The Megyn Kelly Show - Victor Davis Hanson on the Crisis at the Border, the Liberal Elite's ＂Abstract Empathy,＂ and What He Loves About America ｜ Ep. 76

00:00:00.560 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.640 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:14.920 I've been waiting for today's interview. I've wanted this from the beginning, from the launch, and we finally got him.

00:00:20.340 It's Victor Davis Hanson. Good luck finding a bigger brain.

00:00:24.500 He is brilliant, and all you need to do is tee it up and sit back and listen.

00:00:28.380 It made my job very easy, I have to tell you.

00:00:31.260 Victor, he's at the Hoover Institution. He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow out there.

00:00:37.980 And he's this great combination of citizen farmer and professor and overall teacher, you know, of us all.

00:00:48.780 He's the fifth successive generation in the same house, just to give you a feel for how his life has been.

00:00:54.280 He grew up on a raisin farm. He's an almond farmer now.

00:00:56.320 He's a professor of the classics, got a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz back in 75, went on to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, then a PhD in classics from Stanford in 1980, registered independent, though certainly he sounds conservative.

00:01:12.280 And he's still in California doing his thing and prolific in his writing of books and his podcast is amazing.

00:01:20.200 You can you can download. I listen to his podcast all the time.

00:01:22.420 And if you're looking, even if you're a liberal, if you're looking for a smart, conservative view and somebody who's married to facts, you should listen to him.

00:01:30.740 Right. He's a very smart guy to to learn from and all sorts of expertise in warfare, in the classics and so on.

00:01:37.980 So you should you should check out his podcast, but you should listen to this one because this is an overview of America 2021.

00:01:44.840 And you're welcome. Stand by.

00:01:55.500 Victor Davis Hanson.

00:01:57.420 What a pleasure to have you here.

00:01:59.840 Thank you for doing this.

00:02:01.280 Thank you for having me, Megan.

00:02:02.740 I'm thrilled.

00:02:04.380 So I read everything that you write.

00:02:05.980 I listen to your podcast.

00:02:07.160 I listen to both of them and I just love what you have to say because you have such a unique view on the world.

00:02:13.360 And I think it's because you're really a farmer at heart who's super smart, super well educated, but never lost touch with the common man.

00:02:21.880 And so in a lot of ways, you're the most sage man alive at this moment because you can understand what's happening in the world in a way of a lot of our elites cannot.

00:02:32.260 That's my impression of you.

00:02:34.060 So let's start with this.

00:02:35.520 No, it's truth.

00:02:37.160 Let's start with Biden.

00:02:38.400 So I feel like we are watching his cognitive decline.

00:02:42.280 What do you think?

00:02:43.300 Oh, I agree.

00:02:44.100 And unfortunately, I think it's occurring at a geometric rather than just arithmetic rate.

00:02:49.260 You can see by clips just three years ago, he was a different person than when he first announced his candidacy.

00:02:54.980 And I really blame journalists for that.

00:02:57.400 I think there were clear indications throughout the primary debates.

00:03:01.840 And I think it was pointed out by Cory Booker and others that Joe Biden had cognitive issues.

00:03:07.620 It was ignored because he was considered the savior of the Democratic Party from an unwinnable left wing surge that wouldn't beat Donald Trump.

00:03:16.940 And then more importantly, in the general campaign, he outsourced his campaign to the media, essentially, and Democratic operatives and Silicon money and big Wall Street money and stayed ensconced in his basement.

00:03:31.980 And that was not an exaggeration.

00:03:33.460 To the degree that we had an interview, he had an interview like you and I are having.

00:03:37.060 I would have had, if I was Joe Biden, I would have demanded that you give me all the questions beforehand.

00:03:43.360 And I would have had people outside the camera, you know, helping me answer those questions.

00:03:50.900 So it sort of reminds me of Woodrow Wilson's last year or two, actually the last 15 months when Edith Wilson didn't tell us how ill he was.

00:04:00.460 And he was basically comatose for much of the time.

00:04:03.680 Or FDR, when he ran for his fourth term, he didn't tell us about his high blood pressure, maybe melanoma, a variety of illnesses besides his paralysis.

00:04:14.140 And he died, as everybody expected he would, early in April of his fourth term.

00:04:20.960 And I just don't think we've ever elected a president that this was known from the outset rather than during his tenure.

00:04:29.840 Where do you see this going?

00:04:31.260 I mean, what do you expect is going to happen with, you know, because that kind of thing only gets worse.

00:04:37.460 It doesn't get better.

00:04:38.440 And we have a young, vibrant vice president who couldn't get the nomination herself. 1.00

00:04:45.660 She wasn't even wanted by the Democratic Party. 0.90

00:04:48.180 But where do you see this going?

00:04:50.600 Well, I think you hit the nail on the head.

00:04:53.180 We all know, I think, where it's going.

00:04:54.880 And that is, when we get little indications that the media at some critical point will say, investing in the lie or the legend that Joe Biden is completely attentive and capable of handling the job is a greater downside than telling the truth.

00:05:12.220 And they're starting to say, to talk about things.

00:05:14.700 And sometimes these issues are that he missed a prompt.

00:05:18.040 I think Politico ran a story about that.

00:05:21.700 And then we also had the Democratic congressional leadership whispering and finally acting about nuclear codes in his possession.

00:05:29.560 And it doesn't look good for the media.

00:05:31.720 They have to play by these roles that are humiliating to them.

00:05:34.820 And yet they created this Frankenstein monster.

00:05:37.400 I don't mean that in a deprecatory way, but this absurd situation.

00:05:40.340 So where's it going?

00:05:41.240 I think at some critical point in six to 12 months, people are going to step in.

00:05:47.180 And Kamala Harris will be the source of a lot of the rumors and the need for action. 0.99

00:05:53.780 She doesn't have necessarily a good relationship before she was named vice president, as you know, with Biden.

00:06:02.440 Do you think that's why so far he has gone pretty radical left?

00:06:08.880 That he's trying to stave off his own party, pushing him out and replacing him with his number two?

00:06:16.600 Yeah, I've said that a couple of times.

00:06:19.120 And I think it's kind of contrary to conventional wisdom that he was in some kind of vessel that carried the socialist agenda across the finish line unwillingly, maybe.

00:06:32.000 And it was a devil's bargain between the two.

00:06:34.580 He got to be president.

00:06:35.900 They supported him.

00:06:36.920 And he got elements of his agenda.

00:06:38.880 I don't think that's quite right.

00:06:40.100 I think he feels liberated to the degree that he is aware of it, that he's going to be a one-term president.

00:06:45.840 He's not going to run for re-election.

00:06:47.420 He doesn't really care, I think, too much about the midterm elections.

00:06:51.420 He feels that through executive orders and a very thin margin in Congress, he can get this agenda through.

00:06:56.800 And the agenda that he's going to get through is, I think, evident from his executive orders on the border, on energy development, on foreign policy, on appointments.

00:07:05.080 And I think he resents the idea that he was the understudy of Barack Obama for eight years when he was a senior statesman.

00:07:12.120 And now he's going to go down in history as the one progressive that really did get the Obama agenda through in a way that the more heralded and charismatic Obama never did.

00:07:22.960 And then there's an element also, in addition to that, that I don't think he's up to the fight with what the left brings to any type of fight.

00:07:31.500 I don't think he's able of withstanding that media, Silicon Valley, entertainment, celebrity nexus.

00:07:37.940 Now, I know that you've said you think his executive orders so far, his appointments so far, are the most radical and polarizing of any recent president.

00:07:47.400 What specifically, what jumps out at you?

00:07:50.460 Well, if we just came from Mars and we looked at the border, Joe Biden has essentially ordered ICE not to enforce federal immigration law, even though he's sworn under constitutional oath to enforce the laws as written and passed and authorized.

00:08:10.040 He hasn't done that.

00:08:10.920 And he's given a message to people south of the border that if they break U.S. law and they come across the border in a way that was not true the last four years, they will be given de facto amnesty.

00:08:23.780 He's told people that it's very dangerous not to wear a mask, almost unpatriotic, Neanderthal-like.

00:08:32.120 He's threatened the governor of Florida with imposing a travel ban should he not comply with federal orders.

00:08:38.700 And yet we know some of the people coming across the border have COVID and there's no testing, there's no background checks, there's nothing.

00:08:47.160 That's pretty radical.

00:08:48.320 He stopped a pipeline right after years of acrimony and years of debate, when it was in progress, when even the administration of Barack Obama's EPA could not find a deleterious effect of that.

00:09:03.060 In fact, most disinterested observers think it will save energy and it will decrease the likelihood of an oil spill.

00:09:12.400 Yet he just canceled it.

00:09:13.520 And he's talked about going back into the Iran deal when he's been given on a plate the chance of a lifetime in the Middle East with all of these Arab countries sort of making an enemy of my enemy as my friend alliance with Israel. 0.90

00:09:27.900 And the more we know about Iran, it's not doing well, its economies in shambles, it's got a lot of enemies and its terrorist appendages we're starving for cashing it. 0.99

00:09:38.420 He wants to revive that because of this ideological zeal on the left for a Persian Shia tilt that we saw under Obama.

00:09:45.980 I can't even get into things like Title IX or the transgendered issues or what we're seeing with abortion, but the social cultural issues are going to be, I think, more radical than Barack Obama.

00:09:59.660 Remember, Barack Obama ran in 2008 deep skepticism of things like gay marriage, and he promised not to.

00:10:07.880 What he said, at least, was very centrist compared to Biden.

00:10:11.140 And so I think, and then when you see the appointment at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, or even General Austin, who's, he's a renowned soldier, I have nothing but praise for him.

00:10:29.340 But what he's doing right now is basically applying an ideological litmus test and going through the ranks of officer corps to see if any of them don't pass an ideological litmus test.

00:10:41.520 I'm really worried.

00:10:42.740 I'm worried that there's no check on this.

00:10:47.320 When you have a conservative or a reactionary president, you always have the media there to 24-7 shout.

00:10:53.740 But when you have a leftist who's one of their own, whether it's Barack Obama and surveilling, you remember the AP reporters.

00:11:00.960 I remember you talked about James Rosen from Fox having his communications somewhat known to the administration.

00:11:09.800 There was no outcry.

00:11:11.020 Same thing with the IRS.

00:11:12.220 But when the left is doing this and there's no outcry, it only emboldens them because they grow contempt for the media.

00:11:20.240 And you saw that with the Iran deal when we were told by Ben Rose that the media knows nothing.

00:11:25.280 They are just an echo chamber.

00:11:26.640 And I think they have contempt for this media, and they think they have a path to do whatever they want.

00:11:30.840 But where are the Republicans, especially when you mentioned like the Equity Act, you know, that's going to make sure trans girls, you know, boys, it's confusing language, but designated boys at birth can compete against girls in track and so on.

00:11:48.180 When I was at Fox, these issues would have been dominating our news cycle every day, and there would have been very prominent Republicans speaking out about it nonstop.

00:11:57.680 It seems like a lot of this stuff is just getting slipped through without too much objection.

00:12:03.160 No, I agree with that.

00:12:05.840 And I don't know why that is.

00:12:07.400 I think some of it has to do with the Trump factor.

00:12:12.560 I'll just take an example of a natural leader that we would think the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, now the minority leader.

00:12:20.300 But we would have thought that he would have been out in front on those issues.

00:12:23.700 But I think his animus for Trump or his unwillingness to be seen as a, quote, right-wing person, I think there's also this temptation on a lot of Republicans that if they seem moderate or they seem centrist on social and cultural issues, then something like the Hill or Politico will write a puff piece on them, and that's a temptation.

00:12:46.100 They're kind of weary after the Trump years.

00:12:48.040 They just don't want to go out and fight those cultural wars like they used to.

00:12:53.700 And so the left knows that.

00:12:55.960 And it's funny, though, because all of these left-wing movements that we've seen in history, the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, they never have 50% support.

00:13:06.780 We know that there's not 51% support for having biological males and girls sports or denying First Amendment and Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights to students accused of sexual assault.

00:13:20.580 We know that from polls.

00:13:22.560 Same thing on the border.

00:13:23.700 But the Democratic Party feels that it can create a new consensus by authorizing and then institutionalizing something as fact.

00:13:33.660 It's over now.

00:13:34.480 It's fact.

00:13:35.320 Get used to it.

00:13:36.740 And that's their attitude.

00:13:38.620 And people are afraid of them.

00:13:40.760 I guess they're afraid because of the cancel culture or the sheer power of these cultural levers.

00:13:46.880 I mean, there's Wall Street.

00:13:48.360 There's celebrity culture.

00:13:50.440 There's Hollywood.

00:13:51.220 There's professional sports.

00:13:52.940 Silicon Valley, the traditional media, the new media, foundations, academia.

00:13:57.560 You put all of those things together.

00:13:59.960 And even though they're small number-wise, they have enormous amounts of capital and influence to the public.

00:14:06.980 Because it doesn't seem like Democrats, other than people like AOC, really want things like what we saw in New York City last week, which is you're not allowed to refer to parents as mom and dad anymore.

00:14:22.320 You're not allowed to refer to the kids as boys and girls at all, to the point where you have to substitute in new language if a book refers to a girl as a girl or a boy as a boy.

00:14:31.760 I don't think that most Democrats want that, but they don't speak out.

00:14:38.160 No.

00:14:39.320 And I think part of it is the leadership to be sort of ageist.

00:14:45.020 Nancy Pelosi or Clyburn or Hoyer, they're in their 70s and 80s.

00:14:51.600 And this movement you're talking about, the hard left or the neo-socialists, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, is a youthful movement.

00:14:58.840 And they're acquainted and adept with social media, and they have a whole different culture than the leadership itself.

00:15:05.960 And that leadership is emblematic of mainstream Democrats, middle-aged Democrats in general.

00:15:12.240 I think how that works out is they think, I don't want to get into these issues with these young guys.

00:15:17.840 All I know is they're motivated, and they communicate well, and they've got large future audiences.

00:15:24.880 We're a different country demographically.

00:15:26.860 They appeal to this group, and I'll put up with whatever they do to keep me in power.

00:15:32.840 And I think that's pretty much what explains it.

00:15:36.300 I think I have members of my family, siblings, that are pretty hard left.

00:15:41.740 And I know that they were raised by my parents in a way that in the environment in which we live out here in the farm, that these would be antithetical.

00:15:50.560 But they're just straight party people.

00:15:52.980 So whatever the party says is tolerable because it's going to prevent Donald Trump from coming back or a right-wing Republican or whatever bogeyman they have.

00:16:02.440 I want to talk to you about what you've referred to as the woke pandemic in a minute, but I don't want to leave immigration yet because I know this is one of your issues, and I think you can help us understand it.

00:16:14.500 So what I see is obviously the surge happening at the southern border.

00:16:21.160 Biden's reversed Trump's zero-tolerance policies.

00:16:24.940 And now you have Texas Governor Abbott, who just came out and said last year the Border Patrol apprehended 90,000 people in the entire year in the Rio Grande Valley.

00:16:36.220 This year already, we're at the beginning of March.

00:16:38.940 They've had already over 100,000 apprehended in that area alone.

00:16:43.460 It's very clear that, I guess there are a number of factors, it's very clear that folks feel emboldened by Biden's more relaxed policies.

00:16:54.220 And I don't know where this is going to go, or what is the big game plan here by the Democrats?

00:17:01.440 The game plan is that electorally and demographically, they feel that once somebody comes illegally without a high school diploma, and the vast majority don't have high school diplomas, and they come in mass and without diversity.

00:17:17.580 So they're all coming from south of the border.

00:17:19.900 And for the most part, they're from Central America, Mexico.

00:17:22.740 Then they're going to be permanent loyal constituents when they get amnesty and their children are born in the United States for the Democratic Party.

00:17:30.780 And they look at what's happened in California.

00:17:33.640 It's flipped from a state of Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, George Dick Mason, and Arnold Schwarzenegger of governor to a super majority in the House.

00:17:43.540 The state legislatures, we don't have one major, we won't have any, I shouldn't say, statewide officeholder who's Republican.

00:17:50.780 And they see that model, and they think Nevada has now adopted it, New Mexico has.

00:17:55.240 Arizona is just about there, if not there already.

00:17:57.980 Colorado is there.

00:17:58.900 Texas is the next big prize.

00:18:00.820 Georgia.

00:18:01.720 And they feel that it's a winning strategy.

00:18:06.700 They don't feel that their message, the issues that we've talked about already, whether it's transgenderism or the open borders or the stimulus package, or all of these things are necessarily winning issues.

00:18:19.200 But a changed demography is because people will say, well, even people who come here illegally know that they tax social services and they don't know English and they burden the schools. 0.69

00:18:32.280 And yes, but has anybody ever been to Oaxaca, Mexico, whatever the United States is, and whatever crisis it's in, it's heaven compared to southern Mexico.

00:18:42.880 And so when people tell me, well, I'm leaving California because it's unlivable because we don't have money for roads and highways and you can't use social services and the public schools have so many second language programs. 1.00

00:18:56.660 Many of these people are Hispanic themselves, I always say to them, and so it's worse than Oaxaca, and the answer is no, it's not. 1.00

00:19:07.200 And so where's it going?

00:19:10.020 I think this is one of these issues that everybody's been complacent in, four or five interests.

00:19:15.180 We know that the Democratic Party wants a changed demography.

00:19:19.120 We know that a Latino elite believes in this La Raza mythology that they can be, and even though they're quite assimilated and they love consumer capitalism, they can be an opposition group that demands repertory action from larger society as victim. 0.99

00:19:37.520 And we know that the American Southwest, if you're upper middle class, you can live like a 19th century English lord with cheap help doing your laundry, doing your lawn, caring for your mother, cooking your food, taking care of your children.

00:19:54.360 I grew up with none of that.

00:19:56.580 And yet when I go to Palo Alto where I work at Stanford, I see all of these colleagues that have all this help in a way they probably wouldn't if they had to hire someone else other than someone who's just arrived here from south of the border. 0.90

00:20:11.020 And then you have the employers, the largest, it's not farming, when I was growing up it was farming, but it only constitutes about 20% of the jobs that are taken by illegals or meatpacking, but especially hospitality, hotels, restaurants, landscaping.

00:20:26.580 Meatpacking.

00:20:28.060 So the Republican conservative constituency is in on it too.

00:20:32.260 And then finally, the main tester in the mosaic is the government of Mexico.

00:20:36.980 The government of Mexico gets about $30 billion.

00:20:39.700 South American governments get another $30, $60 billion.

00:20:43.620 It comes in to Mexico from remittances.

00:20:47.580 And it's very cynical, Megan, because their attitude is, I just sent you the poorest people that we don't want.

00:20:55.280 And they're indigenous people.

00:20:57.440 They're not the Mexican elite that always boast the degree of their pure Spanish ancestry in a very racist fashion. 0.60

00:21:05.760 But once they get up here, living on the minimum wage is very difficult.

00:21:10.220 And yet the Mexican government expects them to send $200, $300 a week back to their families because the Mexican government either can't or won't provide social services.

00:21:20.620 And we, the taxpayer, provide the social services for the Mexican illegal immigrant. 0.99

00:21:26.500 So then he's freed up with cash to send back to Mexico.

00:21:30.120 I once talked to a Mexican professor, a very brilliant woman who really despised the United States. 1.00

00:21:36.020 And she said to me, Victor, it's a wonderful system for us.

00:21:39.860 Because we, all of our dissidents and all the people are unhappy and social justice, they leave.

00:21:46.180 They don't march on Mexico City.

00:21:48.280 And you have them.

00:21:49.680 And then they bring us remittances.

00:21:52.920 And we don't have to spend social services on it.

00:21:56.240 And then we can call you racist because they don't have parity with the average American.

00:22:02.200 I mean, we say it's because of their skin color.

00:22:04.180 And when they do have parity, they have a romantic view of Mexico and they're firm supporters and stalwart post expatriates that support better relations with Mexico the longer they're not there.

00:22:18.000 So she spelled it out pretty clearly for me.

00:22:20.720 I once wrote about it in Mexifornia, a book about it.

00:22:23.580 But it's insidious.

00:22:26.300 And I don't know how we're ever going to stop it until second and third generation Mexican-American people and Hispanics say, you know what, I live in Merced, California, or I live in Stockton, or I live in a suburb of L.A. 0.99

00:22:41.680 And when we bring so many people in that are non-diverse in mass and they don't know English and they don't have education, my child's public school experience is altered. 1.00

00:22:52.980 And it's not safe for my son to be in this neighborhood when we have gang and cartel people coming in from Mexico.

00:22:59.020 When that happens, and it's starting to, I think you'll, according to the polls at least, it's already happened.

00:23:04.920 Then you'll see some changes.

00:23:06.320 Coming up in one second, here in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the view on immigration is, you know, we're in favor.

00:23:14.700 We're all immigrants.

00:23:16.100 More is better than less.

00:23:18.140 Well, Victor's been living a very different life out there in California for a long time and has a different experience of how it might not be the greatest thing.

00:23:26.080 Certainly illegal immigration into the country really might not be the greatest thing and might have real-life consequences for our friends on the southern border.

00:23:33.620 So we'll get into how he has seen that manifest where he is.

00:23:38.780 We'll get back to that in just one second.

00:23:40.720 But first this.

00:23:46.260 The numbers are stunning.

00:23:48.140 I mean, this is from the New York Times that border agents encountered a migrant at the border about 78,000 times in January.

00:23:55.740 That's more than double the rate of the same time a year ago, higher than in any January in a decade.

00:24:04.080 The number of migrant children in custody has tripled in just the past two weeks.

00:24:09.000 Like, they're running across the southern border.

00:24:12.580 And Biden, who ran on a more humane policy and being the anti-Trump, is he's in a pickle because he knows I don't know that he thinks we can accommodate all these people here in the United States through an asylum-seeking process or any other process.

00:24:29.360 But he's supposed to be the anti-Trump, the welcomer, the kinder, gentler president.

00:24:34.620 So he's got to let them across.

00:24:38.600 And a lot of them are coming in.

00:24:40.980 Absolutely.

00:24:41.420 And we know now that that 11 million figure of permanent residents who are not here legally, that's been there for 20 years.

00:24:50.220 And finally, finally, MIT and Yale did two consecutive studies.

00:24:53.900 And the number is somewhere between 19 and 20 million already here who are not of legal status.

00:25:01.840 Joe Biden, along with especially Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, if you go back and Bill Clinton and you look at their speeches in the 1996 Democratic Convention,

00:25:10.420 even Barack Obama in 2008, it was all strong borders and we don't support illegal immigration.

00:25:18.780 And the reason was twofold.

00:25:20.560 One, they were afraid of their union support and the unions felt that that drove down wages, especially the SEIU.

00:25:28.400 And then second, that they felt that the numbers weren't that large to make an effect at the polls.

00:25:33.960 That's not true anymore.

00:25:35.120 They've lost the union working class, lower middle class white voter.

00:25:39.700 Or they feel they've lost them or he's irrelevant or he's doomed demographically or whatever the reason, they don't appeal to him anymore.

00:25:46.920 And then the numbers are so large, as you point out, that they feel that this is a constituency that's going to be the backbone of gaining and retaining power.

00:25:57.600 And so I don't I don't know how the only hope that we have is you have to have faith in American institutions that even in extremists, when they violated laws and there's so many numbers that there's enough people who realize that without the melting pot and without legality, then we're nothing more than the Balkans.

00:26:17.900 We're just going to descend into tribal warfare where there is no rule of law.

00:26:22.280 And that's already happened.

00:26:23.300 If you go in places here in rural California, it already has happened.

00:26:27.860 How so?

00:26:28.700 Well, if I get up in the morning like this morning and I walk out along Mountain View Avenue and DeWolf Avenue in my rural neighborhood on my farm, there's this morning there was a sofa and a dishwasher thrown on the side of the road.

00:26:47.460 If I were to call the California sheriff, Fresno County Sheriff, APA, because I see a Hispanic name with the garbage that's with it, they will not come out. 1.00

00:26:58.640 There is no rule.

00:26:59.480 If I did that and somebody saw me or I left my phone bill or power bill with the garbage and say a sofa or other, I would be in jail.

00:27:10.420 If I walk through, if I go into town and I want to use social services in the way that I used to, and that means go into a Department of Motor Vehicles office, it's not practical.

00:27:27.320 You cannot walk into a local Central Valley DMV office and get service.

00:27:32.480 You have to make an appointment now weeks and weeks ahead.

00:27:34.980 But if I want a basic service, I have to assume that I won't, it will, it'll be in Spanish.

00:27:41.540 If I go into the dry cleaners, all the stores around it will be in Spanish.

00:27:46.460 The owner of the dry cleaner will not speak English very well.

00:27:50.280 And so that's, that's a reality.

00:27:52.200 And if I'm walking on through my almond orchard and I see somebody that doesn't speak English and he has an AR-15 and he's sitting on the side of his car,

00:28:02.020 I have no idea whether he's a cartel member or he's just a nice guy that's getting paid a bounty to shoot coyotes illegally.

00:28:08.740 But that, that's the reality.

00:28:10.480 And I know that the people that I work with at Stanford, and this is what is very disturbing.

00:28:15.740 If I were to tell them that, then I would be a racist, an old white bitter person.

00:28:21.880 And they're so woke, but then when you look at how, what woke means, it means that the entire Bay Area, whether it's Harker School or Castileya or Sacred Heart or the Menlo School, whatever it is, they're, they're growing.

00:28:39.700 Because all of these Silicon Valley elite that are so wealthy do not dare put their children in the Redwood City Schools or the Eastern Woodside School District.

00:28:50.060 They want their kids in lily white, Asian and white prep schools. 0.98

00:28:54.640 They want to use people to clean their home.

00:28:58.280 And they want to sound very virtuous in doing so by, in the abstract, damning a mythical alt-right white racist who's against illegal immigration.

00:29:07.500 But they don't want to live next to the people.

00:29:10.340 And I'm speaking as somebody whose two brothers have Mexican, one had a Mexican-American wife, the other has Mexican-American children.

00:29:18.040 And I grew up with, I don't, I think there were seven of us that were not Mexican-American in my first, first grade, all the way through seventh grade.

00:29:27.900 And when I get up in the morning, I choose to live here, but I don't see anybody who's not Mexican-American.

00:29:32.860 All my friends are Mexican-American.

00:29:34.320 And so it's not, these people, and I think that's very important, Megan, that a lot of this elite left is some kind of strange psychological mechanism where they construct an abstract caring or empathy as sort of a medieval exemption.

00:29:48.980 So then they don't have to live with the other that they champion.

00:29:52.940 Because they do not want to put their kids in the same school.

00:29:55.520 They do not want to live next to them.

00:29:57.120 They do not want to entertain with them.

00:29:58.680 They don't want to be friends with people.

00:30:00.020 That's so interesting, because I can tell you here in New York, of course, the opposite of extreme geographically and just so far removed from the border that people don't understand it.

00:30:11.080 You'll hear a lot from the liberals up here.

00:30:13.520 I'm an immigrant.

00:30:14.680 I come from a family of immigrants.

00:30:16.340 And they skip over the part where it was done legally.

00:30:19.080 And they think that people who are along the southern border who are complaining about this are just all a bunch of xenophobes and racists without understanding that not only is there some real danger there, but there are genuine economic and societal consequences to having what is effectively an open border.

00:30:36.180 Yeah, there is.

00:30:36.720 I mean, when my daughter was in high school, a person hit us, ran, T-boned us, and then took off running.

00:30:45.080 And we weren't hurt that badly, just shaken up.

00:30:47.820 I went and tackled him.

00:30:49.700 And he was arrested.

00:30:51.880 And the next, the officer told me to leave.

00:30:55.340 And the next day when I filed insurance, there was no record of that arrest.

00:30:58.760 They let him off because I guess they knew him or he was related, the local police department.

00:31:03.260 And I've had since 1980 now six incidents, I count them, where people have run off the road, intoxicated, and torn out either vineyard or almond trees.

00:31:15.620 Had one just two months ago.

00:31:17.800 And the car is there in the vineyard or the orchard.

00:31:22.140 And it's destroyed usually.

00:31:23.880 And the person is either intoxicated in the car or they've left.

00:31:27.700 And when I ask an officer to come out, I'm told that under no circumstances will you be able to impound that car.

00:31:35.160 And they come out and impound it.

00:31:36.540 And that's the last I ever hear it.

00:31:38.060 There's no compensation.

00:31:39.200 There's no insurance coverage.

00:31:40.500 And that's something that happens all the time.

00:31:43.660 Why won't they do it?

00:31:44.740 Well, one of two reasons they give me.

00:31:47.380 One is it's so ubiquitous and frequent that it would be futile to do so.

00:31:52.040 And two, they don't want to be a high profile officer who goes after the quote unquote undocumented because that would stigmatize them within their department or deny their promotion or maybe even come to the attention of the local paper.

00:32:07.260 Well, so what happens now?

00:32:09.240 Because I just can't get over the fact that Biden's pushing for amnesty, you know, for those 19 to 20 million people.

00:32:16.220 Yeah.

00:32:16.420 That's a huge number who are in this country.

00:32:18.500 You don't hear boo about it in the press.

00:32:21.240 Nothing.

00:32:21.800 I mean, 10 years ago, remember when Bush tried to actually create a plan where he worked for the for amnesty with the other side?

00:32:28.360 And it was it was the lead story on Fox News every day.

00:32:30.700 Now you've got Biden pushing this and he says it wants it to happen within eight years.

00:32:35.980 There's no one's talking about it.

00:32:37.840 So do you think it's likely to happen or does it all come down to Joe Manchin?

00:32:42.240 Like what's going to happen with that?

00:32:44.720 Oh, I think the numbers are so large that they're going to do something like, say, we're going to give an amnesty for 11 million.

00:32:53.120 And then they're going to wink and nod and say, that's only half.

00:32:55.740 We only gave it for half as a first step.

00:32:58.280 And once they do that, that's going to, of course, entice more people and more people and more people across the border.

00:33:07.640 And the people who are doing this are people of the upper, upper middle class or where I live and I work.

00:33:14.680 It's the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Google people who have the ability to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own ideology.

00:33:24.480 And so they don't care.

00:33:25.660 They feel pretty good about it.

00:33:26.860 And they think I'm always going to have a wall around my estate as I damn walls on the border.

00:33:32.860 I'm always going to have private schools for my own children as I champion the teachers union and damn charter schools for the lower middle classes. 0.67

00:33:42.360 So you can see how it works, at least the short term thinking of the people who enable this to happen long term.

00:33:50.220 It'll finally catch up to them as it does with every disastrous decision.

00:33:54.740 I think also just briefly, I think we have to be cognizant or candid about the role of race.

00:34:01.660 Race has changed in this country. 0.84

00:34:04.060 We used to believe that class was the determinant of victimization and oppression.

00:34:09.900 We looked at the poor didn't have a good break, whether it was self-inflicted pathologies or bad luck or exploitation by employers or whatever culture.

00:34:19.300 We accepted that we wanted to help the poor of all different races.

00:34:23.200 There's more people who are poor that are non-minority than all minorities put together. 1.00

00:34:28.880 I think it's about 27 million versus 22 million or something.

00:34:32.600 So that was sort of the Marxist idea.

00:34:36.820 And it didn't really work in the United States to say that we're going to have a class struggle because we're all fluid.

00:34:43.320 We're upwardly mobile.

00:34:44.780 Yesterday's poor person is tomorrow's wealthy person.

00:34:47.400 Tomorrow's wealthy person was yesterday, et cetera, et cetera.

00:34:50.920 But something happened with that formula where we created this new thing called diversity.

00:34:57.140 And that was in the Obama administration, really, that it came into the fore.

00:35:02.140 Before, it was a black-white binary, and everybody else was working around it.

00:35:06.240 But because of the legacy of slavery and the poverty of the African-American, levels of poverty in the African-American community, we were working on that specifically.

00:35:17.360 Suddenly, all of a sudden, we dropped all class considerations.

00:35:21.240 I remember 2009-10, all of a sudden, Sikhs in this area, Punjabis, third-generation optometrists who were Asian. 0.98

00:35:32.760 Anybody who was non-white was now a new group called diversity. 0.62

00:35:39.500 And all of a sudden, at Stanford, where I worked, if somebody came from India, and he was a grandee with a lot of money, and he was a doctor or a professor,

00:35:48.520 and you had him in your department, you were considered diverse.

00:35:52.500 And what that did was it just divorced all ideas of oppression and victimization from class considerations.

00:36:01.280 And it upped, in a practical sense, the exploited poor from 15% of the population that were non-white poor, 10%, all of a sudden, 30% of all classes. 0.71

00:36:14.640 And what that did is, you could be very, very wealthy, and we saw that in that interview with Oprah.

00:36:19.680 Oprah's a victim. 0.96

00:36:21.380 You know, she said that a $38,000 crocodile purse was not instantly presented out of its case to her.

00:36:28.740 Therefore, they were racist, and she suffered from it.

00:36:32.120 Michelle Obama said she was a victim when somebody to target asked her to take a package down from a shelf.

00:36:38.020 The royal, these royals that we saw are victims.

00:36:40.860 Everybody can be a victim based on the idea that they have some claim to be non-white in some ways. 0.83

00:36:48.920 Even if they can be wealthy, they can be privileged.

00:36:50.860 They can have far more privilege than somebody in southern Ohio or Appalachia or Bakersfield, California.

00:36:56.700 That's a new idea that I think we haven't discussed as a society.

00:37:00.760 Why don't we make these things income-based rather than racially based?

00:37:04.540 It's funny you should bring this up because I was saying when I was teasing you, I said,

00:37:08.940 I don't know if I have it in me to ask Victor about Meghan Markle and the royals just because I see you on such a high pedestal.

00:37:16.460 But I'm glad you brought it up because I do have strong feelings about it, and they're right along the lines that you just mentioned.

00:37:22.180 We're supposed to look at the millionaires talking to this billionaire on set in this television setting

00:37:26.540 that's watched by tens of millions around the globe and feel sorry for this prince and his wife, the duchess,

00:37:33.960 because they're really worried that their son might not get the title to which they feel he is entitled.

00:37:40.980 Yeah, you know, I didn't.

00:37:42.880 I saw clips of it and I didn't understand the incoherence.

00:37:47.760 It was I don't think Prince Anne's children.

00:37:51.120 I mean, there's a lot of grandchildren of Queen Elsa, but they're not all titled.

00:37:54.980 It doesn't mean just because you're a grandchild, you're automatically titled.

00:37:59.340 Correct.

00:37:59.840 It doesn't happen.

00:38:01.100 It doesn't happen.

00:38:01.900 The only reason we know about either Miss Markle, Meghan Markle, or Prince Andrew is because of the Queen.

00:38:12.780 And he was born lucky, I suppose, with all this privilege.

00:38:17.640 And yet, listening to him, he feels like he suffered because his wife has suffered,

00:38:23.320 who even before she met him, she was well off, an actress.

00:38:26.900 She had a little company.

00:38:28.000 She was doing fine.

00:38:28.940 There was no sign that she'd been oppressed.

00:38:31.620 And then, you know, what did she think the royal family of Britain is like?

00:38:37.120 I mean, the Windsor family goes way back.

00:38:39.920 It has Germanic roots.

00:38:41.160 It has proper English roots.

00:38:43.120 It's you, if you or I married into that family, believe me, they would be joking behind our

00:38:49.260 backs that we're American yokels, whatever race we were.

00:38:52.800 And it wouldn't be necessarily malicious.

00:38:54.920 It's just part of that, the baggage that one accepts when they want to become a royal by marriage.

00:39:01.320 Right.

00:39:01.840 And then you have these two neighbors, the $90 million estate where Opa lives, $15 million estate

00:39:09.720 Montecito, where the royal couple lives.

00:39:13.260 And they're aghast at all this oppression that they've suffered.

00:39:16.600 And I thought, wow, we're in a pandemic.

00:39:18.560 People are dying.

00:39:20.360 We've got all these national crisis.

00:39:21.980 And we have to listen to these psychodramas.

00:39:24.060 And then there was no evidence.

00:39:26.760 It was all he said, she said, or an unnamed person said this.

00:39:32.040 And we won't name this person, I guess, until next episode.

00:39:36.300 Right, right.

00:39:36.960 Oh, but they want their privacy.

00:39:39.040 Yeah.

00:39:39.860 You just wrote a piece about this called The Progressive Imaginarium, which nailed it.

00:39:44.760 Can you explain what that term means?

00:39:46.380 Well, I think we have this sort of fun house where all these imaginary characters live, and

00:39:52.820 the press allows them to live there, whether it's these two supposedly alt-white hoodlums 0.99

00:39:58.720 that confronted Josie Smollett in Chicago at 2.30 in the morning yelling MAGA slogans. 0.96

00:40:07.180 And they didn't like empires, if they even knew what empire was.

00:40:10.860 And then they threw out bleach.

00:40:12.640 Of course, the freezing point of bleach, I think it was eight below that, it would have

00:40:17.560 frozen in midair.

00:40:19.420 But nevertheless, it scattered as if they were going to bleach him and make him white.

00:40:24.140 And then somehow he fought them off while he was holding a sandwich in one hand and

00:40:27.960 the cell phone and the other.

00:40:29.180 And they managed to put a noose on them.

00:40:31.520 But Diminutive, Juicy beat these people. 1.00

00:40:33.820 And people accepted this.

00:40:35.980 And they accepted it.

00:40:38.100 They accepted Elizabeth Warren.

00:40:40.180 If you go back to a catalog at Harvard Law School, she was their first Native American. 0.78

00:40:46.220 She's in this fantasy house.

00:40:48.240 These two people are in this fantasy house.

00:40:51.260 Joe Biden, we just talked about this idea that he's a vigorous, engaged president, good

00:40:58.980 old Joe Biden from Scranton, this middle class, centrist president that's on top of things.

00:41:04.640 It's a complete mythology.

00:41:07.120 And these are media-fed mythologies.

00:41:10.680 And, you know, I was a big critic.

00:41:12.960 I took a lot of heat from the right of the Capitol assault and mob.

00:41:17.580 But if you look at that Capitol's January 6th assault, what you'd see is it was there was

00:41:24.000 no leader.

00:41:24.640 It was a bunch of buffoonish, angry, just, you know, enraged people who committed a felony

00:41:34.060 and should face the consequences.

00:41:35.580 But all of a sudden, we had this fantasy that it was an armed insurrection, pre-planned,

00:41:42.220 and that they were trying to take ties in with them to kidnap government officials.

00:41:47.300 And they were armed.

00:41:48.480 There was never one person who was arrested that ever had in their possession, much less

00:41:53.420 used a firearm.

00:41:54.940 The ties came from the Capitol police that some idiot stole.

00:41:59.100 And the tragic death of Officer Sicknick can be attributed to a lot of hypotheticals.

00:42:06.800 We don't know the answer.

00:42:07.560 But one of them is not the New York Times narrative that an enraged Trump supporter approached

00:42:13.580 him with a fire extinguisher and bashed his head in and killed him.

00:42:16.820 That's not true.

00:42:17.720 And so that's an iconic date.

00:42:20.720 And why that's important is that that justified the largest militarization of Washington since

00:42:25.760 the Civil War, 30,000 people at one point.

00:42:29.360 Yet we didn't hear a peep, Megan, from the 280 retired generals and admirals and national

00:42:35.500 security officials who said that if Donald Trump called in the troops after the burning,

00:42:39.800 partial burning of the St. John Episcopal Church on that, I think it was June 6th,

00:42:46.140 a riot and demonstration that got close to the White House ground.

00:42:50.300 That would be an insurrection.

00:42:51.920 That would be a coup.

00:42:52.760 We're going to have more with Victor Davis Hanson in one second.

00:42:56.960 We're going to talk about the upcoming George Floyd trial and the pressure on the jurors

00:43:03.180 there and how the media is likely to cover this one.

00:43:07.060 But before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we call Sound Up here at the

00:43:10.280 Megyn Kelly Show.

00:43:11.540 This is where we bring you some sound, some like a soundbite that we feel you must hear.

00:43:16.140 And for me, this one was a no brainer.

00:43:18.620 Everyone seems to be weighing in on Oprah Winfrey's bombshell interview of Harry and

00:43:22.580 Meghan because we really were dying to hear from her.

00:43:26.640 Hillary Clinton, who's got some strong opinions. 0.82

00:43:31.380 Listen to this.

00:43:32.120 Their cruelty in going after Meghan was just outrageous.

00:43:39.440 And the fact she did not get more support, that the reaction was, you know, let's just

00:43:45.740 paper it over and pretend that it didn't happen or it will go away.

00:43:49.560 Just keep your head down.

00:43:50.800 Well, you know, this young woman was not about to keep her head down.

00:43:54.260 You know, this is 2021.

00:43:57.100 And she wanted to live her life.

00:43:59.340 She wanted to, you know, be fully engaged.

00:44:03.120 And she had every right to hope for that.

00:44:06.620 OK, so could you please spare us the lectures on cruelty to young women in 2021?

00:44:15.740 Miss, let's create a war room to attack Bill Clinton's accusers when he was running for office 1.00

00:44:21.860 with the help of George Stephanopoulos, by the way.

00:44:24.280 Right.

00:44:24.660 She didn't care.

00:44:25.380 She didn't care whether it was true.

00:44:27.040 She just wanted to tear him down.

00:44:28.100 That's it.

00:44:28.520 But that's Hillary Clinton, folks. 1.00

00:44:30.640 Feminist icon who now is speaking out about the cruelty against poor Meghan Markle.

00:44:36.040 Can you like who does she think?

00:44:38.180 And by the way, cruelty from a woman who allegedly issued the stand down order in Benghazi, Libya,

00:44:44.680 right, who let our troops hang out to dry while they were under attack at the consulate.

00:44:48.660 I'm just saying maybe she shouldn't be lecturing people on how to behave well.

00:44:52.160 Right.

00:44:52.400 Not to mention all of her alleged illegal acts when she was hiding her server, having a server and then deleting the hard drive and all the stuff she did. 0.99

00:44:59.520 She should just not be moralizing to anyone about anything like the nerve of her to go out there and play this.

00:45:05.660 Like, oh, Hillary's going to stand up for Meghan. 0.98

00:45:08.660 You're not helping.

00:45:09.780 You're not helping Meghan Markle's cause.

00:45:11.780 Not even a little.

00:45:12.380 And by the way, let's not forget about her associations with Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.

00:45:19.500 And don't forget, Ronan Farrell reported that it was her publicist who tried to kill the story at first about Harvey Weinstein, outing him as a as a sexual predator.

00:45:27.700 Now that the guy denied that, but she also reportedly had a conversation with Lena Dunham about the same thing.

00:45:34.500 And so you tell me whether Hillary Clinton is some protector of women or she just want to weigh in on the side of the princess because she thought it'd be fashionable. 0.98

00:45:41.440 She should spend more time working on her hair and less time working on fake statements about female empowerment. 1.00

00:45:48.240 And that is what we call Sound Up.

00:45:50.760 Back to Victor in one minute.

00:45:57.700 Coming up with the George Floyd trial, because that's that's a taboo subject.

00:46:03.120 But I think one can have a balanced view that that had Officer Chauvin not put his knee on the neck of George Floyd for eight minutes, it would have been a different outcome without also denying the fact that had George Floyd not been in the process of committing a felony of counterfeiting.

00:46:24.120 And had he not had apparently near toxic levels or toxic levels of drugs, there would have been a different outcome.

00:46:31.540 But that balanced view is not going to be on it's not going to be what the trial is about.

00:46:37.400 It's going to be about utter fear of a huge multimillion dollar damage, death, riot, mayhem.

00:46:45.460 If that verdict is anything other than second degree murder.

00:46:48.740 I was just thinking about this because we're going to cover that trial and we're going to need to be fearless about it because the facts are the facts.

00:46:56.880 And if the facts turn out to be in any way helpful to the officer, people are going to lose their minds at media who report that.

00:47:07.100 So it's going to require some intestinal fortitude to follow the evidence wherever it goes in that courtroom.

00:47:13.140 We're going to do that.

00:47:14.700 But that case in particular is just so controversial.

00:47:18.200 And yet, as you know, Victor, you know, you point out that already I read one of your pieces where you were saying some of these polls are kind of showing that perhaps we're at the end of this woke pandemic.

00:47:29.840 Perhaps we're getting near the end, one that that shows people are seeing that the so-called armed insurrection really wasn't exactly that and that the media has had a very different standard toward that than they have toward the Antifa violence we've seen.

00:47:44.360 And the second one was about people's attitudes toward BLM, Black Lives Matter and police.

00:47:52.580 It's been radical.

00:47:53.540 And as you know, the Harvard Harris poll is not conservative.

00:47:58.000 It's not a Rasmussen poll.

00:47:59.200 And they found that 73% of the public now considers Antifa a terrorist organization.

00:48:07.100 And by about 12-point margin, they feel that it was given too much leniency.

00:48:12.340 And whereas BLM had about 55% of public support, it's down, I think, in the high 30s now.

00:48:17.900 And the police have just, they've just risen.

00:48:20.820 It's no longer people feel you should defund the police or that they're culpable, that they're the aggrieved party.

00:48:25.960 And that changed, that radical change in view as a result of 90 days, as you said, of unchecked looting and arson that followed sometimes peaceful demonstrations.

00:48:38.700 But not all, they didn't all end peacefully.

00:48:41.340 And people thought there had to be consequences and there was none.

00:48:44.800 And then, as you say, and as I've written, it was asymmetrical, the way that we reacted to the Capitol assault.

00:48:52.660 And the other problem with the George Floyd is that May 25th is now an iconic date among our cultural elites.

00:49:02.620 I know that after May 25th, my life, everybody's life at Stanford University changed.

00:49:10.320 Everybody in academia's life changed.

00:49:12.720 All of a sudden, we were presented with a narrative that we had no control over that said,

00:49:16.940 George Floyd's death revealed that we are a racist, inherently evil society going back to 1619.

00:49:26.360 And there's nothing you can do other than make the proletary efforts.

00:49:31.560 And that means changing standards, going to workshops, being reeducated, confessing that your privilege is honored, all of that.

00:49:39.180 And for that date to be suspect of anything less than that, if that jury finds out that Officer Chauvin was derelict and committed involuntary manslaughter, inadvertently putting his knee two foot long, or maybe even if they acquit him much less, or I should say much less if they acquit him, that whole date then is questioned.

00:50:03.320 And that narrative that we now have institutionalized for a year is over with.

00:50:08.180 And I don't think people can afford on the left to let that happen.

00:50:11.860 It's like, how can that jury, how are they going to be able to offer an unvarnished assessment of the case?

00:50:20.580 They're going to be terrified.

00:50:22.640 Everyone in the country knows that if that jury, who, unlike the rest of us, gets to sit, steps away from the witnesses and evaluate their credibility and look at the evidence firsthand and touch things and feel things and deliberate amongst themselves,

00:50:35.920 if they don't come to, quote, the right conclusion, if they find anything other than murder in this case.

00:50:41.100 And the odds on murder are pretty long, according to legal experts.

00:50:45.920 I mean, really, they're pretty long.

00:50:47.540 They know as well as you and I do that there are going to be riots unlike we've ever seen.

00:50:53.100 And just think of what happened when the Ferguson DA didn't, right, when they didn't bring the charges there.

00:50:58.860 This is going to make that look like nothing.

00:51:02.040 No, it is.

00:51:02.960 And I think everybody knows that.

00:51:04.640 And I think that we saw that 30 years ago with the OJ trial, that that jury was terrified.

00:51:10.500 And that had a role, we know later, in acquitting OJ, because people were just, they didn't want to face the consequences.

00:51:20.500 And I think their attitude is really cynical.

00:51:22.900 It's sort of they, I mean, the larger society.

00:51:26.440 It's, well, if he was derelict, it's his own fault, Officer Sheldon.

00:51:30.820 And if he has to be a sacrificial lamb for the greater good, then so be it.

00:51:35.620 And that's what's really disturbing.

00:51:39.220 There's an, I use that word asymmetrical maybe too much, but when you look at what happened, George Floyd had a degree of culpability because he was engaged in a crime, apparently, from all our witnesses, passing a $20 counterfeit bill.

00:51:55.580 And he didn't actively hit the officer, but he passively resisted arrest.

00:52:00.300 And that's a felony.

00:52:01.860 I mean, so the officer, after his death, the officer's name was released right away.

00:52:10.240 I mean, it was a matter of a few hours.

00:52:13.040 But the Capitol officer who shot Ms. Babbitt, I think her name was, who illegally entered and should not have been inside the Capitol and was trying to break through, probably to commit damage.

00:52:24.160 But nevertheless, she too was unarmed, but she was shot and killed.

00:52:28.460 To this day, we have no idea who that officer was.

00:52:31.860 And so I get, it's little things like that when the public, and I'm trying to reflect now why these polls are showing this radical change in views.

00:52:41.680 And I think a lot of it is the public just feels that the administrative state or the bureaucracy or elected officials or the media does not look at things empirically.

00:52:53.700 They have ideological agendas or they have ideological agendas or they're scared.

00:52:56.960 That's also a motive.

00:52:58.180 They feel that if they were empirical and they're thinking, if there's going to be damage or there's going to be fallout from my decision, it's going to go on you and not me.

00:53:08.680 And so I see that in academic life a lot where you see college presidents, anytime there's something like the Smith case where an African-American young woman claimed that she was harassed by being black at a luncheon counter or I should say buying lunch.

00:53:28.560 And she blamed all of these poor working class people, the janitor, the security guard, some of the kitchen help, who actually hadn't done anything.

00:53:36.280 She wasn't not supposed to be in that area.

00:53:37.980 And they were just worried for the other people who were going to come in.

00:53:40.820 And yet, if you read what the academics said, it was all this virtual signaling that we're shocked.

00:53:47.120 We're not going to let this happen.

00:53:48.320 And the subtext was we're going to destroy poor people's lives because they really don't matter. 1.00

00:53:53.180 They're just poor working class white people and they're not anointed academics like we are.

00:53:58.460 Yeah, it was back to lived experience.

00:54:00.200 Her lived experience made her perceive something in a way that wasn't factual.

00:54:05.000 And so the destruction of those lives must be tolerated because of the respective colors of their skins. 0.98

00:54:12.480 Yeah. And then every once in a while, you read in the paper where there's an outstanding liberal academic and for the situation, he falls through the cracks or she does.

00:54:23.300 And then they are victimized and suddenly they are outraged.

00:54:27.280 We saw that Mr. McNeil at the New York Times or Barry Weiss, when that starts happening, then people, they think, wow,

00:54:34.400 I'm one of you. Why is this happening to me?

00:54:38.960 Don't I get exemption?

00:54:40.560 I hate Donald Trump just as much as you do.

00:54:43.180 And yet they don't, because once these forces are unleashed, there's no logic about where they're going to fall or lead to.

00:54:51.580 But why did you write that, and I quote, peak wokeness is nearing?

00:54:57.900 And the end of your sentence was, because if it continued in its present incarnation, then the United States as we know it would cease to exist.

00:55:04.880 So that's a good news, bad news sentence.

00:55:07.680 Yeah.

00:55:08.260 Well, I don't think it can.

00:55:09.360 Yeah, so there were situations in the ancient world during the, say, the Peloponnesian War on an island called Corsaira.

00:55:19.420 It's a famous incident where this started, where they started all of this hysteria.

00:55:24.800 They started, factions started fighting, and it was total chaos.

00:55:28.140 And the historian Thucydides chronicled it and said, when human nature being wanted, this is going to happen.

00:55:35.060 It's not a sustainable situation.

00:55:36.760 The reign of terror was not a sustainable situation when the Jacobins hijacked the French Revolution in 1790. 0.62

00:55:43.500 The say them witch trials were not sustainable.

00:55:46.040 You couldn't just go say, she's a witch, he's a witch.

00:55:48.980 And while there were communists in the State Department, you couldn't have a guy like Joe McCarthy say, I am holding a list of 200 names and crimes of these communists because it was an act.

00:56:02.200 You couldn't allow that to happen in the sense that the system then wouldn't work.

00:56:05.840 So if we really do believe that we're systematically racist, and we always were, and whether it was $11 trillion in reparatory Great Society programs or 700,000 dead during the Civil War, that we've done nothing to remedy that and that we're inherently evil, then there's no reason for us to continue.

00:56:28.040 History comes in and says, oh, by the way, if you don't think you're better than the alternative, then you're not going to last.

00:56:34.320 And you can't have these universities on the one hand say, you students are $1.7 trillion in debt, and we're going to charge you full tuition for a third-rate Zoom experience while all our professors just sit home in quarantine.

00:56:50.800 But we're going to hire millions of dollars of diversity and equity and inclusion coordinators and administrators and provosts, and you're all going to have from one hour to three hours in mandatory diversity training and re-education.

00:57:07.040 And we're going to create a climate of fear throughout the country where if you make one wrong statement, you and I are on this right now, you know, Megan, better than I do, and I know in academia that if I say one thing wrong or you do, you could end up spending thousands of dollars in legal fees just to preserve your livelihood.

00:57:27.660 And it's happened to me at Stanford University.

00:57:32.760 It was written about with Scott Atlas, the advisors, who's a colleague of mine, and Neil Ferguson, the historian.

00:57:38.960 All of a sudden, during this woke period, people that were very radical in the Stanford faculty thought, hmm, it's about time to go after that right-wing Hoover Institution.

00:57:49.020 I saw this.

00:57:50.760 Yeah, and they were not right-wing.

00:57:53.040 The majority of Hoover fellows voted Democratic in the last two elections or three elections.

00:57:58.680 But nonetheless, they couldn't tolerate the idea there were some conservatives on campus.

00:58:04.740 And so they made these wild charges that Dr. Atlas was responsible for 400,000 deaths because I had questioned the ability to check the authenticity of 100 mail-in ballots.

00:58:18.280 100 million, even though I had said, you know, that it wasn't wise to press that objection to the elections beyond the initial suits that failed.

00:58:30.700 Nonetheless, I'm responsible for five dead in the Capitol.

00:58:34.460 So I just want to say, I listen, as I pointed out earlier, I listen to you.

00:58:39.320 I listen to you throughout the election.

00:58:40.980 And when Stanford turned on you, these key professors at Stanford tried to turn on you to say somehow you caused what happened on January 6th, I thought it was outrageous, too, because I heard you raising questions about mail-in ballots.

00:58:55.240 And you said something like, Trump lost the election when that was allowed, prior to the election, when that just was allowed in a sweeping method in places like Pennsylvania, because you had questions about the integrity of those ballots.

00:59:07.580 That's nowhere near the same as saying the Kraken, the Sydney, you know, like they were trying to attack you like you were saying Trump is still the legitimate president and he's not going to leave office.

00:59:21.820 No, I know it. I got in an argument with Lou Dobbs on Fox News one afternoon, whom I like.

00:59:27.920 I like him very much. I respect him a great deal.

00:59:29.960 But I didn't believe that there was a problem with the voting machines along the Sidney Powell lines.

00:59:35.140 And I said so. I think it was November 9th on Laura Ingraham's show.

00:59:40.880 I said, if you can't establish, you can't win in court, not because it's wrong or right, but if you don't get a hearing in court, you're never going to overturn this election.

00:59:50.160 You might as well work on the Georgia Senate races. So that was ironic.

00:59:54.820 But the thing about it was these professors, at least one of them, I don't want to mention all four, lump them together.

01:00:02.620 But that professor had started an anti-fascist. So you know what that means.

01:00:07.160 It's short for anti-network on campus. Earlier, a few years earlier, he told Stanford students,

01:00:13.220 he celebrated the fact that they were shut down a bridge, endangered lives, caused car crashes at peak hour in the San Mateo Bridge, 70 of whom were arrested.

01:00:23.140 And he had posted on his website. This all took about five seconds to find this out.

01:00:28.080 All you had to do was go to his website.

01:00:29.480 And he was recommending one of the most anti-Semitic tracks you could see if America knew all about the terrible Jews and terrible Israelis. 1.00

01:00:38.100 Oh, my God.

01:00:38.960 And there was no all.

01:00:42.300 I guess what I'm trying to say is that this would have continued and continued.

01:00:46.920 I wrote a letter to the Daily. It didn't stop them.

01:00:49.180 Neil and Scott objected until finally we just said, you know what, this is not a matter of they get to lie and we get to lie.

01:00:58.740 That's what they were saying. Some people at Stanford said, well, everybody has liars. Let's just call it quits.

01:01:03.600 We said, we have not lied. We haven't said anything wrong. Don't conflate us with these people.

01:01:09.520 And we respect, we're not the ones trying to censor them, even though they're not telling the truth.

01:01:15.420 But we didn't really get help until we helped ourselves.

01:01:20.220 It really, I think it's a good lesson for all of us that when you get targeted by the mob, you're not going to have a lot of people come to your defense.

01:01:31.220 The only defense is yourself.

01:01:33.660 And the left in these matters are bullies.

01:01:37.920 And they will not stop until they feel in a cost-benefit analysis they have more to lose and to gain.

01:01:43.000 And when once we kind of showed carefully in a series of letters and media appearances that we had done nothing wrong, we were just scholars that they objected to on ideological grounds, and that if you really wanted to examine culpability for insurrectionary activity, you should look at our accusers.

01:02:01.560 As soon as that happened, it dropped. It was dropped.

01:02:03.700 Oh, wow. So just to back up, because I know you're short on time, but how will it fall apart? How will wokeism leave us?

01:02:14.000 I wasn't around for the McCarthy era, and I don't know how the Salem witch trials wound up dying out.

01:02:20.460 Well, the first thing that happens is it cannibalizes the sacrosancts.

01:02:25.500 So when McCarthy went after the U.S. Army and George Marshall, hero of World War II, and then that forced Dwight Eisenhower to say, you know what, he may be in my party, and that's my base, but I got to speak out.

01:02:40.020 And that happened.

01:02:40.780 And once the Republicans said, you know what, he's not going to get exemption from us.

01:02:45.900 So in this case, if they continue to go after Democrats and leftists in academia, and they will, because each victory makes them gorged and more conceited, that will begin to slow it down.

01:03:00.600 And then the other thing is the sheer amount of capital and labor and time that's invested in it.

01:03:05.340 I can tell you that in our particular minor little isolated case, I don't think that the people who run a multibillion operation like Stanford University want that type of publicity, and they want that type of time exhausted, and they want all of those legal questions adjudicated by their staff when there was nothing there.

01:03:26.960 And I think it's a drag on the economy and our own collective time, that if everybody is a racist, then nobody is a racist.

01:03:35.500 That's what I'm getting to.

01:03:36.980 And we get a saturation point where, you know, if everybody's a Satan witch, then there's no longer anything called a witch.

01:03:44.340 If everybody is an aristocratic Catholic oppressor in 1793 France, then nobody is.

01:03:53.000 And that's what's happening right now.

01:03:54.440 Everybody is systematically racist.

01:03:56.760 They say that openly.

01:03:58.540 You're all racist.

01:03:59.660 It's all up to you people to confess.

01:04:02.300 Well, that's not viable because, you know, there's still 70% of the population, whatever ideological bent they are, is not going to say, I'm awful and culpable, and you can do whatever you want.

01:04:15.800 Tell me what I have to do.

01:04:17.200 There will be some who feel that they can dodge the bullet and make a deal, but most won't.

01:04:22.360 When it gets to that extreme, and we're getting close to that extreme.

01:04:25.800 So I think we're already seeing in polls that people are starting to push back.

01:04:30.360 And what killed the Me Too movement, which I thought had a lot of justifiable causes in the beginning. 0.66

01:04:41.820 But what really did it in was when they went after Brett Kavanaugh.

01:04:46.960 And you could make the argument that what you did at 17 years old when there were no collaborating witnesses and what evidence did exist kind of exonerated them.

01:04:56.520 But nevertheless, they persisted.

01:04:58.140 And then they started going after luminaries on the left.

01:05:02.860 I mean, Tara Reid going after Joe Biden.

01:05:05.400 And she had far more, I thought, credible charges than did Ms. Ford against Kavanaugh.

01:05:12.100 And then you look at Cuomo, and in the leftist mind, it was fine that he may have been indirectly responsible or indeed directly responsible for 15,000 deaths in long-term facilities in New York.

01:05:27.800 But what was not tolerable was that he had touched or been acted inappropriately toward women.

01:05:33.840 And so at that point, everybody said, well, if there is a Me Too credo and a culture, then let's follow it.

01:05:41.540 Let's apply it to Joe Biden.

01:05:42.800 Let's apply it to Andrew Cuomo.

01:05:44.500 Let's apply it to other people and not just Brett Kavanaugh.

01:05:48.020 And it sort of petered out.

01:05:51.060 I mean, some of it was institutionalized, the good part, but it doesn't have the same force that it did two years ago.

01:05:56.480 Well, I certainly hope that, I mean, the one good thing about this nonsense infiltrating our schools is that I do believe, whereas you might not stand up for yourself, parents will stand up for their children.

01:06:08.520 Parents don't want their kids showing up at the third grade to be told they're white supremacists.

01:06:13.580 And I think we're starting to see real pushback on that more and more, which gives me some hope.

01:06:18.780 All right, last two questions.

01:06:20.160 The first is, what is the thing that's most concerning you right now about our country?

01:06:25.360 I think it's actually the debt.

01:06:28.040 We're getting $29 trillion in debt.

01:06:31.160 And we just passed $2 trillion we printed, and we had a trillion dollars that we haven't even used.

01:06:37.420 And the ideology behind it, that we can just print money, and we can have zero interest rates, and we can transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from middle class and lower middle class people who get no interest on their meager saving.

01:06:51.860 And use that zero interest to keep borrowing money and not paying interest on it, because that's not sustainable either.

01:07:00.620 At some point, we're going to have a stagflation, inflation, recession.

01:07:03.380 And so when I look at history, everybody always says to classicists, why did the classical city-state fail, or why did Rome do so well, and suddenly it collapsed in the 5th century?

01:07:17.420 Well, it's never suddenly.

01:07:18.420 It's the destruction of the currency, and it's increased debt, and the ideology that debt creates, that everybody's entitled to some free money.

01:07:28.720 So that's what I'm most worried about.

01:07:31.760 All right, I'm squeezing in one question before my last one, which is, speaking of the classics, because this is your department, and this is truly what you're an expert in.

01:07:40.060 For somebody like me who doesn't really understand it, I have a confession for you.

01:07:45.460 Last night, I googled classics.

01:07:47.960 Like, what does it mean?

01:07:49.500 Ancient Greece.

01:07:50.520 Okay, ancient Rome.

01:07:51.480 And then what after that?

01:07:53.300 I would like to learn more.

01:07:54.660 As somebody who is just a Syracuse University graduate, and then went on to law school, where they didn't talk about this at all, what would be a good place for me to start to learn more about the classics?

01:08:06.240 Well, I would, to be frank, I would not read anything after 2000, because it's ideological.

01:08:13.060 What we're talking about today, infected classics.

01:08:16.040 So there's a good book, a classic book by Edith Hamilton called The Greek Way.

01:08:21.660 It was a classic in the 1940s.

01:08:24.460 There's H.D.

01:08:25.360 Kiddo, The Greeks. 0.99

01:08:26.140 I co-authored a book called Who Killed Homer?

01:08:28.460 What Classics and What Happened to It?

01:08:31.120 There's a good book called Greek Ways by Bruce Thornton.

01:08:34.560 And all of these start, the theme of all of these books is that there are certain works of literature, art, architecture, that everybody recognizes by their innate beauty and power and wisdom.

01:08:49.240 And it has nothing to do with being white or male or anything.

01:08:52.680 And over time, that's the test of it.

01:08:56.200 So the Doric Order or the Parthenon or a Greek vase painting or the Iliad or the Odyssey or Thucydides' History or Aristotle's Politics, they are so focused on the great issues of life, you know, the human experience.

01:09:12.500 What happens to us when we die?

01:09:14.780 Why do good people do bad things?

01:09:17.760 Why do you forgive somebody or does that only empower them?

01:09:23.360 All of these things every day that we want to know about, these pieces of literature, these poems and forensic speeches or histories deal with in a way that most literature today doesn't.

01:09:35.080 And then the same thing with art.

01:09:37.140 They capture what the eye sees, not what you think it sees.

01:09:41.520 But then if it exaggerates beauty, it does so in a way that's realistic, it's classical.

01:09:48.040 And that's the term.

01:09:49.140 Or why is our Supreme Court or buildings in Washington or Paris, why do they all go back eventually to this classical mode of columns or architraves or pediments?

01:10:01.620 Why not just make square boxes like the Bauhaus movement?

01:10:04.840 And so classics means that throw anything you want in the human experience out there.

01:10:10.720 But there are certain archetypes of literature.

01:10:14.860 And it's not just in Greece and Rome.

01:10:16.420 It's in Florentine, Italy in the 15th and 16th century.

01:10:21.940 It can be American novels in the 1930s, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, that they're not here today.

01:10:31.280 So there are these pockets of brilliance that explode and they become immortalized.

01:10:37.560 And so that was what classics are.

01:10:39.340 And then very quickly, you study it in a variety of ways.

01:10:43.560 The keystone is learning Latin and Greek.

01:10:45.460 Most people don't want to do that.

01:10:46.680 If you do Latin and Greek, then you can read it in the original.

01:10:49.140 You can see what they said about it.

01:10:51.420 But you can study ancient history.

01:10:53.200 You can study it through archaeology, numismatics, ancient cornage, ancient architecture, ancient vase paintings.

01:10:59.860 You can go and I spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens as an archaeologist.

01:11:06.820 That's exciting, too.

01:11:07.740 You dig and you find things.

01:11:09.160 And it's quite spectacular to see a grave come to life all of a sudden.

01:11:13.860 And so it's a multidisciplinary experience.

01:11:18.240 And I wish it was there because I created a classics department in Cal State Fresno for 21 years for minority kids.

01:11:24.720 I think 90% of my kids were from Southeast Asia or Mexico.

01:11:29.860 And I found that if they learn Latin and some learn Greek and they learn vocabulary and etymology and how to speak like Demosthenes or Cicero, no notes, just using hand gestures and memorization, I could really ensure them a quality education that was better than what you could get at Stanford.

01:11:50.820 And for all of them, race became incidental to who they were.

01:11:55.960 It was no longer essential.

01:11:56.960 They were so meritocratic and they were so skilled and adept.

01:12:01.700 And these are people who came from Mexico without even speaking English in some cases. 1.00

01:12:05.420 But I just wish we would get back to that meritocratic system.

01:12:08.940 And then I think because I'm not I don't believe that people's natural aptitude has anything to do with race or anything at all.

01:12:16.760 And so I'm not worried about immigration from a racial point of view.

01:12:22.700 I'm worried from a cultural legal point of view.

01:12:25.020 If we had if we said we're going to take 100,000 people from Mexico legally and we're going to select people on who we're going to have the best chance of succeeding quickly based on their education level in Mexico, I would be I think they would be just as successful as anybody else.

01:12:43.060 My worry is because we're undermining the sanctity of the law, mostly.

01:12:48.380 Yeah.

01:12:48.640 And then and then you're told you can't talk about it.

01:12:50.560 So, first of all, that was inspirational.

01:12:52.120 I love listening to you talk about I love your own enthusiasm for it, which is contagious and makes makes me want to go.

01:12:58.180 I'm going to go get those books today.

01:13:00.060 Abby, would you please go get me those books today?

01:13:01.800 I have my assistance here.

01:13:03.220 So that's exciting because I you made the case very persuasively.

01:13:07.920 All right.

01:13:08.460 Here's my last question, which is I asked to some guests, but you in particular need to answer this.

01:13:14.500 What do you love about America?

01:13:16.740 You know, I like the American can do.

01:13:19.920 I don't give a damn attitude.

01:13:21.620 And that was with us from the very beginning, as we know from the founders.

01:13:26.400 And we were right on the border sometime of chaos.

01:13:29.480 But I like the idea that I see a guy that's built his own Winnebago out of wood on the freeway.

01:13:36.700 Or I like an idea when I go up to the lake and there's a boat ramp and everybody's in line for hours to unload their boat.

01:13:44.740 And some weird guy on the other side found a natural dirt slope.

01:13:48.420 He says, come over here.

01:13:49.260 Look what I've done.

01:13:50.160 They don't do that in Europe, you know.

01:13:52.280 And so there's this spontaneous, innovative, highly individual streak that's inherent in America.

01:13:58.160 And that's why once we get going, we're always, we screw things up.

01:14:04.320 But once we get going, like in World War II, at the end of World War II, we had a larger GDP coming out of the Depression than all the other major belligerents in the world.

01:14:13.640 The U.S. Navy was larger than every single Navy in the world by 1945.

01:14:18.000 And yet it wasn't, we had the 19th largest army behind Portugal when World War II started.

01:14:25.340 And when it ended, we had 12.5 million.

01:14:27.840 For whatever people say about vaccinations, this country was the one that gave us four vaccinations.

01:14:35.100 And we are going to be eventually the largest country with the most vaccination once we gear up to it.

01:14:41.020 And once we just let, get the government out and say, you know what, Walgreens, you do this, CVS, you do that.

01:14:47.600 The purpose is as many arms get jabbed as possible, as quickly.

01:14:52.480 And once you unleash this American individualism and imagination, it's quite scary, but in a positive way.

01:14:59.920 So that's what I like best about the United States.

01:15:02.000 And what I like worst is when people try to artificially repress it or stigmatize it or demonize it.

01:15:08.400 But there's a natural exuberance about this country that's ecumenical, too.

01:15:13.100 And Americans are the most charitable people in the world.

01:15:16.000 When somebody goes on a fund me thing or somebody has a natural, there's nowhere else in the world where anybody just starts giving and spending like Americans do. 0.76

01:15:25.040 I've lived all over the world and traveled all over, and I've never seen anybody quite like an American as far as their generosity and their lack of pretense.

01:15:34.480 Or, you know, you go up in Europe and you'll just see an American come up and you say, hey, where are you from?

01:15:38.360 Oh, yeah, I was there.

01:15:39.360 Hey, yeah, yeah, you want to go have coffee?

01:15:41.420 Other people don't do that to the same degree that we do.

01:15:44.960 And it's something that we need to really, really appreciate because it is exceptional.

01:15:50.640 The one and only Victor Davis Hanson.

01:15:54.480 Now people know why I love you.

01:15:56.380 I'm really glad you were here.

01:15:57.920 Thank you.

01:15:58.220 Please come back, too.

01:15:59.180 Please come back.

01:15:59.760 I will.

01:16:00.360 I will.

01:16:05.700 So up next on Wednesday, don't forget to subscribe.

01:16:09.640 You've got to listen to this interview.

01:16:11.340 Jocko Willink is here.

01:16:13.120 This is not just a Navy SEAL.

01:16:14.720 This is the Navy SEAL.

01:16:17.280 This is the Navy SEAL commander that all the SEALs want to work under.

01:16:22.600 And this guy not only served our country honorably with repeated tours of duty in the Middle East and Iraq, but I mean, he knew some of the best and greatest Navy SEALs that have ever served our nation.

01:16:33.240 And he's got leadership advice.

01:16:35.560 He's got thoughts about where we are in our country.

01:16:38.120 He's got thoughts on how you get yourself out of bed every day and deal with some of the craziness that's weighing on all of us so much.

01:16:44.280 Right.

01:16:44.580 Like, how do you put that out of your head?

01:16:46.500 How do you deal with bullies in this woke culture?

01:16:49.440 How do you even think about your bullies?

01:16:53.120 I found him really useful with some practical tips on how I could do better in my life.

01:16:58.260 And he's on another level.

01:16:59.880 He's not like anybody we've had on before.

01:17:01.580 He just comes at everything from a different level.

01:17:03.740 And he's the one who got me thinking about how we need more military people in office.

01:17:08.280 We need somebody like Jocko to run for office.

01:17:10.980 Unfortunately, he's probably too evolved to do it.

01:17:12.900 But I know you're going to love the interview.

01:17:14.180 So don't forget, go ahead and subscribe now.

01:17:15.860 Download the show.

01:17:17.640 Give me a five-star rating if you feel inclined.

01:17:19.660 And I'd love to get a review from you.

01:17:21.860 I do read them all.

01:17:23.320 And I always appreciate hearing your feedback.

01:17:26.440 Talk to you then.

01:17:27.880 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

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01:17:49.100 big.

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01:17:51.440 Thank you.

The Megyn Kelly Show - March 15, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson on the Crisis at the Border, the Liberal Elite's ＂Abstract Empathy,＂ and What He Loves About America ｜ Ep. 76

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