The coming death of ‘citizenship’ and how to stop it
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
167.67897
Summary
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist who for decades has been teaching and writing about Ancient Greece. He also uses his knowledge of yesterday to help us understand the issues we face today via his books, columns, and appearances on popular programs like The Tucker Carlson Show. His new book is The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hi everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Full Comet. I'm Anthony Fury. Don't forget
00:00:07.940
to subscribe to this show to learn when new episodes are posted. Our guest today is Victor
00:00:12.160
Davis Hanson. He is a classicist who for decades has been teaching and writing about ancient Greece,
00:00:17.280
but he also uses his knowledge of yesterday to help us understand the issues we face today
00:00:21.500
via his books, columns, and appearances on popular programs like The Tucker Carlson Show.
00:00:25.840
His new book is a must-read, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization
00:00:32.740
are Destroying the Idea of America. Victor Davis Hanson joins us now. Hello, Professor. Great to
00:00:39.260
have you on the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks very much for joining us. Before we
00:00:43.940
get into these great ideas that you're unpacking in the book, I wanted to take a moment to ask you
00:00:49.600
about the COVID situation in your country right now, and I guess in your state, California, because
00:00:55.020
one thing I find very interesting is when I'll have a friend travel to a part of the U.S. or
00:00:59.660
the U.K. or even another part of Canada, they always come back and they're like, oh, wow,
00:01:03.420
they're doing it so differently there. I mean, things are just so different, and I see in the
00:01:06.440
news in the U.S. there's jurisdictions where, you know, people don't even talk about it anymore,
00:01:11.640
but then there's other places where, you know, kids are still wearing masks outdoors. What's
00:01:15.240
going on there right now? Part of it is, it's somewhat similar to your system of provinces,
00:01:22.820
but we, our federalist system of, you know, we are not 330 million people in aggregate. We're 50
00:01:30.540
states, and the Constitution says that the powers not delineated in it are relegated to the state,
00:01:38.200
so that means that these COVID restrictions, while they're scientifically quote-unquote based,
00:01:45.360
they vary in terms of culture and geography and politics. So, as a general, but not an absolute
00:01:52.320
rule, those people in red states, that is more conservative or traditional states, generally allow
00:01:59.380
people a greater degree of discretion about exercising caution. All, I don't know of any red state
00:02:06.100
governor hasn't urged people to be vaccinated, but they have suggested that people should be entrusted
00:02:12.760
with their own health decisions, rather than in the blue state model, in which the state government
00:02:19.860
then comes in and tells the citizen, if you don't have a vaccination card, you can't eat, for example,
00:02:27.820
in New York or San Francisco. And the problem with it is that in this divided country, the blue
00:02:35.800
states have said that they are following the science. But when you break that down, and you
00:02:41.760
see that much of the science suggests that people with naturally acquired immunities have comparable,
00:02:48.500
if not in some cases, superior immunity to those that were acquired, acquired it through vaccinations,
00:02:55.960
there's no avenue for them to have equality. What I mean by that is you could have a soldier,
00:03:01.320
they got a bad case of COVID. And this is not an abstraction, 100 million Americans, almost one out
00:03:07.560
of three have had COVID and have immunity. But that soldier, if he chooses not to get a vaccination,
00:03:15.720
will be given a dishonorable or excuse me, a less than honorable or just a general discharge from the
00:03:20.600
military. It's almost as if and this was sort of coming out of the brain of Dr. Fauci,
00:03:26.280
the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases under the CDC. So it's kind of an
00:03:34.120
incoherent. And that's what a lot of the protests I think are about. When we when you hear about all
00:03:40.200
these protests, I know it's a lot of it is from some communities that are less than representatively
00:03:47.480
vaccinated, the Latino community, the black community, the poor white rural community.
00:03:51.400
But a lot of the anger is of that hundred million that some of whom were not vaccinated,
00:03:57.000
they don't feel they should be. And they have not yet been given a scientific explanation
00:04:02.440
why they should be denied be denied constitutional rights of association and expression
00:04:08.920
by a fiat or an edict by a non elected bureaucrat like Anthony Fauci.
00:04:14.280
One thing I find very bizarre, very troubling is that a year and a half into this, you'd think,
00:04:18.920
okay, you know, we got the vaccines. And then to your point, many people have had this already. And
00:04:22.440
we kind of, you know, we'd be out of it, or we'd be out of the worst of it, or the worst of the sort
00:04:26.600
of societal divisiveness. But I find in some respects, like to your point about the persons in
00:04:31.880
the military, I mean, I've gotten emails recently from nurses who have just been fired or will be
00:04:36.280
fired. And because they haven't taken the vaccine, and our vaccination rates are much higher in the
00:04:40.680
United States, we're close to 90%. And, you know, we went into lockdown more recently, the last
00:04:46.280
lockdown because, oh, you got to protect the healthcare system. Now we're firing a bunch
00:04:49.640
of nurses. And then there's arguments over, you know, parents have to be vaccinated to watch their
00:04:55.000
children play hockey in the hockey rinks and so forth. And this is the stuff that's really just,
00:04:59.000
you know, tearing communities apart. I'm like, wow, this far down the line. And in some sense,
00:05:05.880
Yeah, I think an outsider might look at this and empirically conclude that there are a lot of
00:05:12.280
unelected, and I talk about the unelected and the dying citizen, but there's a lot of unelected
00:05:16.840
people who combine executive, legislative, and judicial power. These are cabinet secretaries,
00:05:25.880
EPA, the CDC, the FDA, and they got into a frame of mind where they were given enormous powers from
00:05:34.120
the citizens. And they don't want to relinquish them. And I'll give you an example. When in the world
00:05:39.800
did the CDC decide whether a rent contract was valid or not? In other words, in the United States,
00:05:46.760
if the CDC declares a national threat, and it has, then that contractual arrangement between two
00:05:55.560
private providers is interrupted. And the renter doesn't have to pay rent to the landlord, even
00:06:01.480
though a lot of the landlords are very poor, in some cases no wealthier or even poorer than the
00:06:05.480
person renting them. And so it's that type of power that's been assumed, and they don't want to give
00:06:11.640
it back. And yet, when you look again empirically, where I live in California, we're very proud of our
00:06:18.920
quarantines and our vaccination rates. But if you look at the actual deaths per million residents,
00:06:25.640
and you compare it with states half our size and population like Texas and Florida, they've been
00:06:31.320
relatively wide open. We're not that different. We're about the same. And that really raises
00:06:37.000
existential questions. Why did we impair our economy? Why is our unemployment rate higher?
00:06:44.600
Why? Why? Why? When these other states, their attitude was essentially, this virus is not going to go
00:06:50.920
away, but we can deal with it. It may mutate, it may do this or that, but it relatively stays predictably
00:06:59.160
lethal for people over 65 who have comorbidities, such as obesity, diabetes, cardio problems,
00:07:07.160
and we're going to concentrate on them. Quarantine people around them, and we're going to look at
00:07:12.680
therapeutics. We're going to give regimens, and we're going to save that vulnerable population.
00:07:18.360
But the rest of us, and I'm not in that group, but the group under 65 that's healthy,
00:07:24.600
it's about 99.8 to 99.9 likelihood you're going to die from it. And so those people can use proper
00:07:33.320
precautions, but it's not going to be that much different than a flu epidemic,
00:07:39.160
of which kills in a normal year anywhere from 20 to 70,000 people, unfortunately. But that message
00:07:45.560
should not sink in because of hysteria about the coronavirus. And now it's been so warped and
00:07:52.680
politicized. Part of it's been due to Dr. Fauci because he's given so many edicts from on high,
00:07:59.720
and then later admitted that he used the platonic lie to delude us. He said that you didn't need travel
00:08:07.080
bans, then you did need travel bans. You didn't need masks, then you should have a mask. And I only said
00:08:12.040
you didn't have to have masks, so you wouldn't run out and buy them all and short our medical
00:08:16.520
community. Then maybe two masks are better. But you know what? We'll be out of this at 60%
00:08:21.160
herd immunity, but maybe 70. But you know what? That would discourage people from getting vaccinations.
00:08:26.200
So maybe it's 90%. And then I had no, I don't even know what you're talking about. Why would the
00:08:33.160
National Institute of Allergy Infectious Diseases ever give $600,000 for virology research in Wuhan?
00:08:40.280
That's preposterous. Well, we gave it to the Echo Health Alliance. That was the Echo Health. We didn't
00:08:45.160
know what they did. Well, we routed it through them to the Chinese, but they didn't engage and gain
00:08:50.120
in function. And now we learned today that the National Institute of Health admits that American
00:08:57.560
money helped sponsor the type of research that likely led to a re-engineered gain-of-function
00:09:04.520
virus that likely escaped from a lab and is likely the culprit of this world pandemic.
00:09:11.080
And yet how many times was the mere questioning of whether or not that had taken place,
00:09:16.200
based on evidence that perhaps suggested it did, how many times was that mere discussion
00:09:20.680
labeled by Facebook or, you know, those fact checkers or wherever Reuters or Washington Post,
00:09:26.360
how often was that thread line labeled as misinformation? And now we come to the point
00:09:31.160
where you just said, yes, it's been validated as pretty much just what happened.
00:09:35.000
Yeah. I mean, it was a taboo subject. I know that as a fellow at the Hoover Institution with
00:09:41.720
professorial status as a senior fellow, like a Stanford faculty, I was attacked.
00:09:46.520
My colleague, Scott Atlas was attacked. Neil Ferguson was attacked. Another colleague at the
00:09:52.360
Hoover for suggesting, not that we were experts, although Scott is a doctor and an advisor to the
00:09:58.600
president of the United States, he was, that there was gain of function given the literature.
00:10:03.880
And there was no evidence whatsoever that any animal, a bat, a pangolin, anything had ever had this
00:10:10.200
virus in the natural world. And it was very suspicious. But at the time we said that over
00:10:15.880
a year ago, we were demonized and labeled that we were conspiracy theorists. We were Trump fanatic,
00:10:22.120
you name it. So there was an effort on the part of Dr. Fauci and the CDC and the FDA and the NIA
00:10:31.320
ID all to suppress open discussion and debate about the origins. And then without knowing the origins and
00:10:38.600
the transmissions and the landscape of how this developed, it really retarded any therapeutic
00:10:44.280
reaction to it. And now all of a sudden we learn, not only was it likely a gain of function engineered
00:10:51.000
virus at Wuhan, subsidized by the US government, but more importantly, the investigatory group that was
00:10:59.880
in charge of finding out the truth was headed by Peter Daszak, who was a recipient of Dr. Fauci's grant,
00:11:06.600
who routed it to the Chinese, who went to the Lancet, British Millet Medical Journal,
00:11:12.120
and under their auspices created a so-called disinterested group of investigators to tell us
00:11:18.840
in conjunction with the Chinese that this was impossible. Not only was there no biology lab
00:11:24.440
origins, but there was no gain of function research only to have now we're told that he was removed and
00:11:30.600
then he was biased and, you know, just forget all of that. And so the point I'm getting at is that in
00:11:37.160
a normal world, we would have had quarantine and traditional public health reactions to those who
00:11:46.440
were vulnerable once we had the data, and we had the data pretty early who was going to die from it,
00:11:51.400
and we would have isolated them. In New York, Governor Cuomo unleashed 15,000
00:11:59.240
positive corona patients into rest homes. So we didn't do that, and they all, most of those people
00:12:03.960
died. But we would have protected that population, and then we would have not destroyed the economy,
00:12:10.200
and we're going to probably end up with a higher toll as information starts to leak and dribble in that
00:12:17.240
for the last 18 months there were millions of Americans that were denied access because of
00:12:24.040
the quarantine to things like breast exams, mammograms, PSA tests, liver scans, that now have
00:12:31.880
serious diseases that might have been not so serious had them been detected early. So there was a terrible,
00:12:36.920
that's besides the economic cost. And then we've made it kind of a cult that if anybody were to
00:12:43.080
objective all of what I described, they were somehow apostates or renegades or conspiracists,
00:12:49.640
as I said. So it's been very, it's a shock, and I don't know why Dr. Fauci is still there. Part of
00:12:55.640
it's Donald Trump's fault. He made fun of him, he mocked him, and he kept him. He would have been much
00:13:01.400
better to praise him to the skies, put his arm around him, thank him for years of service, and then
00:13:05.880
said at 80 years old, he's done enough and he's going to be gone tomorrow. He didn't do that.
00:13:11.080
Interesting. Your book, The Dying Citizen, discusses many of these issues sort of throughout
00:13:17.240
as you tackle different elements of citizenship that you see really suffering right now in these
00:13:23.140
times. In the headline, in the sub-headline, talking about destroying the idea of America,
00:13:27.880
I think the idea of America is something that I think is discussed a bit more in American society,
00:13:32.940
in American schools, than we at all talk about our nation here in Canada. We don't do that very much.
00:13:37.680
So if I can ask you, just to explain, when you say the idea of America, what does that mean? What is
00:13:43.700
the idea of America? Yeah, I outline that in six chapters. That's the subtext of every one of them.
00:13:50.120
And I say that historically, to have a constitutional system, whether in Canada or here, you have to have
00:13:57.580
the idea of a citizen, which is a very rare idea. And that's based on certain principles that we know
00:14:03.140
from the past. You have to have a large middle class. You can't have an idea of America with a
00:14:08.800
feudal society. And we're becoming feudal in California, where you have a very powerful elite
00:14:15.520
that's wealthy and well-connected and influences government to its own wants and desires. And
00:14:21.840
then a large subsidized impoverished class. But a large middle class that's autonomous,
00:14:27.960
then checks the power of the wealthy and the subsidized poor. They also need a space,
00:14:35.180
a confined space, confined. It's not just fluid borders like the late, late Roman Empire. But you
00:14:41.080
have to say that we can create citizenship if we inculcate common values, traditions, histories,
00:14:49.220
and civic education. But we can't do that when we have millions of people, two million this year alone,
00:14:55.300
crossing into our border whom we have no idea who they are. We have no idea what language they speak.
00:15:01.020
We have no idea why they're coming, what they want from America. And we, the host, have lost all
00:15:06.780
confidence in assimilating them, integrating them, and intermarrying them in the way. We have 50 million
00:15:12.200
people almost that were not born in the United States. And here in California, 27% of the population
00:15:17.820
was not born in the United States. Even for a society that's confident about its values and the
00:15:23.500
powers of assimilation, that would be a very hard task to create America. And then finally,
00:15:28.600
we have this in America, and I know you do as well, where we have a bi-coastal elite who have been
00:15:34.560
very, very successful under globalization. In other words, they had skills in media, finance,
00:15:42.500
insurance, academia, law, corporate world, of really tapping into a seven billion person market in a way
00:15:54.020
that people in the interior, in the physical jobs of, you know, manufacturing or assembly line work or
00:16:02.600
small farming, their products or their labor could be outsourced or offshore or Xeroxed overseas.
00:16:11.600
And they were so-called losers. And then there was a whole vocabulary of disparagement
00:16:15.800
that followed, deplorables, irredeemables, clingers, dregs, chumps, to quote Biden and Hillary Clinton
00:16:23.560
and Barack Obama. So these are the elite efforts. And you can see where globalization is leading to,
00:16:29.200
it's this admiration of the Davos-Klaus Schwab Great Reset Group, and the idea that a bunch of
00:16:36.340
elites can get together and then craft international tax law or international diversity requirements
00:16:46.180
You think that's on the horizon? International legislation or regulation?
00:16:51.480
I think it's already happened when there was, the G20 is already suggesting that any nation that doesn't
00:16:59.220
adopt a uniform tax code of corporate taxes will be punished. And they're, you know, looking at
00:17:06.860
countries like impoverished Ireland, that's done pretty well by telling corporations,
00:17:11.940
we will give you a more free landscape to operate in, in exchange for the investment you bring to our
00:17:19.860
impoverished economy. And that now the wealthy countries say, no, no, no, no, you're not going to do
00:17:24.420
that. Or in the United States, the Biden administration and Secretary of State Blinken has
00:17:30.220
said to the United Nations, we would like members from the Commission on Human Rights to come in the
00:17:35.260
United States and adjudicate in this period of turmoil, whether you find that we were racist or
00:17:40.920
not. Of course, nobody in the United Nations would ever say, we want to investigate the Chinese to find
00:17:47.980
out if there is really a million and a half Uyghurs who are in forced labor camps or there are forced
00:17:55.520
operations to harvest organs or forced abortion. We want to find that out. But so this idea and theory
00:18:02.020
of cosmopolitanism, they're all going to be citizens of the world is really asymmetrical. And it's basically
00:18:08.120
a fear of China, which gets a total exemption on everything from climate change and carbon emissions
00:18:15.940
to human rights. And yet, we would subordinate United States sovereignty to a group of nations,
00:18:24.200
the vast majority of them are not constitutional or consensual.
00:18:27.580
Let me ask, since you brought up foreign affairs in China, how that plays into the framework you're
00:18:35.020
discussing right now. Because in recent months, we've had some flare-ups happening in the area of
00:18:41.040
Israel. We've had Kim Jong-un doing a couple more tests. Obviously, what's going on in Afghanistan,
00:18:47.680
where the Taliban feels more emboldened than ever. And then Xi Jinping making a lot of challenges,
00:18:52.480
including being in something of a war posture towards Taiwan, such that we haven't seen in decades.
00:18:58.340
And I look at that and I go, well, that stuff wasn't really happening when Donald Trump was
00:19:02.800
president. And then people say, well, Joe Biden is being tested. And one goes, okay, is that something
00:19:09.740
unique to Joe Biden? And these tests are going to continue, and they're going to be more than tests,
00:19:13.940
they're going to be action. Or is this just what happens when there's a changing of the guard,
00:19:16.840
and it's all just kind of smoke to see how tough this new administration is?
00:19:21.140
Well, I think what you're describing is a classical loss of deterrence. That's just a fancy
00:19:27.200
Latin word that says that you can scare people so they don't do something stupid. And it's based on
00:19:33.960
the idea that deterrence arrives from either material ability to stop an enemy from doing
00:19:40.920
something attacking you or your interests or your allies and the will to use that power. And once that
00:19:47.020
is established by prior behavior and strong powers then can deter weaker powers or they can deter
00:19:55.500
similar powers, even bigger powers. But when you lose deterrence, and I'm talking now about the
00:20:02.000
free world and the United States' self-appointed roles ahead of NATO and the Western democracies and
00:20:08.600
by extension, the post-war order, which the United States has played, the United States then has told
00:20:15.340
North Korea or Iran or China or Russia that we have certain interests that promote prosperity and
00:20:24.480
security. And if you impinge on them, there will be consequences. Sometimes we do it well,
00:20:30.020
sometimes we don't do so well. But when you go into Afghanistan for 20 years, and then suddenly,
00:20:37.080
suddenly, even though you're scaling down because the majority of the American people want you to,
00:20:43.060
you know, at some point get out of a 20-year commitment to a pre-industrial society,
00:20:47.540
a traditional Islamic society, nonetheless, if you do that radically and you give up in the space of a
00:20:52.980
week, a billion-dollar embassy, a $300 million air base, $80 billion in equipment and training invested
00:21:02.040
in that equipment, and skedaddle and leave thousands of people who are going to be butchered or murdered
00:21:09.360
or persecuted that came out of the woodwork to support you, then other countries are going to say
00:21:15.540
it's a very dangerous thing to ally yourself to the United States. Because every once in a while,
00:21:21.600
the radical left takes over the United States. And when they do take over, they renegotiate a lot
00:21:28.660
of their commitments. Donald Trump was a realist, and some people called him an isolationist, but he
00:21:34.480
did keep deterrence. And by that, I mean, he took out General Soleimani. He took out Baghdadi, the head
00:21:42.040
of ISIS. He did bomb, as promised, ISIS to smithereens. He did attack, when Russian mercenaries
00:21:48.740
attacked Americans in Syria. They obliterated 200 of them. He did tell Kim Jong-il, do not point
00:21:56.800
missiles at West Coast cities, or you're going to find yourself in big trouble. So, while he didn't
00:22:03.200
want to commit sizable troops, and he wanted to reduce radically the imprint abroad in Afghanistan,
00:22:09.800
he still made NATO pony up $100 million more. And we do have 145 bases or contingents around the world
00:22:20.000
today. But when you start to question what we're going to do, and the Biden administration in just
00:22:25.040
nine months has basically told the world, you know what, we don't care about humiliation. We don't care
00:22:31.020
about any of this. We've had a pride flag flying in Kabul. That was good. We had George Floyd murals.
00:22:36.640
That was good. We had a gender studies. That's what we're interested in. And promulgating this
00:22:42.800
version of equity, first world equity, a lot of very dubious nations are going to say, you know what,
00:22:53.640
this might never happen again. The United States just won't react. It's in a crisis of confidence.
00:22:59.640
If we go into Taiwan, let's go in 10 miles today in their airspace, 15 miles in their maritime sphere
00:23:06.900
of influence, and we'll increase it each day until we find any resistance. And so that's what's
00:23:13.140
happening as we speak. You're absolutely right. People like Putin, people like the communist Chinese,
00:23:18.500
people like the North Koreans are meeting, and they're saying, just what does this mean?
00:23:22.580
How far should we push this? Are we going to get another administration quick? If this is a golden
00:23:29.020
moment, maybe we can absorb all of the Ukraine or Belarus, or we can take in more areas of the
00:23:36.740
former Soviet Republic, or maybe we can finish the Taiwan problem for good, or maybe we can even bully
00:23:43.040
South Korea into disconnecting with Japan and the Philippines and Australia and the United States. So
00:23:52.820
What's going to happen next? I know you're also an author of military history books, and you've taught
00:23:58.680
at military institutes, and there's all these great power theories in terms of how nations look at each
00:24:03.520
other when one is on the ascent, one is on the decline, and so on. I mean, what are the next moves
00:24:11.760
Yes. What is Xi Jinping seriously thinking about doing, or is he just watching the U.S., and are they
00:24:19.620
Well, he looks at the world, and he says he's got about a thousand nuclear weapons. The United
00:24:24.460
States has 7,000 of them, and he knows that the United States did take out Saddam Hussein, didn't do
00:24:32.260
too well in the reconstruction, but they know at times it's hard to predict. It's unpredictable, and it's
00:24:39.500
got enormous military power. It has 11 carrier groups. It's got the most sophisticated military in the
00:24:45.380
world, and while the general society is in decline, the type, the profile of Americans that go into
00:24:54.360
combat units in the U.S. military, Army, Marines, Navy, are traditional Americans, and they've proven
00:25:02.300
themselves to be the best fighters in the world, that particular group of them. If they're well-led,
00:25:08.360
I'm not sure that the latter is always true. So he knows that he does not want to get into a fighting
00:25:13.300
war with the United States. Last time he did it was a Korean War, and the Chinese people, the People's
00:25:18.720
Liberation Army lost over a million and a half soldiers, and they were, you know, stopped in North
00:25:24.260
Korea, South Korea, and expelled, and that's one of the reasons they never invaded Vietnam. So he has a
00:25:30.260
history of being very careful, but what he's looking at now is, yes, that's true, but we have now 1.4 billion
00:25:38.240
people. Our economy is on a trajectory to match or excel the United States within five to six years.
00:25:45.840
The United States is in a sea of disruption, social, cultural, economic, political turmoil,
00:25:53.820
and maybe, just maybe, we can project an image that we're stronger than the United States.
00:26:03.100
So what they're doing right now, specifically in answer to your question, they're going to the
00:26:07.920
Australians. I know that for a fact, you talk to them. They're going to the Japanese, they're going
00:26:12.820
to the South Koreans, they're going to the Philippines, and they're saying, look, we're creating a, it's
00:26:18.480
sort of like the Japanese greater Asia co-prosperity spheres of 1940. They're saying, in our territory,
00:26:25.880
you people in Australia have natural resources. We need them. You people in Japan have been a
00:26:30.900
traditional enemy. There's no need for that. You people in South Korea have always been friendlier
00:26:35.960
to the Chinese than you have been the Japanese. You people in the Chinese know that you have territory
00:26:41.680
that you can't really control, that we could absorb. So all of us are going to be in a family
00:26:47.780
controlled by China. It's going to be sort of a mercantile, asymmetrical system. And if they say,
00:26:54.080
well, that wouldn't be fair, that wouldn't be symmetrical, that wouldn't be equal, they said, you really,
00:26:58.320
what's your alternative? You want to ally with a distant United States?
00:27:02.960
Now that was working for a while, I know, with the Belt and Road Initiative, and a lot of people
00:27:06.560
were being signed on to deal with China in many different ways. And here in Canada, we have some
00:27:12.060
troubling aspects of that. But I know in the past year and a half, there's been rising skepticism and
00:27:16.400
a greater push for decoupling. That phrase is used here in Canada now to decouple from China.
00:27:21.660
Do you think the past year and a half has kind of, you know, nipped things short
00:27:29.680
In the last year and a half, China has made more political, global, economic progress than any
00:27:35.740
time in its entire history, vis-a-vis the West.
00:27:39.480
So they're not moving backwards now, they're progressing even further.
00:27:42.060
Yeah, the virus turned out to be a windfall for China. Because forget about whether they handled it
00:27:48.460
well, or they're being transparent. But just think of what the message has been to the world.
00:27:52.680
We don't think a virus escaped, but maybe you do. And if it did, it paralyzed the entire world. But
00:28:01.260
it paralyzed your world much more than it did ours. We wouldn't want that ever, ever to happen again,
00:28:07.240
would we? And in a way, that's a creation of deterrence. So now we have people in the United
00:28:13.320
States saying, oh my God, what might leak out of that biology lab next? And what would we do about it?
00:28:20.300
And they know that. And so they kind of wink and nod and say, let's all get together and stop,
00:28:25.020
ha, ha, ha. And it's a very strange thing. And then secondly, they're not just pressuring states
00:28:32.820
around them. But with that much cash, they are influencing decision makers in all aspects of our
00:28:42.720
culture within the United States. And I'll give you three or four examples. The most prominent people
00:28:48.580
in the news the last month have been Dr. Fauci. Dr. Fauci was engaged in subsidizing gain-of-function
00:28:58.120
research at Wuhan. A second person is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley. He's been in the
00:29:03.880
news. Why? Because he called up the PLA general and warned him that he would warn him in advance of
00:29:12.120
any attack. Can you imagine a Chinese four-star general calling Milley up and saying, if these
00:29:17.600
crazy people in Beijing ever, ever think about being aggressive toward you, I'm going to call you up.
00:29:23.480
So they interpret that not as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but as weakness to be exploited.
00:29:29.700
And then you look further and you say, well, who else is compromised? Well, how about Hunter Biden?
00:29:37.020
He still has this 10% stake in a Chinese financial company that has given him millions of dollars,
00:29:43.100
and he won't give it up. And we know that Joe Biden, he had traveled as private citizens and as when
00:29:49.460
Joe Biden was vice president to China with Hunter Biden exploited for the Biden Incorporated Family
00:29:56.640
syndicate or whatever it was. And he's got his art gallery deals now. That amazes me. I follow
00:30:01.200
the art world. I've been to the Chelsea galleries many times. You don't suddenly just get an exhibit
00:30:04.940
at one of the top galleries in Manhattan and you only started painting six months ago and they go over
00:30:09.840
400K each. I think Hunter Biden's message is basically, I kept this family afloat from the moment
00:30:18.680
Joe Biden was vice president in 2009 until he was elected in 2020. For 11 years, I was a grifter and I
00:30:31.160
went to Ukraine. I went to Russia. I went to China and I did all of these quid pro quo grifting deals.
00:30:38.240
And I funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the family syndicate, especially to myself.
00:30:44.340
Hundreds of millions. And Joe Biden built a big home. He has three homes. He didn't report income tax.
00:30:50.700
Now he's suggesting he never paid income tax on $500,000 worth of obligation.
00:30:55.960
Well, wait, hold on. Let me clarify here. Biden has not, because I know we went through a lot of drama
00:31:00.580
with Trump and income tax, and you're saying that Biden also did not file income tax?
00:31:05.240
I'm not saying that. I'm saying in the midst of accusations that Donald Trump took either on
00:31:12.560
unlawful or unethical deductions that lowered his tax rate, which the left had been hammering on,
00:31:18.560
we've had independent people associated with congressional budget and tax people, but also
00:31:25.480
private accountants and scholars who said this money that Joe Biden got was not taxed at a rate that
00:31:35.220
it should have been taxed. He didn't pay payroll tax on it. And it was probably a $500,000 bill that
00:31:41.800
he owed. We're also discovering in these communications with Hunter Biden on his laptop
00:31:48.280
that he was funneling money into the Joe Biden family account. It was a shared account where
00:31:55.540
Joe Biden was paying bills, and that was not reported as income.
00:31:58.840
So, sorry, a man in his 40s still shares a checking account with his father? I haven't shared a bank
00:32:04.440
account with my parents since I was, I don't know, however old, 13. I don't think it would be,
00:32:09.440
I don't think it would be mundanely called a checking account. It would be some type of shared
00:32:13.980
business expense account. But the point I'm making is that indirectly, Hunter Biden has been
00:32:24.380
compromised by the Chinese. So then the question is posed, given all of that liability and given
00:32:33.100
all the damage he's done with his missing laptops and his behavior and his investments with China,
00:32:39.700
why in the world would he be doing this art scam where everybody in the United States says,
00:32:45.760
we know who's buying this paint-by-numbers primitive art for $75,000? And now these are foreign lobbyists
00:32:53.180
and foreign powers. And why would he be doing that? And the answer is, in a very strange way,
00:32:59.520
he's exercising leverage over his own family. If you read his emails, he's full of angst and anger
00:33:05.840
at them. He says, you know what, I kept this family going. Mr. 10%, the big guy, referring to the
00:33:12.660
president, and his nieces, and all of you people, I did the hard, you know, heavy lifting. So I think
00:33:18.980
he's basically saying, I'm Samson with an arm around every, each pillar in the temple. And if
00:33:24.780
you keep pushing me, I'm going to pull it all down. I can do whatever I want. I think he's totally out
00:33:28.860
of control. But again, what I'm getting at is, if you have the president with that liability,
00:33:34.620
and you have General Milley's conduct, and you have Anthony Fauci's conduct, and you add into the
00:33:39.540
equation, Bill Gates praising the Chinese reaction to the virus, who has sizable, and was probably the
00:33:46.420
first major investor in China. Then you have Michael Bloomberg running for president, lecturing us
00:33:51.660
that China is a consensual society, as he puts $10 billion in capital to finance startup companies
00:34:00.900
run by, or at least associated with the Chinese Communist Party. At what level do you have
00:34:06.040
independent autonomous voices in America that are worried about the Chinese threat? And the answer
00:34:12.420
is, it's very difficult. I work at Stanford University, and I can tell you that last year
00:34:17.420
they arrested a visiting neuroscientist, a visiting professor, not because she had Chinese ties, but
00:34:25.240
she was working for the Chinese military. Right. And it's a level of infiltration that's, it's,
00:34:32.940
it's insidious, and the money is so great and powerful, whether it's Fang Fang, having a romantic
00:34:39.420
election, uh, relations with Representative Eric Swalwell, who's on the House Intelligence Committee,
00:34:45.220
and we didn't even know that, or it's Dianne Feinstein admitting five years ago as head of the
00:34:51.540
Senate Intelligence Committee, that her chauffeur for 20 years, 20 years, listened to her phone calls in
00:34:58.040
her car as a Chinese Communist operative. So it's, it's not paranoid to be very worried about the reach
00:35:06.380
of the Chinese Communist Party within this country. Pivoting a little bit here, because you brought up
00:35:11.600
Stanford University again, and about the general university system, the approach to education that
00:35:16.480
we're dealing with right now. When I flip through the beginning of the book, I mean, I see a lot of
00:35:20.580
references to antiquity, of course, your, your, your specialty, talking about what the plays of
00:35:25.760
Euripides can teach us and so forth. And yet, we're also living in an era where we know that
00:35:31.320
stuff is being pushed out, it's being discouraged in terms of a classical education. And so many people
00:35:37.040
are, are, you know, to use the Goethe phrase, living from hand to mouth in terms of the information and
00:35:41.740
the education they're receiving to kind of assess the contemporary scene. What's going on in the
00:35:47.860
education world right now? And how does that play in to, to destroying the idea of America to
00:35:53.460
the dying citizen? Well, I kind of pointed out that most of the bad ideas that you and I have
00:35:59.320
discussed, whether it's altering the constitutional system or identifying by race or abolishing borders
00:36:08.700
can be found 30 years ago in the university. And that's because the university became, especially
00:36:15.760
the elite university, it became immune from the general society. The professors are tenured
00:36:20.740
after just six years. They're not subject to accountability. There's no exit tests for
00:36:27.540
graduates. So we have no idea that they're any better at math or science or language or literature
00:36:32.980
when they leave the university than when they enter. These endowments have soared. So you've got
00:36:40.920
50 billion at Harvard, 30 billion at Yale, 28 billion at Stanford. It's not taxed. And what are they doing
00:36:49.540
with all of that capital? Are they helping the students be better? No. They're spending on diversity
00:36:55.440
coordinators, on pretty fancy living. You know, we have everything now for a student from rock
00:37:01.280
climbing walls to latte bars. So what my point is that they're entirely unaccountable and they live in a
00:37:08.880
fairy land where no one else is subject to such exemptions from modern, you know, employment as the
00:37:15.660
professor class and these students. And yet when they leave, not all of them are well educated and
00:37:22.140
all of them, most all of them, except maybe the very wealthiest have student debt. So you think that
00:37:30.100
with all this money, they would at least subsidize their own debt and that would make, you know, the
00:37:34.760
moral hazard then, they wouldn't have this moral hazard of saying, oh, we have no responsibility for
00:37:40.540
the debt that our students incur from the government. It's not our concern. So we're going to jack the
00:37:45.760
rate of tuition higher than the rate of inflation. And we don't really care how well educated. That's
00:37:51.200
a prescription for a disaster. What do you think of these Google diplomas? We had a previous guest
00:37:56.060
breakdown for us what's going on here in terms of the issue with kids going into many years of
00:38:00.760
university for things that they're not paying attention to and then arguably don't need, but
00:38:04.220
they're getting into massive debt. And Google has started out its own version of a university where you
00:38:10.300
only go for two or three months. You probably know more about it than I do. And then you get
00:38:13.360
this sort of diploma and that at least they acknowledge that as equivalent of a four-year
00:38:18.520
university program. I mean, are those things that there's a future? You're obviously not getting a
00:38:22.680
classical liberal arts education in all of that, but is there utility to that? I think what's
00:38:27.880
happening, the university is very scared right now because it's not just the 1980s for-profit,
00:38:34.200
you know, trade schools. There are sophisticated online curricula now that are traditional. Hillsdale
00:38:42.240
College is a good example. They get millions of people who sign up for their courses for free and
00:38:48.200
you can pay a little bit more and get college credit for it. And there is K through 12 in which
00:38:56.020
the university has the monopoly on training those teachers. There's a lot of anger now because they're
00:39:01.680
not just politicized, but they're incompetent. So that if you look at charter schools or parochial
00:39:06.200
schools or homeschooling, the rates are really increasing. And there's a lot of push here in the
00:39:12.260
United States to say to the universities, we reject your idea that you have to have a credential to be a
00:39:18.220
public school teacher. You have a monopoly on that, but you don't have to have a credential to be a junior
00:39:23.660
college teacher. You don't have to have a credential to be a professor. You don't have to be a
00:39:28.280
credential in a Catholic school. Why do you get to credential people and put them through this,
00:39:33.700
you know, boot camp of, we call the Department of Education? When, why don't we just give an
00:39:39.220
academic degree? They can go anywhere and they get an academic degree if they want to be a teacher.
00:39:43.360
Just get a year in master's degree from an online group or something. So there's a lot of anger at the
00:39:50.060
university, not just the failure of higher education, but what we're seeing in these school board
00:39:57.200
uprisings. And essentially we're saying that these teachers through the credentialing process got a
00:40:03.900
whole year or two of indoctrination from professors of education. And they put these rarefied theory,
00:40:11.960
critical theory, critical legal theory, critical racial theory, new monetary theory, all these theories,
00:40:17.040
they started indoctrinating kids, kids. And you end up with something like the Virginia
00:40:22.980
uprising. It's not going to cease. What is at issue with the Virginia uprising?
00:40:28.020
There's two or three things. Number one is students began after George Floyd's death and the
00:40:34.260
reaction and the rioting started to come home. And it accelerated during Zoom when parents were actually,
00:40:41.960
when the schools were shut down and they could actually, for the first time, see what the teachers
00:40:46.260
were doing to their children in their own living room as they watched the Zoom. But they understood
00:40:52.640
that this was not civil rights education about content of our character, not the color of our skin,
00:40:59.640
Martin Luther King Jr. brand. This was, you can be racist to stop racist. You can discriminate to stop
00:41:06.540
discrimination. White people, white people, white people, white people, white people. And they said,
00:41:11.800
I'm not going to put my kid and have him or her come home and tell me that me, that I, my family,
00:41:21.940
my parents, my grandparents, you know, my father who flew a B-17, my cousin who died in Iwo Jima,
00:41:30.660
my great grandfather who fought for the North, we're all toxic. That's not going to happen.
00:41:35.680
And then more specifically, uh, it was kind of triggered because a parent found out that his
00:41:44.160
daughter had gone to a transgender, a girl's restroom and a biological male that was transgendering
00:41:50.720
raped her. And she was underage. That would be forcible rape. That's a, you know, a first-class
00:41:57.240
felony. And the school hid that fact and did not tell the public. And the parent got outraged and
00:42:04.460
then went to the boardroom to make the public aware of what the school board had not been
00:42:08.600
transparent about. And that opened up again, this whole idea that these schools were arbitrarily
00:42:15.840
deciding, uh, that females would share restroom facilities with men that were biological males.
00:42:25.520
And what I just said is impermissible in the university. You're not to use the word biological
00:42:30.520
males. So who is pushing all of this in terms of the administrators? When we talk about the critical
00:42:37.600
race theory, we saw just the other day, Condoleezza Rice making an appearance on the view that a lot
00:42:41.960
of people shared and found a very powerful statement of why she doesn't support these policies that,
00:42:46.100
you know, put people at loggerheads based on race. And at least up here in Canada, from what I see,
00:42:50.460
I don't think that people of any walk of life, you know, regular parents, Latino, black,
00:42:55.060
white, or what have you are particularly asking for all of this, this sort of divisive stuff in
00:43:00.280
the classroom. None of them are. What's happened politically, and I kind of talk about that in
00:43:05.840
The Dying Citizen, every issue now that is less, I mean, let's face it, they're leading to what I
00:43:12.040
would call a civilizational collapse in just nine months. So you look at the supply chain,
00:43:17.480
and that is a direct result of new monetary theory where we think we can print $2 trillion and then
00:43:26.000
another $3 trillion for infrastructure, and that $5 trillion will be spread around. We're going to
00:43:30.880
give $600 a month for the victims of capitalism, I don't know, or COVID lockdown not to work. So we
00:43:37.560
have the highest rate of labor non-participation in our history. We can't get people to work 24 hours,
00:43:43.480
three shifts to unload ships. But that represents empty shelves. Or when the Biden administration,
00:43:49.840
they came up with this sort of European idea of carbon emissions. So we're going to cut out
00:43:56.040
two and a half billion, a million barrels a day. We're going to cancel pipelines with your country
00:44:01.780
that would facilitate the use of much needed oil and gas. And now what's happened? It's $5 a gallon
00:44:10.140
for a Californian or an American. That's outrageous. It's almost six in the Bay Area.
00:44:15.540
And so a lot of people say, I can't not afford that. I wasn't prepared for that. Why did you do
00:44:21.080
that? We were independent. We were the largest oil and gas producer in the world. The Middle East was
00:44:26.580
irrelevant for us. We didn't have to go over there. We weren't worried about Russia. We had control over
00:44:32.060
the price that affects Iran's income. Why would you give that away on a theory of man-engineered
00:44:39.000
climate change that could be altered by government action? And so when they look at the border,
00:44:45.120
that you said the border was a construct and everybody has a birthright to come in the United
00:44:49.080
States. Look at it. They're not vaccinated. People don't know English. We don't know where they're from.
00:44:54.900
Why did you do that? So what I'm getting at is that all of those political
00:44:58.480
positions and policies did not, never, never polled 50%. And once they were enacted,
00:45:07.540
they led to utter disasters. And now independents and conservative Democrats and now a lot of liberal
00:45:13.500
Democrats are saying, I can't live like this. I can't walk out in San Francisco. There's no pharmacy
00:45:20.140
now. They've shut them down because looting is de rigueur for a lot of people. There's no consequences.
00:45:25.720
I can't drive my pickup anymore because it's, it costs a hundred dollars to fill up and it's only
00:45:31.800
three quarters full. I had Christmas presents. I can't get them. My kid came home and said that I
00:45:38.440
was a racist. I, this is intolerable. So they're starting to get angry and, and there hadn't been
00:45:44.860
accountability, you see, because Joe Biden ran a stealth campaign. And he said, I'm the old guy you
00:45:50.920
remember from 30 years ago. I'm good old Joe Biden from Scranton, the moderate Democrat. And I'm not
00:45:57.920
Elizabeth Warren. I'm not Bernie Sanders. I am not Beto O'Rourke. I'm not the rest of them.
00:46:05.760
And on that principle, he was nominated and he did not campaign and the money was raised in
00:46:12.620
exorbitant amounts and he won. And then he was a stealth president. He's not answered questions.
00:46:17.440
He's not able to, he's 78, but he's not a vigorous 78. But his-
00:46:22.040
Do you believe there's great debate about that? You know, and I know there's still people
00:46:25.380
relitigate whether or not Ronald Reagan did have issues towards the end of his presidency. And that's
00:46:30.400
a deeply passionate thing argued by people who worked among him and, you know, everyone on the
00:46:34.160
Washington scene. Is, is that an issue with Joe Biden right now?
00:46:37.240
Yeah. But the point is that he carried this hardcore socialist agenda on his back under misleading
00:46:49.520
pretenses that he was vigorous and engaged and the media was so sick of Trump. And that was a
00:46:57.600
complete myth. And after nine months, when he doesn't know where he is, and as some people that age that
00:47:03.860
have cognitive issues get angry and he says things that can be interpreted as sexist or racist,
00:47:09.940
or he breathes on somebody, or he goes off on a tangent, now people are saying, I don't have good
00:47:16.240
will for Joe Biden. And I'm not going to overlook that I never had good will for his policies. So
00:47:22.920
suddenly after Afghanistan and his lies about, you know, just go to the airport and you get on a plane,
00:47:28.380
no problem. Or, you know, this, all of this stuff he says is nonsense. So what's happened politically,
00:47:35.440
he's not able to carry the issues, but he's a force multiplier of their unpopularity. He,
00:47:44.000
Joe Biden, the person, and you look at his polls, 52% positive, 45% positive, 43%, 39%, 37%.
00:47:55.020
36. And so they're polling right where, do you like the Biden economy? Do you like the Biden
00:48:01.460
borders? Do you like the Biden energy policy? Do you like the Biden racial relations policy? And
00:48:07.580
they're right about 36. So he's down there with them. And all of these Democrats, and they look
00:48:12.920
toward this election a year from now, are saying, you know what? These guys who gave us all this live
00:48:19.920
in places like Massachusetts or Illinois or some crazy left-wing district, but the majority of us
00:48:26.320
are representatives from either plus five Trump or plus five, a fluid congressional district. And
00:48:34.660
we're going to lose because our opponent's going to blame us for every one of these things.
00:48:38.920
And they're starting to panic. And a lot of people on the, on the left, if you read the commentary
00:48:45.580
every day, I've never seen them more depressed. They went from exit, exhilarant to chronically
00:48:54.380
Speaking of looking for the exit ramp, the dying citizen, how does one rejuvenate that? What is
00:49:01.880
the concluding message to the dying citizen? How does one breathe fresh breath?
00:49:05.920
I, yeah, my message is that we have to support policies that encourage autonomy and self-reliance
00:49:14.380
and not subsidies, whether they're wealthy people getting subsidies from as insiders or dependent
00:49:19.820
poor. You can't have a state where 50% of all the births are subsidized by Medi-Cal in California,
00:49:26.660
or one fourth of the people you meet, you don't speak the same language with them. Or we're going to
00:49:32.540
have to take control of our borders, as citizens are. And they're going to have to say, it's not
00:49:37.680
racist, it's not xenophobia, it's not nativism, it's not protectionism, just to have a border.
00:49:44.220
That's, that's the common stuff of civilization. We're going to have, the citizens are going to
00:49:48.120
have to say, you can call me a racist. You call me any name you want, but I'm going to judge people
00:49:53.060
by the content of their character and not their general appearance. There's not going to be any more
00:49:56.660
quotas, no more set-asides. Race is going to be incidental, not essential. And then we're going to
00:50:02.340
have to say to the John Brennans who lie under oath, or the James Clapper who lied to the Senate
00:50:08.660
under oath, or the James Comeys who suddenly can't remember 245 times, we're going to hold you
00:50:15.580
responsible. And if you lie under oath, you're going to face the same penalties that the citizen does
00:50:21.940
when he lies to the IRS. So we're going to have to hold our elites accountable. We're going to have
00:50:27.840
to say to the universities and everything, this system's worked for 233 years. We're not in the
00:50:33.260
233 year of our history, just because of some crackpot theory that you cooked up in the faculty
00:50:40.020
lounge. It's not going to change the electoral college. And we're not going to get rid of 150
00:50:45.320
year Supreme Court of nine justices and get that. And I think that's happening as we speak. And then
00:50:51.580
finally, we've got to stop. And I think it's starting that the citizens are starting to say
00:50:57.840
I'm not impressed by the EU. I'm not impressed by the by the UN. I'm not very impressed by the
00:51:03.800
Paris Climate Accord. I don't think the Iran deal was so good. I don't want to go to Davos. I don't
00:51:10.380
like people at Davos. They don't represent me. I don't like all of these wealthy, elite, privileged
00:51:17.420
people who sound like Bolsheviks as a virtue signal, while they're never subject to the
00:51:23.440
consequences of their own ideology. And I think that will happen. But the way I look at it,
00:51:29.900
we had long term problems that threatened citizenship viability. And then we had a terrible 2020.
00:51:37.400
We had the pandemic. We had our first national quarantine, our first self induced recession.
00:51:43.660
We had the George Floyd death, we had 120 days of rioting and looting that was basically exempt
00:51:49.600
from consequences. We had 102 mail in ballots, 102 million, we've never had that 62% of the people
00:51:57.300
did not vote on election day. And yet, the error rate decreased by a magnitude of 10, from about 5%
00:52:04.460
down to 0.3 or 0.4%, depending on the state. We had the riots on January 6. And out of that turmoil,
00:52:12.400
ideas were promulgated and advanced that no one in their right mind and calm times would have ever,
00:52:19.660
ever supported. And then we had Donald Trump was a very controversial and polarizing figure.
00:52:26.300
So I think once all of this starts to quiet down, people are reasserting
00:52:31.660
the citizens' control over their culture, over their economy, over their politics, and they're
00:52:38.880
very angry. And I think that the left has no idea, the left, the hard left has no idea what they've
00:52:46.180
woken up. And I think the Democratic Party, the traditional Democratic Party is terrified because
00:52:51.660
There's a lot to unpack there, but there's a lot more of it in The Dying Citizen, how progressive
00:52:57.660
elites, tribalism, and globalization are destroying the idea of America. Victor Davis Hanson,
00:53:07.660
Full Comment is a post-media podcast. I'm Anthony Fury. This episode was produced by Andre Pru with
00:53:13.700
theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer. You can subscribe to Full
00:53:18.460
Comment on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can help us
00:53:23.400
by giving us a rating or a review and by telling your friends about us. Thanks for listening.