe it was six feet of chain like he dealt with corn pop.

Yeah.

Or maybe he also took a childhood as a child when somebody insulted his sister.

He went into the guy's lunch counter and took his head, slammed it on the counter.

Remember Joe?

Joe was always doing that.

He was always using his superior muscular strength and audacity to attack people.

Well, Victor, towards the end of this essay, you talk about the final ironies.

You said the Democratic Party won the long march through journalism, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Why so?

Well, I mention this a lot, and I don't want to sound like a broken record, but deterrence keeps us honest.

The fact that if I have a bunch of crap in my yard and it doesn't fit into my trash can, I don't go take it to somebody's vineyard and throw it out there, not only because it's the wrong thing to do, but I could be arrested if I had less moral scruple.

But when you take away the fear of punishment or embarrassment, then humans react accordingly.

And it's not because they reward that magnanimity with similar restraint.

They take advantage of it.

So you have a whole generation now, starting with Obama for eight years, but in the Trump years and as the out party, now as the in-party, where people have not cross-examined Democratic politicians.

So they become flabby.

They haven't used their rhetorical muscle, so to speak, and they get angry.

Nancy Pelosi will not answer a question if any of them escapes the filter system.

She can't.

She hasn't been asked a hostile question in years.

Joe Biden cannot, he gets angry.

He lost his temper at the G7 at one little meek, mild rejoinder from a reporter.

So when you create that climate that anything the president says will be okay, and he never has to fear a question, he will just lie as hell and people will nod.

And that's what happens in third world dictatorships.

And that's what we are in some cases as it involves the media.

So it's not good for their own side.

Whereas if you're Donald Trump or you're a Republican House member or senator, you're going to get attacked 24-7.

It goes that way with journalism too.

If you're a pundit or journalism or op-ed writers and you write something, you say to yourself as you write it, this person, this statement is going to be attacked.

I'm going to be attacked.

What am I going to say?

You don't say I'm going to be attacked so I don't write it.

You're going to say, okay, brace yourself.

Get some counter arguments because your email is going to be full by five o'clock of personal insults, ad hominem attacks, but not if you're left.

Well, Victor, that piece was titled The Biden-O-Go Zones, and also

it's published on American Greatness, where you write regularly, weekly, two pieces.

The other piece we just discussed, Why Are They Woke?

Folks, check them out please so victor we have a question it found its way to me somehow that one of our regular listeners asked if i put this forward to you as victor the historian so let me just read this if you don't mind and contemplate and i'm not going to give his name i'm going to call him bobby p So he wrote, I listened to VDH's podcast and enjoy them and appreciate your contributions.

I have a question for Victor.

Maybe you can ask him in the podcast someday.

Here's the question.

And he's going to elaborate a little.

Is history nothing more than a narrative?

That's the question.

So he says, I ask for several reasons, not least because I work in a university where I encounter the, quote, history is narrative, end quote, position all the time.

I understand that history is told as a story.

In that sense, it is a narrative.

But that language has been hijacked by another understanding of the narrative.

Narrative as the quote unquote popular understanding or propaganda.

When people say things like, quote, the victors write history, end quote, they imply that the history written by the victors is a lie, a narrative, and another narrative is as good as any other.

So, is history nothing more than narrative?

Is there any objective history that we can rely upon for making decisions or even understanding ourselves?

Mr.

Historian, what do you think about that?

Yes.

In fact, Thucydides, our first analytical historian, who is often accused of being a postmodernist, set out a group, a series of exempla speeches he heard, or if you said he didn't hear them, he put words in the mouth that might be true, telling you they could be more relative than abstract and inquiries.

But what the questioner is saying is that a minor truth, or maybe a...

a truth became the truth.

The point is that we all have prejudices.

So

I wrote a book on ancient agriculture and agrarianism in the ancient world.

If I lived in New York City, would I have written it?

No.

If somebody written wrote in New York City, they might want to write about building collapses of high-raises in Rome, because that's what they know.

Does that mean that they're going to be prejudicial?

No, not necessarily.

In fact, not at all.

So we all have interest and we all have prejudices and likes and dislikes.

And that affects history, but it's checked, it's adjudicated, it's censored, it's cross-examined by the evidence, and the evidence is abstract.

It's not relative, it's finite.

And by what do I mean by that?

The preponderance of evidence.

So if I say Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, is that just because I like Sparta?

And you could say, well, it really didn't.

You just are bringing your white males pro-Spartan?

No, I can tell you because I say this is the evidence from Xenophon's Hellenica.

He describes the defeat.

This is the evidence from Epigraphy.

These are stone documents that Athens itself published after the war.

These are coins that show disintegration of the currency during the last years of the Peloponnesian War.

This is the archaeological evidence from the long walls that were dismantled.

So what the historian does is he builds brick by brick a case.

It's just like the, he's just like a prosecuting attorney, but he's not after a particular client, but he does bring evidence to build a likely scenario.

Is it 99.99999 true?

No, but maybe it's 90%.

It's likely.

And then of course he's facing cross-examination all the time.

And you can see what the questioner means when he says, is it your history?

Is it my history?

No, there is a history of what actually happened to the degree we have the evidence to formulate.

And this is really important.

And as historians, we're trained how to use them.

And what do I mean by that?

It means that if you're looking at the life of General Sherman and you're reading his own autobiography, that is a valuable piece of evidence, but you understand that all people write in their own interests.

If you're reading an attack on him by a personal venomous rival, then you put that in the context.

If you're seeing somebody who was more disinterested, you put that.

And when you aggregate all of those together, you can create a likely narrative.

And you notice how these people keep saying, my truth?

Right.

That's a horrible thing to say.

My truth says, well, we shall have our truth, but my truth, I hear that at Stanford University a a lot, there is no my truth.

There's my interpretation, there's my take on things, but there is the truth.

And we know exactly, you can fight over it if you don't have enough evidence.

But in most cases, if you really want to ascertain the truth, you can find enough evidence of a diverse type and you can weigh it and calculate it and use it to find the answer.

And if you don't have that, if you don't have induction and empiricism, then then you don't have anything.

When Elon Musk sends a rocket up, are we going to say, well, it's just his truth of physics and mechanics and engineering and computers?

And you can say, well, it blew up.

So apparently it was.

Well, that was because it was inexact.

He didn't have enough perfect information, but he's getting there.

But more or less, he understands that physics is not conditioned by race.

It's a very important question because this relativism is starting to affect meritocracy.

If United Airlines says that we are going to start picking people for our pilot training program based on their race, you can see that that is not an essential criterion to pilot an empire.

It may be good for public relations or corporate profits, but for the actual understanding of how the airplane works and how you navigate and how you fly it, it's not.

Whether the plane flies well or not doesn't depend on the race or the color of anybody's skin.

It's the training.

And once you go down this, I'm going to hire my first cousin over the better qualified candidate under the rules of tribalism, you're headed for a fall.

Yeah.

Also,

NASA this week put out something about their priority is now to focus on equity.

I thought it was to put devices up into outer space.

And you remember the Obama NASA director that said he had three goals under Obama for NASA.

And the first one was Muslim outreach and to assure people of the contributions and science of the Arab community.

I don't think that has anything to do with sending a rocket to the moon, but it might have everything to do with the fact that NASA of today is not the NASA we grew up with.

The government is not doing the critical rocketry and space exploration.

It's been outsourced to private enterprise.

Well, thanks for that answer.

Bobby P.

I hope you're happy with that.

And let's talk about one more thing on this episode of the Classicist.

We're recording on Friday, June 25th.

Victor, California, we have, I think formally, the

recall was approved,

sanctified, or whatever the word is.

There were enough, clearly, enough people signed the petition for the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom.

But there are two articles that come out this week that I'd like to get your two cents on, or more than two cents.

They involve a lot of cents.

One of them is titled, This is, I'm reading from an AP story.

Well, let me read the other story first.

Newsom proposes $5.2 billion to paid off unpaid rent in California.

So I wonder if he was going to do that.

Regardless, well,

he's got this recall.

Why not spend this insane amount of money on rent?

I don't know if the legislature approved that.

This was raised the last few days.

I don't know if it has happened in the meanwhile.

And then the other thing is not about an expenditure.

Well, it is about an expenditure.

This is an AP story.

Let me just read this quickly.

And then, Victor, you have at

Newsom, what's happening in California, et cetera.

This has to do with something you're intimately affected by, wildfire prevention work.

So story goes from AP, Governor Gavin Newsom has vastly overstated wildfire prevention work completed by his administration, according to a Capitol Public Radio investigation released Wednesday, two days ago.

State fire officials have treated less than 18 of the 140 square acres that the Democrat governor has touted, the radio station reported.

The land is part of 35 priority projects Newsom designated in 2019 on the heels of the deadliest wildfire season in state history.

And the final thing here is in 2020, I find this mind-boggling, California's fuel reduction efforts also dropped.

from the year before.

Newsom cut fire prevention budget by $150 million,

CAP Radio reported.

We're going to pay rents of $5.2 billion, but they're cutting this fire prevention budget that has, without it, this staggering losses.

It's just insanity.

Anyway, that's my.

Well, you start who Gavin Newsom is.

And remember who runs California.

It was Barbara Boxer.

It was Diane Feinstein.

It was Nancy Pelosi.

It was Gavin Newsom.

These were all very wealthy people who grew up within a few miles of each other.

They're not diverse people.

They do not represent the demography of California.

They're very wealthy and they're insiders.

Gavin Newsom would not be governor if he didn't have friends like the Gettys that throughout his entire life subsidized his excesses and made up for them.

And so that's the first thing to know.

He's not a product of a meritocracy.

He's half-witted.

He's not a very good politician, but he's a product of the old boy network, the old boy network that the left said they abhorred.

He has an overriding philosophy, philosophy like his leftist compatriots that says if you

go against human nature and you indulge people then they will react accordingly and they will delight your progressive sensibilities.

By that I mean if you go to vintage beach and you stop all enforcement of homelessness, vagrancy, drug use, people will say, you know, I'm going to be very careful where I go.

And I'm not going to put my tent.

I'm not going to defecate.

I'm not going to urinate because I really appreciate the fact that Gavin Newsom said I could camp here.

If anybody believes that, they're insane.

And he's done that with every single issue.

And he's done it with rent reprieves.

He says, essentially, don't pay your rent if you're stressed out about COVID or you might have lost your job.

And because I said that to you, I know in the future, when you get back to work, you will pay your rent.

on time.

That's not going to happen.

People think, well, if the government says it wasn't my fault that I didn't meet, then it's not my fault.

This is what Jerry Brown did when he decided that we drove too much.

And he said, we need to get a really tough law enforcement.

So you could go online and find out how many tickets a million a year hybrid patrol had issued.

Then suddenly you started noticing that they weren't on there.

And then we were told that people of color and marginalized communities were unduly ticketed because of their cars or I don't know what.

And then we'd have a big reprie program.

Let's enforce ticket issuance.

Let's enforce and raise penalties, but let's exempt all these people who have a social or cultural excuse that they can't follow the law.

The final thing is: when you mention the fire, Gavin Newsom has a philosophy that what Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, who's retired, and other people in the Bay Area feel

about the environment, about race, about fuels, about fires or timber, then they're going to dictate on high to the deplorables below.

And it worked pretty well when you could say there's a bunch of white Trump supporters, but there are no more white Trump supporters.

He lost by 35 points in California.

So now it gets interesting because a bunch of privileged white people in the Bay Area are saying to largely Asian and Hispanic people, it's in your interest to pay 30 cents a kilowatt.

It really is, because then when you're down there in Bakersfield and Fresno, it's 110, you won't turn on your air conditioner.

Now, it won't affect me because it's 65 degrees in San Francisco.

And when you have to drive out to Mendota to get on that tractor from Visalia, it's really good you pay $4.5 a gallon because

it doesn't affect me because I don't drive anywhere.

I live in San Francisco, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So they talk down to people.

They have this bromise.

This state is fueled by $6 trillion of market capitalization from Silicon Valley and maybe a lesser amount in Hollywood and coastal marquee universities that have become globalist corporate enterprises.

But the point is it's a top coastal elite that talks down to people and they have destroyed the forest industry that doesn't exist anymore.

They have destroyed the mining industry that really doesn't exist anymore.

They have destroyed manufacturing to the extent they could get away with it.

They have destroyed the natural gas, coal, and oil industries.

We still have a lot pumped, but not in new fields.

They've destroyed the nuclear industry because ideologically they don't fit their straitjacket protocol or agenda.

And a lot of people, now they're at war with not just the white middle class, half of it left.

It's in Idaho, it's in Nevada, it's in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Texas.

It's gone.

It's at war with an ascendant Mexican-American, Central American, Asian-American working class.

We'll see what this recall bodes for, but I can tell you that if somebody just drove throughout the Central Sierra Forest, and when you see acres and acres, we're talking, you know, 400,000 acres of once beautiful forest that had beetle infestations that could have been harvested for wood that's short.

And you see what there is today, it looks like Verdun.

Charcoal, and I wrote on our website, took pictures of it.

It's really funny when you talk to people who's lost their homes in that conflagration, they say to you, I can't get anybody to work.

There's nobody who would build my cabin and I can't afford the lumber.

And you say, well, wait a minute, look over there.

There's all this lumber they're trying to harvest.

And California is one of the richest lumber states in the country.

And

it's still got one of the higher unemployment rates because we're paying people not to work.

And they said, well, that's the problem, Victor.

We can't harvest our wood and we can't make people work.

So I can't get my cabin built.

So we'll see what the frustration is.

And the same applies to water as well we're letting water go out to the ocean and rather than to agriculture and

ultimately gavin newsom and his ilk believe that when he gets up in the morning and he opens a stainless steel refrigerator there is no such thing as a steel industry and when he gets on his granite counter to make his latte there is no such thing as a granite mining industry and when he walks on his number one grade oak floor there is no lumber industry and when he leans against his wall reinforced by two by sixes there is no Douglas fir in his home.

And when he comes out and waters his great,

tastefully English garden, there is no such thing as water that's pumped from the ground or delivered from a surface source.

And he believes that because he's never had to believe it, he's never been around people.

If Gavin Newfusen, the best thing could happen for Gavin Newsom is he could just say, you know what, I'm taking a month vacation and I'm going to move to Bakersfield.

And I'm going to rent an apartment and talk to people and see how they live.

And then he might get caught or might get woke for a second.

He's done a lot of damage.

This state, it's tragic, Jack.

We had Ronald Reagan, George Duke Majin, Pete Wilson, even Arnold Schwarzenegger, as bad as he was.

We almost had 32 years of good governance.

And now we have super majorities of leftists in state legislatures, no statewide officers other than leftists.

super majority of congressional representatives.

I think we had seven.

Now we only have 12 of 53 seats that are Republican in the U.S.

Congress.

Both senators are all going to be leftist.

And people got what they wanted.

And guess what?

They don't like it.

Yeah.

And

we drove the other day back from Stanford to here.

When I started there, it was a two-hour and 45-minute drive.

And we would say to ourselves, well, we're on the two-lane.

As soon as we get to the four-lane, this traffic jam, we get to the four lane and it's just as bad.

Or, wow, they're doing all of this construction.

Well, are you seeing that guy?

He's just sitting his bulldozer.

That guy is just sitting on the side of the road.

Wow, this construction zone, it says reduce speed to 45.

There's not a worker in sight.

It's been, it looks like it's some archaeological dig.

And that's California.

Is that the infamous 99?

Oh, the Infus 99 is a killer.

And everybody who comes to the, I have a lot of people that come up here from Los Angeles.

or even Sacramento, they drive down and they say, what in the world happened at that place called Delano de Visalia?

The lanes went down to just nothing and the people driving them are insane.

And there's litter, there's brooms, there's lawnmowers, there's everything all over the road.

And it just takes one accident to shut down the major north-south lateral in the state.

I could go on, but

I don't want to, I don't get you.

Yeah, don't get me.

Okay.

Well, that's all the time we have anyway.

So Victor, thanks to our listeners who have checked out this edition of The Classicist and who also listened to The Traditionalist.

I'm fortunate enough to co-host both of those shows that are under the Victor Davis-Hansen Show umbrella.

And there's also The Culturalist with Sammy Wink.

So we hope folks listen to that too.

Victor, thanks again for sharing your wisdom.

We look forward to another, the follow-up episode on the hoop snake.

So that's coming out on victorhanson.com.

Folks, again, do check out that website and do think about ordering The Dying Citizen, which will be published formally and off the presses in this coming October.

It's going to be an extremely important book.

Thanks all.

If you subscribe to the Victor Davis Hanson Show on the podcast platform that you prefer, if it happens to be iTunes, please consider leaving a review of five stars and even a comment about

the wisdom shared by our host.

Please do not mention the inadequacies of the co-host.

Thanks very much, Victor.

You have a great week, and we'll be back next week on another edition of The Classicist.

Thank you very much, Jack, and thank everybody for listening.