Full Comment - The coming death of ‘citizenship’ and how to stop it

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,

00:05:04.600 it's scarier than it was earlier.

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, 0.92

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 1.00

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 0.98

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 1.00

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, 0.84

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 0.79

00:15:23.500 powers of assimilation, that would be a very hard task to create America. And then finally, 0.89

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 0.73

00:16:15.800 that followed, deplorables, irredeemables, clingers, dregs, chumps, to quote Biden and Hillary Clinton 0.98

00:16:23.560 and Barack Obama. So these are the elite efforts. And you can see where globalization is leading to, 0.96

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

00:16:42.940 on corporations or...

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 0.95

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 0.99

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 1.00

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, 1.00

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

00:23:50.060 it's a very dangerous period we're in.

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

00:24:08.280 on the board?

00:24:09.560 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

00:24:17.760 happy with seeing these sort of...

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 0.98

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 0.73

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 1.00

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 0.96

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 0.92

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

00:27:25.600 for the China ascendancy?

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 0.98

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 0.70

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 0.95

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 0.79

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 0.99

00:41:50.720 raped her. And she was underage. That would be forcible rape. That's a, you know, a first-class 0.99

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. 0.69

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 0.99

00:42:37.600 race theory, we saw just the other day, Condoleezza Rice making an appearance on the view that a lot 0.89

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 1.00

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%.

00:47:53.460 All in nine months.

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

00:48:53.320 depressed.

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 0.86

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 0.80

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

00:52:51.140 they do.

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,

00:53:02.960 thanks for joining us on the podcast today.

00:53:05.400 Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

00:53:07.240 All the best.

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.

Full Comment - November 01, 2021

The coming death of ‘citizenship’ and how to stop it

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