The Classicist: The Roots of Left Ideology and Its Detritus

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

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

He's also a best-selling author, and he's got a book coming out in October that is certain to be another bestseller.

It's called The Dying Citizen.

How do you find out about it?

How do you pre-order it?

Go to VictorHanson.com.

That's Victor's website, Private Papers.

You'll find a ton of original material there, some of which we're going to talk about in a minute.

But you'll also find a link to The Dying Citizen.

I strongly encourage folks to pre-order.

Victor is an essayist at American Greatness, farmer, classicist, military historian.

He is the editorial guru of Hoover's very important online journal, Strategica.

Check that out.

VictorHanson.com, private papers, is one of the basis for the things we will talk about on The Classicist.

And my name is Jack Fowler, for what it matters.

I am the former publisher of National Review.

I'm the co-host, and I'm the director of American Philanthropic's Center for Civil Society.

Today, Victor, we're going to talk about some of the lengthy pieces you've written

for your website.

They're both under the category, two of them are under the category of Eeyore.

And as you know, all of us have a little Eeyore in us.

Some of us have more of an Eeyore than others.

And that's seeing the glass not 95% full, but 5% empty.

But Victor's Eeyore is talking about the first one is living in the kingdom of lies, and we certainly are.

And then another essay, it's two parts combined.

When is some hatred, some racism okay?

We'll also talk about a couple of woke matters.

There is a piece from the Daily Signal, that's a Heritage Foundation publication, about a head of a foundation who battled back and kind of defeated a woke staff that were trying to take down the foundation.

We have a kind of a crank of a psychoanalyst.

Yeah, Dr.

Moss, who's writing published pieces in professional journals that being white is a perversion.

We have the editor of National Geographic urging people to put their race qualifications on their emails as their sign-off.

And we're going to use the classicist on occasion to talk about things California.

And our friends at the California Policy Center, Ed Ring, who was the former head of it and writes frequently for the CPC, has an interesting piece.

on how people can fix California.

And Victor, being a resident of that, of the Golden State, like him to give his two cents on that.

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so uh victor let's start off by looking at some of the pieces that you have written for your website and let's take the living in the kingdom of lies.

Uh, this begins with a very, very short, it's a very short beginning.

Isn't it true that almost every big news story of the last four years has proved to be an utter lie?

And you include uh the Reichstag, as you call it, the Reichstag capital coup, a bat and a word for fecal matter, not guano, uh, the old Joe Biden from Scranton myth, uh, the satanic Andrew Cuomo deification, the great Dr.

Fauci icon hoax.

Victor,

you go into great detail

in this combined piece, two pieces originally.

And there's a nice picture in here of lies and more lies over

an iceberg, which means there's a lot more below the surface.

So Victor, we're living in a kingdom of lies.

Would you tell us about some of the big ones?

Yeah, I think what I meant by that is I think all of our listeners, we just sort of walk around like zombies.

And when Dr.

Fauci comes on and says, wear two masks,

or even if you're vaccinated and you're with people who are vaccinated and you're outside, as you did until recently, still wear a mask or get your 12-year-old child vaccinated with an unproven, in some cases, vaccination as far as it pertains to young children.

We don't listen to him anymore.

We don't.

And we say to him mentally,

go back and explain why you funded this gain of function, but don't tell me.

I don't believe you anymore.

And the same thing is true about Andrew Cuomo.

When he starts getting on there and doing this macho,

I am going to tell you this, and I'm going to do this.

And I'm a New York ethnic, and I'm a savvy guy, and I'm a brawl.

We just say, you know what?

We've heard it.

You put people in the restroom.

They died.

You lie, people die.

We don't want to hear it anymore.

We got your little award from Hollywood.

You were writing a book to make, what, I don't know, $5 million why you should have had your eye on the ball.

And then you do the shtick with your mediocrity, your brother on CNN.

And we don't want to hear it anymore.

We're done with it.

We're done.

We just don't listen to it anymore.

And I think I could go on, but we're doing that with a lot of the things.

There's this dropout that we don't want to hear the lies, that we're dropping out.

And I've called in the past a monastery of the mind.

And, you know, I think it's also the same way when you turn on the television, if you happen to see somebody pontificating on network news or cable news about race, this, race, that, or you go to work and somebody's lecturing on race, race, race, and somebody at the university is saying race, race, race.

You're just saying, you know what?

I'm not supposed to think this, but these people are really racist.

They really do believe that race determines who you are and it's the most important principle in the world, not the content of our character.

They don't like what Martin Luther King was trying to do.

They are not integrationists.

They do not want assimilation between the different races.

They do not want integration.

These are Balkan people.

They really like society organized along the lines of the former Yugoslavia or what we saw in Iraq with religious sects or what we

see in other countries in the world, you know, in the Middle East or in Africa.

They are tribal people, all of them.

And they, and this is scary.

They do not like like the majority population.

Let's say it, they don't like white people.

They hate them.

And I'm not just saying that, and I'm not trying to create divisions.

And I want to be very clear.

When you have a professor at Bernard, and he says, Ben-Philippe, that he references a novel in which he dreams of gassing white people.

Or when you have a Yale invitee speaker, a psychiatrist, say that she has dreams of shooting white people people in the head, or you have a legal activist, I think Ellie Mistal, say, when I get out of this lockdown, I just can't put up with white people.

I don't want to be around them.

Or when you have Mr.

Young at the root, who writes for the New York Times saying

white people are the cause of all of these pathologies, whether it's climate change or anything that's wrong, it's white people.

And they start using words like, I don't want to be quote unquote exposed as if there's a virus in the air or these people quote infest then we we've heard that vocabulary away and we're all scared to say it because we're supposed to say well people of color can't be racist or it's a reaction to years of oppression no it's racism and it's starting to have an effect and by that i mean there are people on the street we just had a situation in san francisco with an amazon delivery person got in an argument uh she was a person quote unquote of color and the person white and she said, white privilege, and then she started to attack her.

And we've had a lot of these violent incidents against Jews in Los Angeles, against Jews in New York, against Asians, and the whole apparatus of this society has lied.

That's what I mean by kingdom of lied.

These are not, don't.

Don't believe what you see on these videos.

These are not African-American males that are attacking Asian Americans.

Hey, these are not Middle Eastern males that are attacking Jews.

That's just what you're, these are all ramifications of Donald Trump.

Well,

this bleeds into what you, I just want to clarify something because it bleeds into the other piece you wrote about

when is some hatred, some racism okay.

And there is a top-down, trickle-down effect here.

And if you just, let me read the very end of that piece.

And you wrote, look to history and find an example of any multiracial society that fared well once its various tribes became obsessed with their grievances and solidarity and used tribal venom to advance personal and career agendas.

The Civil War is a locus classicus that cost the lives of 700,000 Americans, left a century of national bitterness, racism, and impoverishment.

Otherwise, ask the Rwandans, the sect of Iraqis, the clans of the former Yugoslavia, the Lebanese, or the shock troops of the Ottomans that went into Armenia.

All this started with with rants.

I think this is the important part here.

All this started with rants from academics, politicians, activists, the professional classes about those who infest and expose.

So, yeah, your example of the Amazon incident, the Amazon deliverer incident,

somebody's inciting this.

And it's the

people

with PhD after their name or members of other elitist classifications.

Yeah, I mean, they're contextualizing the violence.

So if you're a criminal and you think that you're going to commit a criminal act and you're going to act against a different race and you think that race is

considered toxic or that people fantasize with degrees from Yale or from New York and they're fantasizing about killing these people, then you might think, well, you know, if I hit this person in the face, I kick her, I knock his teeth out, there's not going to be anything done because they're going to contextualize the violence that's somehow justified.

And that message is drifting down.

The irony, of course, is this is what the left has told us, that words matter and that we had to be very careful.

But now they're not talking about this at all.

In fact,

I think you could say the left is a little bit apprehensive because they have unleashed, they have sowed the wind, I should say, and they're reaping the whirlwind and they're making individual decisions about crime and violence that they're not talking about to us.

So most of these people on CNN and MSNBC who blame Donald Trump for anti-Asian violence and anti-Jewish violence and race-based violence, they are not

taking risk in being

in these areas of high crime because they don't think they're going to be exempt unless they can wear some sign and say, I'm woke.

Please go to, I'm not being facetious.

Remember during the riots, people had those signs on their stores.

right woke supporter but this is this is not going to end well it never does and the only way you can ever have a multiracial consensual society is to subordinate racial and tribal identification and replace it with a commonality of citizenship i.e american citizenship or you can go the other route And that is the Soviet route that had diverse people and they were all terrified in unison by Joseph Stalin or the Ottomans who anytime there was an ethnic or tribal uprising, they just send in the janissaries and that was that.

And so, but if you're going to have a modern multiracial democracy, look at India and look at Brazil and it doesn't work out too well.

And we're getting to that point right now.

And these people have deliberately incited racial tensions and violence.

And they think it's going to accrue them political power.

But I think it's one of the most dangerous things I've ever seen in my lifetime because

a lot of people are getting very, very angry about it.

You can't just ask a, you can't ask 70% of the population to sit there every night and be told or read that they're somehow culpable.

And then when they get up in the morning and go to work, that they have to go through, if they're a Lockheed executive or a colonel in the military, to have some person making, you know, $300,000 a year tell them that there's a sophisticated Freudian analysis that really shows you that they're guilty sort of kind of of a microaggression for which they have to apologize not just for privilege but for honor and privilege as if they didn't do anything, anything to earn what they've got.

Or we're going to go back through history and we're going to say, you know what?

All those people that died on D-Tay, that's not very important because, you know, they're all white.

Right.

And we're going to go back and we're going to look at the Oregon Trail and we're going to say, you know, it doesn't really matter that half the wagon people were scared and terrified and just died and the other half were courageous because they're all white people.

There were no individuals.

And the Native Americans, we're not going to say some of them, you know, ran buffalo off a cliff, very wasteful act, and some of them killed and tortured other Indian tribes, but we're just going to say they're all noble because they were victims.

And that's what these people are doing.

They're taking the individual out of history, past and present, and they're replacing them with these cosmic tapestries of melodramatic evil, oppression,

victimizers.

And

it's what we read about in Orwell.

Well, Victor,

it's not only people, as you know, ranting on

TV that's influencing the culture, but

really aggressive activity in the classroom.

So there's this incident.

I would like us to talk about some of these woke things a little more.

Megan Kelly and John McWhorter have gotten some publicity in the last couple of days for exposing this incident in New Jersey, where there's this very prestigious, very expensive $52,000 a year school called Dwight Englewood, where a teacher who's been there for several years, her name is

Dana Stangle-Plow.

She's resigned from the school.

And let me just read a little bit from her resignation.

letter.

She also, you should folks Google her.

She gives a very powerful video presentation of

this.

She says

she was a parent and she became a teacher because she liked how the school was,

but now she's leaving.

She says, Because I believe that Dwight Englewood is failing our students.

Over the past few years, the school has embraced an ideology that is damaging to our students' intellectual and emotional growth and destroying any chance at creating a true community among our diverse population, etc.

The school's ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals.

By the way, we're talking about, you know, 12-year-olds and 14-year-olds.

This is what they're teaching.

It requires them not to see themselves as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood.

They must locate themselves within the oppressor or oppressed group.

or some intersectional middle where they must reckon with being part oppressor and part victim.

The theory of power hierarchies is only one way of seeing the world, and yet it pervades Dwight Englewood as the singular way of seeing the world.

So kudos to,

and this is much more what she writes.

She actually, somewhere else in this story, the guy, the principal of the school or whatever his title is, he told the teachers earlier this year, if he could have fired them all, he would have to replace them.

with people of color.

This woman, Dana Stangle Plow, happens to be a white woman.

Victor, what's happening here at this elite prestigious school, training the kids that are going to go to our elite prestigious universities, I'm sure is happening

in many other places.

Yeah, I had three reactions to that.

The first was,

why do they exercise power and how do they get it and hold on to it?

And that

to do that, that was...

that requires either the quietude of all of us or the implied consent.

So when somebody resigns, that's the the first step.

But what if we were to say the most important thing in my life is not that my daughter got into Stanford.

Maybe she's going to go to Hillsdale or St.

Thomas Aquinas or St.

John.

So what if we redefine what is prestigious, not based on a cattle brand on your rear end, that is the BA from the college you graduate, but what you actually learned.

And what if people in mass started to defect, as they have from the NBA or the

audience of the NFL, about this construct, and that's what it is of an Ivy League or a prestigious prep school or college education.

So I think that that's something to really watch.

The second is

don't think that

because you

confess your white privilege or your honor and privilege or you're very wealthy, that you can navigate or very influential, that you can navigate your way around this.

It can affect everybody because once you unleash these furies,

nobody knows where they're going to go.

And that happened.

Remember, a lot of the Russian aristocrats in 1917 thought, you know, I can cut a deal with Lenin.

And I didn't, I always opposed the Tsar.

I wanted a constitutional republic and I can deal with it.

I can handle Lenin.

A lot of the German industrialists said, you know what, I didn't like Weimar.

It was neo-So.

I can deal with these national socialists.

A lot of people in China said, you know what, the nationalists were corrupt.

Mao is, you know, he's sort of an Abraham Lincoln.

The Americans kind of like him.

And so I can deal with him.

And it doesn't, and the same thing about, you know, Robespierre and the Jacobin.

It doesn't work.

You can't reason with critical race theory.

And I'd just like to finish, because we're kind of in an academic segment, the classicists.

Where did these ideas come from, Jack?

We say critical theory.

And then critical legal theory, it's bastard children, and critical racial theory, but they all have something in common.

And it started in in the 19th century with the two most destructive thinkers, I think, in the West have been Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.

Freud, remember, said that what we say and how we act are reflections of inner impulses and inner feelings that we have to unpack and find out because they're the real us.

When you say something, that's not necessarily who you are, what you don't say.

And of course, one would say, well, if it's really me, why don't I say it?

And that gives you this impulse, as you see, with a microaggression or a systemic racism.

You can't see racism

or you haven't been aggressive, but it's a Freudian micro-phenomenon.

And we can detect it just like Freud could detect it with psychoanalysis, with racial analysis.

And then Marx said there is no middle class, there's no middle way.

There's victims and victimized.

There's a binary.

And so they've taken that generic paradigm.

And then in the Flotsam of Jetsum of World War I and World War II, that when Europe committed collective suicide, there grew up in the Frankfurt School, this idea of critical theory.

And that said, you know, they lost confidence in their governments, their militaries, their art, their literature.

And in Germany, it's popped up as the Frankfurt School.

And they said, you know what?

These norms are just construct patriotism.

That's just because of people in command and have power, either because of their race or class, but mostly because of their class.

And we don't have to accept it.

And people in France after World War II and the humiliation of the French army, which collapsed in seven weeks in 1940, the postmodernists, the Lacans, the Foucaults, the Dairy Dogs, they said, you know what?

There are no facts, i.e., we didn't collapse.

It's just, you say we collapse.

That's because of your position of power.

What they are saying is rules, norms, they're just constructions of an elite to use to manipulate us.

They're machinations.

And so critical legal theory and their view said, you know what, if I shoplift, you say that's a crime only because you have a lot of things and I don't.

But what if that was a liberation, an act of liberation?

So you can see that in the BLM movement already when people are contextual, I think

Nicole Hannah-Jones contextualized at the height of the riots looting.

and said, you know, these are people that don't have anything.

That came from this critical race theory and the critical theory.

And then finally, it was Gramsky in Italy, you know, who said,

well, you know, it's very hard to bifurcate society on the on the basis of economics alone because there is some mobility and there's inheritances and there's luck and there's hard work and some people are poor and the next week they're rich, but that's not going to be enough for us to have permanent class warfare.

We need something else.

So he said there were cultural oppressions and cultural victims.

And we got out of critical race theory, then took that and said, yeah, it's race.

And race you can never change.

It's immutable.

Hope was a victim for the rest of her life.

So was LeBron James.

So were the Obamas.

Now you can give them all the money in the world, but they still have complaints against you.

And that Bakersfield forklift driver with one missing tooth who makes $25,000 a year and that guy out in southern Michigan who works on a family lathe, those guys are their oppressors.

You know why?

Because they're white.

And that's what critical race theory does.

It substitutes class considerations of marks and it substitutes for them race.

And you put all of that together, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, the French postmodernists and their forefathers, Marx and Freud, and you get to this bastardized mishmash mess of critical race theory, which all these half-educated people are being told is some universal law of physics that has to be true.

And it's not, just a joke.

And until we say this emperor is absolutely naked, he has no robes on, we need some little boy in the crowd to say, the clothes are not nice.

He doesn't have any.

And then I think it will dissipate and dissipate very quickly.

Victor, you mentioned patriotism.

And I hadn't put this on our little agenda today, but that, and I forget her name, the New York Times editorial board member who made a kerfuffle earlier this week about how

disheartening, dispiriting,

frightening, whatever, something about the American flag and patriotism.

Looking at the flag was something she saw as a symbol of oppression.

And we can, we'll look back next week, but well, this is the 11th, and this will be broadcast after June 14th.

June 14th happens to be Flag Day.

And you know,

Every year the president is supposed to issue a proclamation on Flag Day, about Flag Day and Flag Week, and has, Obama, everyone, for years.

It's the law.

There hasn't been any yet from Joe Biden.

I just really wonder how much in sync he is with this,

what we're calling mothers birthing people.

We didn't have a proclamation by tradition as we normally have for D-Day.

So anyway, I think we'll return to the issue of woke

CRT and patriotism in the next episode, but I'm betting there'll be no proclamation.

I think there'll be something to talk about.

No, there can't be because Joe Biden is a prisoner.

I think that woman's name was Mara Gay.

I think it was Gay, yeah.

Yeah, and she was the one that said, you know, American-ness is the same as whiteness.

That's what she said.

And she doesn't like whiteness, therefore she doesn't like Americanness.

And if somebody shows the flag or has a bumper sticker that's critical of Biden and therefore they are promoting whiteness, whiteness, and Americanness, and she doesn't want any part of that.

She never answers the question, though,

why people feel so comfortable in the United States and why people are so invested into it and why she's so freely critical of the United States, you never ask herself, where did these traditions that allow me to have free speech, a constitutional government, a free market economy, paradigm that allows people of different races and genders to be equal and to be successful,

an independent judiciary, a bill of rights, where did all this come from?

Is this whiteness?

Because we're not supposed to use, remember the OMB said you can't, I think it was the OMB

and the Federal Reserve and people like that said you can't use the word founding fathers anymore.

But where did it come from?

It came from the Western tradition and the Enlightened tradition.

And I'm not the one that's equating it with whiteness.

I don't think it has, I mean, whiteness to me is are my ancestors in hides and horns up in Scandinavia while darker Mediterranean people in Rome and Greece were crafting civilization.

So for me, it's...

Yes.

So, well, no,

I'm half Irish, so I have to admit that my other people were, we won't, they were very tribal in Ireland as well, but not the not the Greeks and the Italians.

So it's not, it's not whiteness, but it's a, it's a paradigm, a cultural paradigm.

And all these critics take it for granted and they're born into it, and they think they can just completely trash it and then lie about it and say it's racial and never nourish it.

And I think that if they're not careful, we're going to lose it because it requires every generation, some people to have gratitude.

So when she says, you know,

that these Trump voters and the flag and all of this don't share, what is she talking about?

I was a professor, Jack, for 21 years at Cal State Fresno.

And I would say 75% of my classic students were Hispanic or

of Central American lineage or African American or a lot of Southeast Asian.

And then I had 25%, 30%

white.

And I think that I could say with confidence of those white students, zero were wealthy.

None have ever taken Latin in high school.

None went to prep school.

They were all the working classes.

And I'd say half of that 30, 15% were the children of the Oklahoma diaspora, the grandchildren, Steinbeck's grandchildren.

Okay.

So when I found brilliant students, and I did often, and I would counsel them, and they wanted to get a degree from Harvard and Law.

They wanted to go to Stanford Medical School, they wanted to get a PhD in classics at

New York University, whatever it was, or just a teaching credential.

I started with a premise after calling these universities and trying to prep their applications and working with independent studies in depth.

I found out something that the first questions I got were on the phone:

is it a she?

Is it a minority?

Is it a minority?

Is it a minority?

And so when I finally were able to place, I think, 55 students over 20 years in the Ivy League or Stanford or Berkeley, I was feeling pretty good about myself.

But I had a very brilliant, he might have been the most brilliant student I ever had.

I won't mention his name, but he was a complete rebel.

And I mean every aspect of the rebel.

He did not like the institutions of higher learning, but he could read Latin and Greek brilliantly.

And I would sight read Latin with him, and he was just as good as I was after one year.

He was brilliant.

And he came into my office and he wanted to go to graduate.

So we got him a very good

admission to a great university, but not at the same tier as others.

And he said to me, all you do is promote minorities.

You don't care about white people.

I said, I do care about white people.

I care about brown people.

I care about yellow.

I don't care about their adjective.

I care about students.

And he said, well, why do they get in and I don't get in as well?

Because I'm the best student.

He was very arrogant.

I said, well, you're too damn arrogant to start off with.

But more importantly, you were very brilliant.

But I'm not creating this system.

I'm trying to work within it.

And this is the system.

And this is what they tell me.

It's a racialist system.

And he said, well, I never had anything.

And he didn't.

He was very poor.

And so what I'm getting at, Jack, is that that was the reality before George Floyd.

This was the reality of a $11 trillion investment in the great society.

And this was the reality of 50 years, a half century of affirmative action.

And so we're going to tell these kids that were born into this system, these white working class kids, you are an oppressor.

You have honor.

And we're going to say that Don Lamon, that that's his name, that he is a victim of these people?

I don't think so.

So that's...

That's something that they have a rendezvous with.

They're going to have to tell two generations of work.

I'm not worried about the wealthy white people I see on TV or I see its professors.

Hell with them.

They have every privilege in the world.

There is such a thing called white privilege.

They do very well with the old boy network.

The Clintons, I'm going to intern here.

I'll call Stanford up to get one of the Obama daughters in Stanford.

They take care of themselves, whatever their race.

But there is a white elite.

I'm talking about the vast majority of working class white people.

They have not had privilege, and some people have had privilege because of their race.

And what critical racial theory says is, oh, yes,

but when you go to a Swiss boutique and you're Oprah and you want to look at that $38,000 purse and somebody says it's kind of expensive, I don't want to reach up and get it, then you suffer racism.

Or when Michelle Obama says, when somebody asks me at Target when I'm incognito and I'm tall to pick down a package, then she expects me to serve her because she's white.

So that's that's their argument.

I would call those, you know, just these small microaggressions or hoaxes or fantasies.

But we've got to be very careful when we go down this racial line and just forget about class because

class is important and it's more important than race.

It's not the ultimate arbiter.

It is fluid.

And it doesn't mean that we're going to have a Marxist strife.

But there are class considerations, and my experience have trumped race every time.

Yeah, I would definitely agree with that.

Victor, we have about 10 minutes left to talk about two pieces, and maybe I'll just mention,

I don't know that we really have time for it, but I thought we would talk about the National Geographic Editor-in-Chief, Susan Goldberg, who created this stink earlier this week with this effort that she's trying to launch.

That when people sign off their email name, title, that beneath that, they'd have a six-word assessment of their racial standing, where hers, she put white, privileged, with much to learn.

And it's just so sanctimonious

and nauseating to me.

But

just another example of this elitist class trying to

virtue signal.

Yeah, that's a performative act.

She's not serious.

She's not going to pay any price.

If somebody rejoins to her, wait a minute, you have much to learn.

Why don't you take off for a year and go to Parliament, California or Salma, California, where it's 90, 85% Hispanic, and live with the people that really live that working class minority life and see what you learn and see how what they think of you.

And see,

she's never going to do that.

And give her, and give her, as we've talked about before, give her job to a black person.

Yeah, or better yet, step down and say, you know what, I have honor and privilege.

We're all collectively sick of the

CEO, the foundation president, the provost, the dean that writes these nauseating letters.

I have honor and privilege.

Well, if it's unearned, then get out.

You didn't earn it.

You would confess that.

It's kind of like the Princeton psychodramas when they said, we have a racist university.

And the Trump administration said, well, you know, it's against the law to give money to racist universities.

So put your hands on the hood of the car, right?

Exactly.

All right, well, Victor, we have two pieces.

Let's uh talk about one uh briefly.

It's a more positive uh piece.

Uh, I somebody sent it to me, it's uh earlier this week.

It's by the Daily Signal, which is a great daily publication by uh Heritage Foundation, and it's a piece written by Grace Daniel.

That's a pseudonym.

Grace Daniel and her husband created and run a not-for-profit.

It um it helps uh people who are

international agency that uh provides care for survivors of trauma.

So they launched this thing in 2010.

It's going along swimmingly.

She writes, we were pleased with the success of our organization for the first several years.

But around 2016, we noticed a change.

My husband, who serves as the executive director, eventually found himself uneasy among his staff.

The general tone.

was one of criticism.

It wasn't explicitly directed at him at first, but toward systems, hegemony, normativity.

We were not acquainted with critical theory at the time, but the common rhetoric about quote-unquote systems of power and oppression was an indicator that there was a shared perception of reality among the team members to which we were not privy.

So this Grace Daniel and her husband initiated these sessions to hear from staff and discern what was happening.

What usually happened was the staff made vague assertions that the organization was causing harm and would present a list of demands.

I came later to understand these meetings were essentially struggle sessions, an opportunity for our woke employees to shame us into submission, a technique often used in Mouse China.

Now, the point of this piece, and it goes on at some length, is that this couple fought back.

And it was important to fight back by educating themselves on what critical race theory was and what was the rhetoric being used and how to fight back on these rhetorical terms when thrown in their face.

So it's kind of, to me, an inspiring somebody.

They fought back and they prevailed.

Victor, any thoughts on this or the premise of, folks, if you want to engage and prevail, you've really got to learn what the enemy's thesis and theory is?

Yeah, I think you...

you do, and you also have to, they use this term locate, locate the environment in which these people are making this charge.

Most of the time, again, Jack, we're talking about elite people in the professions and academia and K through 12 administration.

Every time we talk about these incidents, there's a particular profile of a privileged person.

And so then that begs the question, why are they doing this?

Because life is doing very well.

Are they doing it because out of, I don't know, Christian duty, they want to turn the other cheek?

They want to reify the lesson of the Sermon on the Mount.

I don't think so.

I think they either do it because they are very fortunate and they feel guilty about it, but not guilty enough to give up their job.

So they perform these virtue signals,

or

they have been instructed that education and knowledge is not inductive inquiry, but it's a totalitarian dogma to advance.

So they go to these foundations and immediately they have this agenda, and that's what they were taught in university but and they mount these platitudes and so these two decided to call them on it because there was no they're there and I think that's a really good lesson when you talk to these kids and you just ask them questions and I don't mean kids chronologically but these puerile minds they don't have an answer they really don't because it's dogma it's like saying to somebody in 1938 in the Soviet Union,

why do you think the Kulaks were enemies of the people?

And you won't get an answer?

Or why did Stalin move the Volga Germans en masse?

And you won't get an answer.

Or why did he wipe out all the Polish?

They won't get an answer.

They'll just get dogma.

And so they're not equipped to argue because they've just memorized some talking points.

So I think that's really good.

And it opens up another line of inquiry.

I think it was, and you read first things probably more than I do, but I don't know him.

You probably do.

Is it R.R.

Reno?

Is that right?

Rusty Reno, yeah.

Yeah.

He wrote a very interesting piece about why he wasn't going to hire any Ivy League people.

Right.

And he kind of had a typology of the type of Ivy League people that he had in the past.

And he said that either you're going to get people who are entirely indoctrinated and their mission, Aries, zeal, when they arrive and work for you is we're going to find an oppression, a microaggression.

We're going to find out who did it and we're going to get a name for ourselves by rooting it out.

and therefore they're going to subvert the entire orderly process of work or

they're going to be so beaten down

and have made so many accommodations throughout their undergraduate years at these elite schools and they've sacrificed so much principle for survival that you really don't want them

or

they have had to be so combative to you know they're sort of like you know they're sort of like a pit bull that has been thrown into a family of tigers

and they've had to bite, bite, bite, bite.

But whatever the typology of these alternatives are, he doesn't want them around.

And he says, if you go to a St.

John's or St.

Thomas Aquinas or a Hillsdale student, you get back to perfectly adjusted people.

And so when you start to look at all of these people's lives, they're not very well adjusted.

Some of them are, but most of them, it's politics 360, 24-7.

And

they're zealots and they're taught to be zealots.

And maybe you should just disengage from them and just say, I know that when I am at my job

in my office, if somebody comes in and says, I'm a student and I did it,

and they give me the resume and then they start in with some dogma.

I don't listen to it.

It makes zero impression at all.

If somebody calls up and said, I want to be be an intern,

I went to Harvard.

If somebody calls up and said, if I say to them, what did you study?

What's your major?

Which books did you like?

What did you do before you went to college?

Where did you grow up?

And it's interesting and different.

Yeah.

But we've really got something wrong in this country where these helicopter parents prep, prep, prep, prep, and they send these kids to these indoctrination centers that have these impressive names on it, and they don't care really whether they learn anything or not.

And then they come out indoctrinated, and then we send them to professional schools.

And then somewhere around the age of 40, they've heard all this crazy stuff, either not to get married or not to have kids or to devote your life to woke issues, and they're very unhappy.

And they take that unhappiness out on the rest of us, and we're supposed to put up with it because they have a BA from Harvard.

It's not going to work anymore, is what Reno is saying.

I think he's right, right.

Yeah, Victor, I got to tell you this little anecdote.

And then we got one more thing to talk about quickly but I live not too far from Yale and tend to go to an event there once a year and usually seated with some students nice nice enough kids but I start a little game of I'm gonna ask them about what non-profit they started and every one of them does you know and can you imagine you're 16 years old and you're starting it

I thought a not-for-profit for you know bringing soap to Lithuania I don't know you know how they can

it's so un

not normal So, you know, kudos.

I asked a guy that

because a Stanford student, I really like a lot of the conservative Stanford students, especially.

And he came in about three years ago.

And I said, so he was telling me he just got in Stanford.

He had the, you know, the 4.9 or whatever it is and the perfect SAC, but that wouldn't even got him in.

So I said, he said, well, there's this third category called community service or cultural enrichment.

And

he said they value that because for the people who, you know, can't do the other two, this is the big thing, but we all have to do the third thing.

It's a way of signaling that you're woke.

So you're not just some right-wing guy gets in on merit.

So I said, what did you do?

And he said, well, I thought about it.

So I cooked up an idea

summer after my junior year of going to some, I don't know, UN program and helping build a well in some African country.

And he said, we just went there and hung around.

We built a little well and I came home.

And then after that I created this mystique that I was worried about the other and I did something concrete and it might have been the kernel of truth to it but he was entirely cynical in his reference right yeah that's what that's what we're creating Jack we're creating an Eastern European circa 1955 cynicism yeah where

you know I was a visit I'll just finish very quickly when I was a visiting professor in 1991 the classics department at Stanford and I had a student that came in and he was brilliant as well.

And he was taking a class.

He said, I want you to see this paper I wrote for my history class.

And I started laughing.

I said,

what does this mean?

He says, you know, the phallocentric

interplay between power nexus and the rhetoric of manhood.

And it all was centered in the construction.

Yeah, the construction of the poetics of sex.

And I said, where did you get all this?

He said, well, I just

started recording the lectures of my professors.

And I started to know every time I saw a repetition of words, I put them down.

And then I did a word count.

And so I made sure my essay had

20 of her most common words, 15, 10, 5.

And then my friends did it.

And we got, there's three of them.

And we got down to maybe less than three words that the professor used ad nauseum.

We weren't going to to get a good grade because they had to do two or three papers.

But once I hit on this formula and I repeated it 15 times all of the buzzwords, I got an A.

And think of the cynicism involved in that

in the work.

That's strategic thinking, though.

Well, Victor, speaking of strategic thinking, we'll end this episode of The Classicist, where on occasion we'll talk about your home state of California.

And the good folks at California Policy Center

they publish some wonderful material

regularly.

Ed Ring writes them.

Ed, I think, was the president of CPC at one time.

And I know he writes for American Greatness also every once in a while.

For all I know, Victor, you probably know Ed, but

he has a piece published earlier this month,

How the People Can Fix California.

And essentially,

the only real recourse, but it's not a bad recourse left to folks, is the state ballot initiative, which is, you know, as you know when you vote there,

lots of important and consequential things are done.

Of course, lots of billions are allocated.

Victor, I don't know if you got to read the piece, but

as a resident of the state, do you think that's probably the case, given the supermajorities of leftists hold in the legislature?

Should whatever conservatives are left in California really think of a strategy that relates to using the ballot initiative as a way to fight back?

Yeah, I think so.

I think what he's getting at is there's a stigma to say that you are a Republican or a conservative, and then you're going to

back a Republican or conservative candidate.

And that's where we have a super majority in California of Democrats in both houses of the legislature.

We don't have one,

unless you count something like the state Board of Equalization member, but we don't have one statewide office holder who's a Republican.

We don't have a Republican governor.

We have no Republican senators.

I think we only have, we're up to 12 out of 52 or three House members that are Republicans.

So that's blocked, Jack,

official legislation and executive action.

So then you're saying, well, what if we went directly to the people and quote unquote under a non-partisan or bipartisan initiative?

And where he gets his confidence is we did this this last election

in 2020, in November, when there was a ballot initiative that said we are going to overturn Proposition 209 and we're going to allow race to be used.

Not that they don't do it anyway illegally, but at least we're going to make it legal.

And guess what?

It lost and lost fairly easily.

In other words, minorities, because we are In California, the so-called white population, if there is such a thing, is about 39% of the population.

So it required a lot of minority input, and they didn't want it.

And then when you looked at trying to really clamp down on Uber and contract gig drivers and gig jobs where people wanted the flexibility and the freedom to go out and make, you know, up to 20 or 30 bucks an hour or whatever, and yet not have to be controlled by the government or unions or healthcare, that freedom won.

And so there were rays of sunshine on the ballot initiative, and there always had been in California, whether it was three strikes and you're out, or the original 209 or Prop 187 that was thrown.

And usually they're thrown out by court.

Where I differ from him is that Trump did not get a chance to work with the California Appellate Court appointees, or he had no chance with California Superior Court judges.

His only chance was the Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court.

And that has not been balanced yet.

He's close.

So, what I'm getting at is if you're going to pass 187 and say, if you come here illegally, there's consequences.

You're not going to get free entitlements.

You're going to lose because three days after that was passed, it was thrown out by the federal court.

So, a lot, you can have all the ballot initiatives you want, but if you have a hardcore activist left-wing judiciary, state or federal, it's going to be very hard.

Well, Victor,

we've got a few seconds left.

We're about to run run out of time.

But it was great, again, hearing you talk about these cultural issues and local issues on the classicist.

Thank you.

Thank our listeners.

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Victor, that's about it.

And we will be back next week with two new episodes for the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

One's the traditionalist, the other's the classicist.

This is the classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler.

Thanks very much, folks, for listening.

Thank you, and thank you for turning in again.

I hope to see you guys next week.