Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 403 ｜ Pushing Back Against Postmodernism

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. So excited. I know I say that every time, but I truly am

00:00:13.480 so excited about this conversation with Victor Davis Hanson. He is a senior fellow at Stanford

00:00:19.640 University's Hoover Institution. He is also a military historian, and he is just a fascinating

00:00:25.640 person. Today, we're going to talk about how postmodernism and moral relativism have affected

00:00:30.660 not just our view of our country, but also foreign policy. And I learned so much from him in this,

00:00:37.560 and it is going to not just kind of teach you why American foreign policy is the way that it is and

00:00:45.620 how we got to the place that we are, but it's also going to make you think about your worldview in

00:00:51.780 general and the worldview that is being taught in academia and is being perpetuated by corporate

00:00:57.040 America and in the media. And he also leaves us with some wisdom and some advice that I found

00:01:02.500 like really courage, inspiring, and just very fortifying. And I know that's something that

00:01:09.800 we all feel like we need. So again, just so looking forward to you guys hearing this conversation and

00:01:15.940 sending me all kinds of positive feedback about it, because I know you're going to love it. So

00:01:20.400 without further ado, here is Victor Davis Hanson.

00:01:27.580 Thank you so much for joining me. First, I think, well, I think a lot of people listening and

00:01:33.040 watching know exactly who you are. They have watched your interviews, you're a guest on Fox News a lot.

00:01:38.660 But I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the Hoover Institution and the mission of the

00:01:45.160 Institution and what your role is there first. Well, it's 100 years old. And the institution was founded

00:01:52.640 by Herbert Hoover in 1920. And originally for the first, say, 45 years, it was an archival

00:02:05.480 library centered in the middle of the Stanford campus. And its purpose was, in Hoover's words, to

00:02:13.220 collect all of the documents that he could find in his food relief efforts to feed the impoverished

00:02:23.660 and famished after World War I, and then to discover the roots and origins of the Russian Revolution.

00:02:29.600 So the practical effect was he brought back millions of documents from war-torn Europe in 1919,

00:02:36.140 20, 21. And then he got a lot of the white, so-called white Russians, that's the term for the

00:02:43.340 anti-red Russians, and to put their papers at Hoover. And then for the next, oh, 50 years,

00:02:51.400 the tower was built, the iconic tower was built in 1947. But the point was, it would be going to be

00:02:57.900 an archival library for the issues of war, revolution, and peace. And then he had a mission

00:03:03.840 statement that the institution was going to promote limited government, free enterprise,

00:03:10.100 and human freedom. Sometime in the 40s to the mid-50s, that changed, or I should say it was augmented

00:03:17.280 to a research center with fellows. And then it made a, Hoover was in a constant war with Stanford

00:03:23.920 University, Stanford being very liberal, he being very conservative. At various iterations of the

00:03:29.480 institution, it had degrees of autonomy, and then subservience. And finally, it was worked out,

00:03:35.560 he felt, right before he died in the late 60s, with the appointment of a very young, dynamic Glyn

00:03:42.560 Campbell. And the story of the institution for the next 60 years, until 2015, were two 30-year

00:03:51.480 directors, Glyn Campbell, John Rayson, who created the current Milton Friedman, Robert Conquest, Tom

00:03:59.360 Soule, Shelby Steele, conservative trademark. And now, because Stanford's got Silicon Valley money,

00:04:09.080 and it's so huge. And it's, as you know, the liberal left has become the progressive hard left.

00:04:16.960 There's a constant struggle to remain autonomous with a lot of pressures in Stanford. And that's

00:04:23.760 where we are today. Yeah, I've always wondered about that. When you think of Stanford, you don't

00:04:29.640 really think about conservative values. And there are many of you who hold such conservative values that

00:04:35.480 come out of the Hoover Institution. Could you talk about how you got involved with the Hoover

00:04:41.040 Institution? And a lot of you, a lot of people listening know your story. But for those, for

00:04:45.940 those who don't, can you just tell kind of a brief summary of how you got to have the voice that you

00:04:52.880 do, and how you kind of got plugged into the circles that you're in now?

00:04:56.280 Well, I graduated with a PhD in classics at 26 in 1980 from Stanford. And then I had grandparents

00:05:06.060 and parents that were not able to take care of this farm. So I had a brother who was going to

00:05:11.180 medical school. And the two of us came back and we farmed the 180 acres. I did that full time for

00:05:17.020 about five years. And then in my late 20s, I went to Cal State Fresno, the nearest campus and started

00:05:23.160 a Latin and Greek classical studies, ancient history program that got pretty big. I did that

00:05:29.140 for 21 years and wrote books on history, classics, agrarianism, modern and ancient farming, and op-eds.

00:05:36.640 I started to write op-eds in the 90s. And then somewhere after 9-11, I became a regular columnist for

00:05:46.300 National Review. So I did that for 20 years. And I was appointed to the Hoover Institution in 2003.

00:05:53.160 2002 and 2003. And I did both. I was a professor of classics. And I went up to Stanford, which is

00:05:59.040 about 180 miles from where I'm speaking at my farm. And then I transitioned in 2004 completely. And I've

00:06:06.880 been there, oh, for the last 17 years at the Hoover Institution. And I, my responsibility is to, as I was told,

00:06:17.140 my contract is to write commentary on political events, try to produce scholarly books every three

00:06:26.960 or four years. And in addition, books that appeal to popular issues. Try to do your part as a Hoover

00:06:33.420 citizen at retreats of the donor and overseer class and promote funding for Hoover. And then finally,

00:06:41.060 have institutional support. So I run the largest task force at the Hoover Institution called the

00:06:46.620 Military History Working Group. And we, and I edit along with my managing editor, David Berkeley,

00:06:53.020 something called an online magazine called Strategica. And the purpose of that group is to

00:06:57.800 bring about 40 scholars world over of all different political persuasions and to discuss contemporary

00:07:04.320 crises, China, the Middle East, Taiwan, Iran, in the context of history, what does history have to tell

00:07:12.340 us about these particular crises? And you can find that every three weeks online, under the rubric

00:07:18.380 Strategica. And that's exactly what I want to talk to you about. I, I saw an interview that you were a

00:07:26.980 part of in a documentary. And I watched this several months ago. And as soon as I started watching it and

00:07:33.600 listening to your answer, you were talking about how the postmodern worldview has affected liberal

00:07:41.080 foreign policy in particular under Barack Obama. And I found what you were saying so fascinating that

00:07:46.360 I immediately jotted you down and said, okay, I want to talk to Victor Davis Hanson about this because I,

00:07:52.920 I had never heard it talked about in those terms. Obviously we know as a conservative perspective,

00:07:58.600 we hear the apology tour by Barack Obama and how he kind of desired to lower the ranking

00:08:05.820 of America and kind of do away with what they might call the myth of American exceptionalism or

00:08:11.880 American greatness. But I never thought about it in terms of kind of this larger postmodern movement

00:08:17.560 or worldview. Can you talk about that? What postmodernism is and how it's kind of affected

00:08:24.740 in particular liberal foreign policy over the past couple of decades.

00:08:29.720 Well, we all know what modernism and that was reaction to the traditional and classical Western

00:08:35.280 civilization. So it meant in art, you could, you could paint something like Jackson Pollock that

00:08:41.540 had nothing to do with what your eyes saw or in poetry, you didn't have to rhyme or have a poetic

00:08:47.660 vocabulary or in school, you could bring in subjects, you know, like sociology or anthropology that weren't

00:08:56.820 part of the classical curriculum. So it meant it was a reaction against the mores of the last 2,500

00:09:03.980 years. People would have sexual Congress that were not married. People who were outside the nuclear

00:09:10.700 family would have viable alternatives, etc. Postmodernism just means after modernism.

00:09:17.960 And what was different about postmodernism, they didn't just reject traditional America,

00:09:22.380 they rejected the means of adjudication, the whole system. So they said to the modernists,

00:09:29.920 your problem is you're reacting to traditional. We don't believe there are facts. We just think a

00:09:33.900 ruling largely white class created a system and called it rational, but it was rigged because it's

00:09:41.420 not based on truth because there is no truth. Truth is what any particular person says and it becomes

00:09:46.900 truth only when they have power. So it was a revolutionary but entirely nihilistic idea. And it

00:09:54.840 came from, you know, Friedrich Nietzsche and Hegel and the German nihilists, but it also was imported

00:10:00.680 first to France, Michel Foucault in the 1960s and 70s, Lacan, Derrida, and now it's here in the

00:10:07.760 university. And this woke culture that we see is a manifestation. And how that works out practically

00:10:13.940 is it says to Americans, you know, you think you have a constitution. It was basically you've been

00:10:20.520 fooled. It was just a bunch of white slave owners who rigged the system and called it truth, freedom,

00:10:25.200 declaration of independence, but it perpetuated their oppressions. And then they would say, you know,

00:10:30.400 you think you're better than other countries or that your safety or prosperity or freedom is

00:10:37.680 preferable to that in Venezuela. But that's just because you've artificially defined those words,

00:10:44.260 given them false definition. Who's to say that something is not better? So it's a very dangerous

00:10:48.740 ideology because it doesn't reflect reality. The people who promulgate it are usually very white,

00:10:55.340 very wealthy, very privileged, and they don't live by it in their own lives. I mean, they put their

00:11:01.700 kids in private school. They want them to go to the Ivy League. They're professionals. They make a lot

00:11:05.860 of money. They have beautiful homes. So they really do believe in concrete realities and hierarchies and

00:11:11.200 privilege. And they mask all that by saying that people who do not have privilege, the white working

00:11:17.480 class in particular, they despise, which lacks the culture of the wealthy and the sympathy of the poor

00:11:23.740 in their eyes. They lob that on them. They say, you have privilege. And that virtual signals

00:11:29.500 an exemption they seek from their own privilege.

00:11:42.400 And how do you think this affects, this kind of view affects foreign policy? How did it affect some of

00:11:48.600 the decisions in your mind that Barack Obama made in his so-called apology tour, even the Iran nuclear deal,

00:11:56.180 what some people would call appeasement towards hostile foreign powers? Do you think that that did have an

00:12:01.240 effect on Obama's administration and the policies that he pushed forth?

00:12:05.360 Oh, yes. And that's a good question. It affects it in so many insidious ways from the pragmatic to the

00:12:12.600 ideological. Let's take the ideological. It basically says, when we look at the Middle East,

00:12:17.780 and we see that Israel is a constitutional republic, a democracy, an honors freedom,

00:12:24.600 we can't really say that, because those reflect artificial values that we put importance or value

00:12:33.040 on that are not fair to other alternative systems, i.e. the Palestinians or the Saudis or Libyans. And

00:12:38.940 therefore, we have no right to go into that area and judge one group over the other. And therefore,

00:12:44.760 if anything, we have to apologize to people in the past, because our dynamic economic system was built

00:12:52.620 on exploitation and colonialism and imperialism are the only legacy of the West. And so that's one

00:12:59.620 problem. But in a very superficial sense, it sends a signal to our opponents that we are very weak,

00:13:07.080 in the sense that they can use our own absurdities as weapons against us. And I'll take a good example

00:13:14.300 of some foreign policy. If we know that the Chinese sort of corrupted the World Health Organization to

00:13:22.980 lie about the origins and the nature and the transmissibility of the COVID virus. And if we know

00:13:29.280 that China has a million Uyghurs in camps or destroy democracy in Hong Kong or destroy the culture of

00:13:36.500 Tibet, it doesn't really matter because then they come back to us and say, you know what, you're just

00:13:41.620 a typically racist Western country and you oppress Chinese students. And every time you find a so-called

00:13:50.060 quote unquote Chinese military attache on your campuses, that's just an excuse for your blanket

00:13:56.300 condemnation of Asian people, just like the 19th century yellow peril. So our enemies look at this

00:14:03.280 and they say, wow, we're just going to mimic the complaints of the left and they take it seriously

00:14:13.040 and it disarms them. And so now in the Biden administration, we're losing sort of that edge or

00:14:19.200 that desire we had to stand up to China's crimes. And it's very, I mean, it can be, it can enter the

00:14:27.320 realm of the absurd. When bin Laden was at his peak, he and Dr. Zawahiri wrote a book. And I mean,

00:14:34.080 there was a book published by Raymond Ibrahim, all of their collected writings, and they were accusing us,

00:14:38.720 believe it or not, of decadence because we didn't have campaign finance reform. We didn't sign on to

00:14:45.020 radical global warming ideology. So they just read American newspapers and said, half the country is

00:14:51.760 trying to eat itself alive. We're going to join that cannibalistic attack on the West. And so

00:14:56.980 self-criticism and self-reflection is really important for society. We're the only culture

00:15:01.940 or civilization in the West that does that. But sometimes it gets to excess and turns from

00:15:07.900 constructive criticism to cannibalistic self-hatred.

00:15:12.580 Yep. And Joe Biden actually recently explicitly said that he had a phone conversation with

00:15:20.880 Jinping and that he kind of had to understand that, you know, that he has different priorities,

00:15:27.660 that it's culturally different, that China, you know, the reason that they are doing what they're

00:15:32.880 doing with Taiwan or Hong Kong or the Uyghur Muslims. It just has to do with different priorities

00:15:39.600 of the regime. It has to do with, you know, different cultural norms. And I was really alarmed

00:15:45.980 to hear that. But I'm afraid that there's a lot of people in charge, a lot of people in what you

00:15:50.540 might call the elite class, that doesn't disturb them at all. And they're perfectly fine with that

00:15:56.580 kind of mentality. And they actually think that America weakening or kind of going lower on the

00:16:02.240 totem pole will be better for the whole world. What do you think the consequence is if America

00:16:08.920 does continue to go down this path of kind of shrinking and trying to lessen our power in the

00:16:16.480 name of, I don't know, tolerance or intersectionality? Well, we don't appreciate the fact that the reason

00:16:25.360 that you or I can, when this epidemic ends, can get on a plane and there's going to be common rules

00:16:31.520 and regulations, how it lands and takes off and the safety requirements it must meet, or how we get

00:16:36.640 on a cell phone, and who we communicate with Asia or Latin America, or how what is legal or illegal in

00:16:44.000 trade, the whole system of global cooperation is based on Westernism after World War Two, and Western

00:16:51.080 technology. And the enforcer, if I could use that term of this system, is to be frank, the United States

00:16:58.080 economy, which is the largest in the world, it's almost in some terms of measurements twice the

00:17:04.240 size of the Chinese economy. And we do that with one fourth of the population. So it's an astounding

00:17:11.760 achievement. And we're critical to make the world work. When we doubt ourselves, as you pointed out,

00:17:18.480 and then other people see, you know what, the United States doesn't really believe in itself,

00:17:22.400 it doesn't really believe in the system. And we're going to take advantage of it. And we know how to take

00:17:26.960 advantage of it, we just emulate the left's hatred of the system. And then they're kind of befuddled,

00:17:33.200 they don't know quite what to do, they don't want to be called racist, or sexist, or homophobes, or

00:17:37.200 nativist, or xenophobes. And so they become paralyzed. In the case of China and Joe Biden,

00:17:44.320 there's two things going on very quickly. One is that our elite, our bipartisan Washington to New York

00:17:50.880 elite and Silicon Valley to Hollywood elite. So many of them are compromised by China, whether it's

00:17:57.280 the NBA who can't say a word, right, an objective objection, or it's Hollywood who calibrates their

00:18:03.600 pictures on the on the orders of Chinese to eliminate black actors that they deemed too dark

00:18:09.600 and wouldn't be acceptable to the lucrative Chinese market or the Biden family itself, Joe Biden's son,

00:18:16.000 Hunter, who still has interest in China. I can't believe he still retains interest in the Chinese

00:18:21.520 communist sponsored company, or it's Mr. Blinken, the Secretary of State, who was had a lucrative career

00:18:28.320 in Chinese investment. All of them are compromised either financially or ideologically. And what was

00:18:35.680 unusual about Trump, to break that cycle, I guess the only person who could do that was someone who was

00:18:44.240 not only not part of it, but was a little bit uncouth. I accrued loud and just said, I don't really care.

00:18:53.360 I'm going to go into this glass store of hypocrisy and break everything up. And of course, he wasn't

00:18:59.520 reelected. And then people said, Well, we stopped that. And then now even more emboldened they were

00:19:03.920 than before he came. So I'm not optimistic that we're going to have the wherewithal to resist the Chinese

00:19:11.200 and the way that they need to be resisted. I've been interested to see other countries like

00:19:16.480 Australia and France kind of criticize the United States for the kind of self loathing mentality that

00:19:25.600 a lot of people in the elite class have taken on or our softness against China or our unwillingness to

00:19:31.200 call out China. Does that surprise you at all that some of these more what you might consider

00:19:35.840 progressive countries are actually stronger in their stances on some of these positions than the

00:19:41.520 United States is? You know, it doesn't. And I can explain why very briefly. There's two or three

00:19:47.120 reasons why they have a long colonial and imperial history that other than the Philippines at the turn

00:19:54.400 of the 20th century, we have not really had. And so when we start to become woke or radical, and we did

00:20:01.200 it in the 1930s, they get scared, because they're worried that we would become not the stabilizer

00:20:07.920 enforcer of the post-war order, but rather ourselves, sort of a revolutionary society that might join

00:20:16.480 their enemies or critics and saying, you know what, we're woke now, we reject our own Western past,

00:20:21.920 we're no longer a Western country. And you guys colonized Asia and Africa, and you're still

00:20:27.600 have influence in India, and we're free of that. We're a revolutionary society. And they're afraid,

00:20:35.680 secondly, because they're very dependent upon us. They have asymmetrical trade with us. They do not,

00:20:42.400 until Trump came along, the vast majority of the NATO allies did not meet their 2% defense

00:20:47.840 contributions. More do, I think eight do now out of 23 countries. But my point is that they, for

00:20:55.760 practical reasons, they say, you know what, the US has to be firm, it has to be a protector. Our role

00:21:02.800 are the ancient Greeks. They're the ancient Roman. They're the muscle and the economy. We're the

00:21:07.520 philosophers. We're going to ankle bag them, make fun of them, tweak them. But we just, we only can do

00:21:13.760 that if they stay firm. They're the parent, we're the whiny juvenile. But when the parent acts like a hippie,

00:21:21.200 then the juvenile says, wait a minute, who pays the bills? Who enforces, who tells? And that's where

00:21:26.400 we are right now. They don't, they're scared stiff. And they're scared stiff because if America goes hard

00:21:32.240 left, it could, in theory, be as critical of them as it is itself. And they don't want that to happen.

00:21:40.000 You know, that's interesting. I've never thought about it in quite that way. And it doesn't seem to

00:21:46.480 be that it's just kind of our more woke allies, like France and Germany and Australia and Canada,

00:21:53.200 that you're saying that they rely on American exceptionalism or American strength, but they

00:21:58.960 like to use America as a punching bag, I guess, to gain their own woke points. And the same thing with

00:22:05.600 the NBA, the same thing with a lot of major corporations, they depend on the American economy,

00:22:10.800 obviously, America being the strongest country in the world. But at the same time,

00:22:15.760 they know that they'll gain points both here and abroad by bashing America as systemically racist and,

00:22:22.480 you know, an enemy of social justice or whatever it is. Is that kind of what you're describing?

00:22:27.840 Yeah, I think you described it very well. I would call it the court jester syndrome,

00:22:32.400 where once the court is stable, then they hire a jester to come in and make fun of them on the

00:22:37.440 pretense that they're not going to be dangerous enough to disrupt the workings of the court. So

00:22:42.800 we have in the system, market capitalism, free enterprise and the protection of private property.

00:22:49.440 And that's makes us that makes Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, or any of these leftists very wealthy.

00:22:57.520 And then they have court jesters. These are the people in the universities that make fun of it,

00:23:01.840 and they kind of amuse it, they go, they sign on to the New Green Deal. They do all these left wing

00:23:07.280 things. But in the old days, there was an area where you couldn't intrude upon. You didn't go in

00:23:12.880 and break up monopolies like, you know, Facebook, they thought they could control their their capitalist

00:23:18.960 juggernaut, and control the court jesters. I don't think they can anymore. Because I think that

00:23:24.800 Joe Biden administration is hijacked by Elizabeth Warren and AOC and the squad. And I think pretty

00:23:31.360 soon, the woke Wall Street, woke Silicon Valley, woke NBA, all of these institutions are going to

00:23:38.240 have to deal with real socialist agendas that I don't think even their, you know, their protections

00:23:44.720 that they have from the consequences of their own game plan or ideology is going to help them.

00:23:50.560 And we'll see about that. But yeah, it's very dishonest. And it works on the transatlantic sense

00:23:57.120 in the same fashion. They view us as monolithically capitalist and productive and strong with all

00:24:03.200 these aircraft carriers and this huge domestic consumer market. And then they can kind of make

00:24:08.880 fun of it up to a point. And that point has been reached now, because when they look at the writing,

00:24:14.720 and they look at the name changing, and the statute changing, top lane in the school,

00:24:21.520 they think this is crazy. Wait a minute. We've got a reign of terror in the United States. This is like

00:24:26.560 the Jacobin takeover of the French Revolution. And these people don't understand that if they change

00:24:32.480 this country, we're not going to have a market. We're not going to have protection. We're not going

00:24:37.520 to have it. We went too far in making fun of it. And now we're starting to see, you know,

00:24:41.440 actually conservative. So Eastern Europe especially is worried. They're much more conservative than we

00:24:48.000 are. And now, as you point out, people in the UK, France, people in Southern Europe,

00:24:54.640 they're very scary, because it's not just France going left wing, it's this huge economic and military

00:25:00.560 power. And when they look at retired generals, who start lecturing about this David Petraeus did about

00:25:06.240 taking down statues, or accusing Donald Trump of being an insurrectionist, or Mussolini, or

00:25:13.360 Hitler-like, that gets them even more scared. My God, they think the Pentagon is becoming a national

00:25:18.480 liberation army. And so I think they're very terrified. Yeah. And it seems like, as they should

00:25:24.000 be, they seem to have a more clear perspective on what's going on here in America than we do. I don't

00:25:29.920 really see an about-face by these corporations and by the establishment media to say, oh, we've

00:25:37.440 caused, or we've helped at least exacerbate some of the chaos in the division and the weakness that we

00:25:44.000 are seeing precipitated throughout the country. And so we're going to stop, or we're going to start

00:25:49.920 criticizing the violence, or we're going to start calling Antifa and BLM what they are. I don't really

00:25:57.680 see that kind of direction within the United States in corporate America and in the media. Do you think

00:26:04.800 that it sounds like they will wake up? That's a very good question. They did not wake up in 1917

00:26:11.200 when Lenin said to all of the Russian aristocrats that wanted to abandon the czar and did and try to

00:26:19.520 make a deal to be saved and to augment and abet the Bolsheviks or the Kerenskyites, the legitimate

00:26:26.960 socialist opposition to the czars. They all thought they could deal with Lenin. Lenin's attitude was

00:26:32.880 you give a capitalist rope and he'll hang himself because they're greedy. So I think the left's

00:26:37.680 attitude is we don't want to preserve market capitalism. We want to take over these big

00:26:42.640 corporations and make them state-run enterprises and wake them up or have them woke sources of jobs

00:26:48.800 and money for us. And I don't think the corporations quite understand that. So

00:26:54.720 maybe they're going to fail and be as they did in Venezuela and Cuba and outsmart themselves, or

00:27:01.680 maybe they're going to wake up as they did in France in 1793. And, you know, Robespierre ended up on the

00:27:08.720 guillotine or maybe in as they did in the sixties, they thought they could handle the sixties revolution.

00:27:13.520 And finally they realized, no, we can't, we got to elect a guy like Ronald Reagan. So

00:27:19.440 there is a pushback right now, but what's different is that we've never seen with this electronic

00:27:25.520 octopus, the control of our means of accessing information, communicating social media, Facebook,

00:27:31.120 Twitter, Google, and all of that is controlled by the left. So it's much harder to gauge or calibrate

00:27:37.360 whether this grassroots pushback can be sustained or how big it is. But you, you're starting to see

00:27:44.000 people on the left, people who've been fired from newspapers, actors that can't get jobs,

00:27:50.400 people who've been canceled out for one word. They're starting to murmur that this is not

00:27:55.200 sustainable because the left is starting to eat its own and they've been eaten and they don't want it.

00:28:01.280 Right. And it's interesting because a lot of, obviously these people on the left who are advancing,

00:28:07.280 these causes and these goals, they, you know, they're soft towards socialism and communism,

00:28:12.640 but isn't the combining of corporate and governmental power also a form of fascism. And these are the

00:28:18.560 very same people who say that they're standing against the fascists who they say are the conservatives

00:28:23.600 or the Trump supporters. Yeah, that was the paradigm that, that fascism did in Europe in the 1930s,

00:28:30.560 whether it was in Spain or, or Italy or Germany, that is, they went to the industrial class,

00:28:35.520 what they called the industrial class and said, look, we're going to give you all these markets

00:28:40.480 and you're going to have a monopoly on and you're going to make a lot of profits because we have an

00:28:44.240 expansionary agenda overseas, but we don't want communism. We don't want leftism. We don't want

00:28:50.640 freedom. We don't want union. We don't want any of that, but you're going to have these. And they all

00:28:55.040 signed up for it. And notice that there are no unions in Amazon. I mean, Amazon said that

00:29:02.560 they wanted to promote workers' rights and that mail-in balloting was wonderful. And then we find

00:29:08.000 out that Jeff Bezos is trying to crush a union movement in Alabama by outlawing, trying to outlaw

00:29:14.400 mail-in ballots, which he said can't be verified. He sounds like a right-wing reactionary. But they're

00:29:20.240 starting to see that this deal they made with the left that gave them monopolies and cartels

00:29:26.320 an absolute exemption from federal jurisdiction or oversight, they think the left is a little bit

00:29:35.200 more ambitious than they signed up for. The left wants to control them. And you really saw that

00:29:39.040 after the last election when Mark Zuckerberg and his companies and Twitter, they were kind of saying,

00:29:46.960 well, we're going to slant the news and not report about Hunter Biden and de-platform occasionally

00:29:53.120 Donald Trump, but we're not going to cancel them out. Because if we do that, we're kind of a state-run

00:29:58.720 organization and we're going to lose half the country, our market. And yet the Obamas came out,

00:30:03.680 Biden came out, Hillary came out, all of these left-wing politicians said, shame on you to give

00:30:09.600 Donald platform 70 million Twitter followers and a huge Facebook audience. You're responsible

00:30:16.240 for all these. So then like a night of the long nights, we woke up on, I guess it was January

00:30:22.720 11th and they had destroyed Parler and then earlier they had de-platformed,

00:30:27.440 they being Twitter and Facebook, Trump for life. And notice the argument they used. It was the 1960s

00:30:34.240 racist lunch count owner or landlord who said to African Americans, we're not infringing on your right

00:30:42.720 to check into my hotel or any hotel. You can go to any lunch, just don't go to mine.

00:30:48.560 You know, I own it. I have a right to say, you know, the first amendment doesn't cover me. I just

00:30:54.480 don't want you in my lunch counter. I don't want you in my hotel, but you know, drive a hundred miles

00:31:00.000 somewhere else. And the courts and the country said, no, that's not realistic. And so they are playing

00:31:06.960 that role of the racist 1960s. They're saying to Trump or to the Parler people or to us, they're

00:31:12.720 saying, you know what? We believe in free speech, but we don't believe in free reach. So if you want

00:31:18.560 to commit, communicate over Twitter, just go get yourself another Twitter, but don't use ours. And

00:31:24.320 then we say, okay, we'll go to Parler and guess what? One o'clock in the morning on the 11th of January,

00:31:31.200 they shut it down and you can't get it on any app or any phone. And that's really scary because that,

00:31:36.320 that gets back to your point about state run fascism.

00:31:49.520 If you could just leave people with maybe one tip or one piece of advice, you know,

00:31:54.640 the average person kind of feels powerless in the midst of all of this. Do you have any, you know,

00:32:00.080 wisdom or, I don't know, a little bit of optimism or hope for people who are just worried about the

00:32:05.360 direction the country is going and what they can do?

00:32:09.040 I do. I would say, don't become depressed or disheartened. But remember that we are in a period

00:32:17.760 where the universities, K through 12, the foundations, professional sports, Hollywood,

00:32:24.720 entertainment, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, they control our culture, our wealth and our

00:32:31.360 power. And they're woke, but they don't have 51% of the people. And for them to wake up and return to

00:32:39.760 normality and honor the Bill of Rights, it requires all of us, even though we're one wink,

00:32:44.960 one bad word, one good word, one facial expression from getting canceled. We don't care. We're going to say

00:32:53.760 what we want, when we want, how we want. And the more that we do that, it's sort of like a glass,

00:32:59.760 a screen, and we have a big illusion on it. And we need to take a sledgehammer in that famous Apple

00:33:05.120 commercial and throw it right through it, because there's nothing there, because it's not based on

00:33:09.600 ethics, morality, or logic. And we can just, you know, there's no logic in saying you can't name a

00:33:14.480 school after George Washington, he's a racist. You can't do that. If you do that, you have no country. So we're

00:33:21.440 going to say, yes, we can. We're going to name whatever we want, and then override that.

00:33:25.120 And you can call me anything in the world has no effect on me. When we start to do that,

00:33:29.840 sort of like that famous lawyer, Joseph Welch, in the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, McCarthy

00:33:37.520 would come like the modern left and say, I have a list here of all these people that I'm going to go

00:33:43.200 after. And he would do things like that, make up stuff, kind of like the blacklisting,

00:33:48.160 the Lincoln Project and others have engaged in. And finally, the army council said,

00:33:53.360 have you no decency, Senator McCarthy? And as soon as he said that, it was weird. It just,

00:33:57.680 it destroyed the illusion. And McCarthy was rendered what he was, kind of an alcoholic,

00:34:04.240 has-been demagogue. And I think we could do that with a lot of these woke people.

00:34:09.200 You have no control over me. I'm a free person. Say what you want. It has no effect on me. I don't

00:34:14.000 care what you say about me in the New York Times. I don't care what you say about me at the local

00:34:17.520 school board. I'm going to continue. And once we all do that in unison, it's our problem just to

00:34:23.680 finish is, remember the ease of fable about the mice get together and they say, you know,

00:34:27.920 these cats are picking us off one by one, this bad cat. And we never know he's coming. He's so

00:34:34.560 stealthy, so clever. And so they, the mice get together and say, ah, we got an idea. We're going

00:34:39.920 to go put a collar with a bell on it around that guy's neck. And so every time he comes,

00:34:46.720 he'll be so loud, we'll just, he's irrelevant. We can scramble him plenty of time. And then one

00:34:50.880 person in the crowd says, ah, who's going to bell the cat? And no one's willing to be

00:34:56.160 the beller of the cat, but we need a lot of them.

00:35:00.080 Yes. Yes. That is so good. Thank you so much. That truly is encouraging. And I really appreciate

00:35:05.120 you taking the time to talk to us. We'll make sure that people know where to follow you and support

00:35:09.360 you and the Hoover Institution. Thank you so much for talking to us today. Yes.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - April 14, 2021

Ep 403 ｜ Pushing Back Against Postmodernism ｜ Guest： Victor Davis Hanson

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