Victor Davis Hanson joins Megyn Kelly on The Megynkel show to talk about Joe Biden's cognitive decline, and what it says about the state of the Democratic Party and the country at large. Megyn talks to the Hoover Institution's Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution.
00:00:00.560Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.640Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:00:14.920I've been waiting for today's interview. I've wanted this from the beginning, from the launch, and we finally got him.
00:00:20.340It's Victor Davis Hanson. Good luck finding a bigger brain.
00:00:24.500He is brilliant, and all you need to do is tee it up and sit back and listen.
00:00:28.380It made my job very easy, I have to tell you.
00:00:31.260Victor, he's at the Hoover Institution. He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow out there.
00:00:37.980And he's this great combination of citizen farmer and professor and overall teacher, you know, of us all.
00:00:48.780He's the fifth successive generation in the same house, just to give you a feel for how his life has been.
00:00:54.280He grew up on a raisin farm. He's an almond farmer now.
00:00:56.320He'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.
00:01:12.280And he's still in California doing his thing and prolific in his writing of books and his podcast is amazing.
00:01:20.200You can you can download. I listen to his podcast all the time.
00:01:22.420And 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.
00:01:30.740Right. He's a very smart guy to to learn from and all sorts of expertise in warfare, in the classics and so on.
00:01:37.980So you should you should check out his podcast, but you should listen to this one because this is an overview of America 2021.
00:02:07.160I listen to both of them and I just love what you have to say because you have such a unique view on the world.
00:02:13.360And 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.
00:02:21.880And 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.
00:02:44.100And unfortunately, I think it's occurring at a geometric rather than just arithmetic rate.
00:02:49.260You can see by clips just three years ago, he was a different person than when he first announced his candidacy.
00:02:54.980And I really blame journalists for that.
00:02:57.400I think there were clear indications throughout the primary debates.
00:03:01.840And I think it was pointed out by Cory Booker and others that Joe Biden had cognitive issues.
00:03:07.620It was ignored because he was considered the savior of the Democratic Party from an unwinnable left wing surge that wouldn't beat Donald Trump.
00:03:16.940And 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.
00:03:33.460To the degree that we had an interview, he had an interview like you and I are having.
00:03:37.060I would have had, if I was Joe Biden, I would have demanded that you give me all the questions beforehand.
00:03:43.360And I would have had people outside the camera, you know, helping me answer those questions.
00:03:50.900So 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.
00:04:00.460And he was basically comatose for much of the time.
00:04:03.680Or 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.
00:04:14.140And he died, as everybody expected he would, early in April of his fourth term.
00:04:20.960And I just don't think we've ever elected a president that this was known from the outset rather than during his tenure.
00:04:50.600Well, I think you hit the nail on the head.
00:04:53.180We all know, I think, where it's going.
00:04:54.880And 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.
00:05:12.220And they're starting to say, to talk about things.
00:05:14.700And sometimes these issues are that he missed a prompt.
00:05:18.040I think Politico ran a story about that.
00:05:21.700And then we also had the Democratic congressional leadership whispering and finally acting about nuclear codes in his possession.
00:05:29.560And it doesn't look good for the media.
00:05:31.720They have to play by these roles that are humiliating to them.
00:05:34.820And yet they created this Frankenstein monster.
00:05:37.400I don't mean that in a deprecatory way, but this absurd situation.
00:05:41.240I think at some critical point in six to 12 months, people are going to step in.
00:05:47.180And Kamala Harris will be the source of a lot of the rumors and the need for action.
00:05:53.780She doesn't have necessarily a good relationship before she was named vice president, as you know, with Biden.
00:06:02.440Do you think that's why so far he has gone pretty radical left?
00:06:08.880That he's trying to stave off his own party, pushing him out and replacing him with his number two?
00:06:16.600Yeah, I've said that a couple of times.
00:06:19.120And 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.
00:06:32.000And it was a devil's bargain between the two.
00:06:40.100I think he feels liberated to the degree that he is aware of it, that he's going to be a one-term president.
00:06:45.840He's not going to run for re-election.
00:06:47.420He doesn't really care, I think, too much about the midterm elections.
00:06:51.420He feels that through executive orders and a very thin margin in Congress, he can get this agenda through.
00:06:56.800And 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.
00:07:05.080And I think he resents the idea that he was the understudy of Barack Obama for eight years when he was a senior statesman.
00:07:12.120And 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.
00:07:22.960And 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.
00:07:31.500I don't think he's able of withstanding that media, Silicon Valley, entertainment, celebrity nexus.
00:07:37.940Now, 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.
00:07:47.400What specifically, what jumps out at you?
00:07:50.460Well, 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.
00:08:10.920And 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.
00:08:23.780He's told people that it's very dangerous not to wear a mask, almost unpatriotic, Neanderthal-like.
00:08:32.120He's threatened the governor of Florida with imposing a travel ban should he not comply with federal orders.
00:08:38.700And 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.
00:08:48.320He 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.
00:09:03.060In fact, most disinterested observers think it will save energy and it will decrease the likelihood of an oil spill.
00:09:13.520And 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.
00:09:27.900And 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.
00:09:38.420He wants to revive that because of this ideological zeal on the left for a Persian Shia tilt that we saw under Obama.
00:09:45.980I 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.
00:09:59.660Remember, Barack Obama ran in 2008 deep skepticism of things like gay marriage, and he promised not to.
00:10:07.880What he said, at least, was very centrist compared to Biden.
00:10:11.140And 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.
00:10:29.340But 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.
00:11:26.640And I think they have contempt for this media, and they think they have a path to do whatever they want.
00:11:30.840But 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.
00:11:48.180When 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.
00:11:57.680It seems like a lot of this stuff is just getting slipped through without too much objection.
00:12:07.400I think some of it has to do with the Trump factor.
00:12:12.560I'll just take an example of a natural leader that we would think the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, now the minority leader.
00:12:20.300But we would have thought that he would have been out in front on those issues.
00:12:23.700But 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.
00:12:46.100They're kind of weary after the Trump years.
00:12:48.040They just don't want to go out and fight those cultural wars like they used to.
00:12:55.960And 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.
00:13:06.780We 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.
00:13:59.960And even though they're small number-wise, they have enormous amounts of capital and influence to the public.
00:14:06.980Because 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.
00:14:22.320You'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.
00:14:31.760I don't think that most Democrats want that, but they don't speak out.
00:14:39.320And I think part of it is the leadership to be sort of ageist.
00:14:45.020Nancy Pelosi or Clyburn or Hoyer, they're in their 70s and 80s.
00:14:51.600And this movement you're talking about, the hard left or the neo-socialists, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, is a youthful movement.
00:14:58.840And they're acquainted and adept with social media, and they have a whole different culture than the leadership itself.
00:15:05.960And that leadership is emblematic of mainstream Democrats, middle-aged Democrats in general.
00:15:12.240I think how that works out is they think, I don't want to get into these issues with these young guys.
00:15:17.840All I know is they're motivated, and they communicate well, and they've got large future audiences.
00:15:24.880We're a different country demographically.
00:15:26.860They appeal to this group, and I'll put up with whatever they do to keep me in power.
00:15:32.840And I think that's pretty much what explains it.
00:15:36.300I think I have members of my family, siblings, that are pretty hard left.
00:15:41.740And 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.
00:15:50.560But they're just straight party people.
00:15:52.980So 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.
00:16:02.440I 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.
00:16:14.500So what I see is obviously the surge happening at the southern border.
00:16:24.940And 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.
00:16:36.220This year already, we're at the beginning of March.
00:16:38.940They've had already over 100,000 apprehended in that area alone.
00:16:43.460It'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.
00:16:54.220And I don't know where this is going to go, or what is the big game plan here by the Democrats?
00:17:01.440The 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.
00:17:17.580So they're all coming from south of the border.
00:17:19.900And for the most part, they're from Central America, Mexico.
00:17:22.740Then 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.
00:17:30.780And they look at what's happened in California.
00:17:33.640It'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.
00:17:43.540The state legislatures, we don't have one major, we won't have any, I shouldn't say, statewide officeholder who's Republican.
00:17:50.780And they see that model, and they think Nevada has now adopted it, New Mexico has.
00:17:55.240Arizona is just about there, if not there already.
00:18:01.720And they feel that it's a winning strategy.
00:18:06.700They 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.
00:18:19.200But 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.
00:18:32.280And 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.
00:18:42.880And 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.
00:18:56.660Many 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.
00:19:10.020I think this is one of these issues that everybody's been complacent in, four or five interests.
00:19:15.180We know that the Democratic Party wants a changed demography.
00:19:19.120We 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.
00:19:37.520And 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.
00:19:56.580And 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.
00:20:11.020And 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.
00:20:57.440They're not the Mexican elite that always boast the degree of their pure Spanish ancestry in a very racist fashion.
00:21:05.760But once they get up here, living on the minimum wage is very difficult.
00:21:10.220And 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.
00:21:20.620And we, the taxpayer, provide the social services for the Mexican illegal immigrant.
00:21:26.500So then he's freed up with cash to send back to Mexico.
00:21:30.120I once talked to a Mexican professor, a very brilliant woman who really despised the United States.
00:21:36.020And she said to me, Victor, it's a wonderful system for us.
00:21:39.860Because we, all of our dissidents and all the people are unhappy and social justice, they leave.
00:21:52.920And we don't have to spend social services on it.
00:21:56.240And then we can call you racist because they don't have parity with the average American.
00:22:02.200I mean, we say it's because of their skin color.
00:22:04.180And 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.
00:22:18.000So she spelled it out pretty clearly for me.
00:22:20.720I once wrote about it in Mexifornia, a book about it.
00:22:26.300And 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.
00:22:41.680And 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.
00:22:52.980And it's not safe for my son to be in this neighborhood when we have gang and cartel people coming in from Mexico.
00:22:59.020When that happens, and it's starting to, I think you'll, according to the polls at least, it's already happened.
00:23:18.140Well, 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.
00:23:26.080Certainly 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.
00:23:33.620So we'll get into how he has seen that manifest where he is.
00:23:38.780We'll get back to that in just one second.
00:23:48.140I mean, this is from the New York Times that border agents encountered a migrant at the border about 78,000 times in January.
00:23:55.740That's more than double the rate of the same time a year ago, higher than in any January in a decade.
00:24:04.080The number of migrant children in custody has tripled in just the past two weeks.
00:24:09.000Like, they're running across the southern border.
00:24:12.580And 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.
00:24:29.360But he's supposed to be the anti-Trump, the welcomer, the kinder, gentler president.
00:24:41.420And we know now that that 11 million figure of permanent residents who are not here legally, that's been there for 20 years.
00:24:50.220And finally, finally, MIT and Yale did two consecutive studies.
00:24:53.900And the number is somewhere between 19 and 20 million already here who are not of legal status.
00:25:01.840Joe 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,
00:25:10.420even Barack Obama in 2008, it was all strong borders and we don't support illegal immigration.
00:25:35.120They've lost the union working class, lower middle class white voter.
00:25:39.700Or 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.
00:25:46.920And 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.
00:25:57.600And 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.
00:26:17.900We're just going to descend into tribal warfare where there is no rule of law.
00:26:28.700Well, 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.
00:26:47.460If 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.
00:26:59.480If 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.
00:27:10.420If 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.
00:27:27.320You cannot walk into a local Central Valley DMV office and get service.
00:27:32.480You have to make an appointment now weeks and weeks ahead.
00:27:34.980But if I want a basic service, I have to assume that I won't, it will, it'll be in Spanish.
00:27:41.540If I go into the dry cleaners, all the stores around it will be in Spanish.
00:27:46.460The owner of the dry cleaner will not speak English very well.
00:27:52.200And 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,
00:28:02.020I 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.
00:28:10.480And I know that the people that I work with at Stanford, and this is what is very disturbing.
00:28:15.740If I were to tell them that, then I would be a racist, an old white bitter person.
00:28:21.880And 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.
00:28:39.700Because 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.
00:28:50.060They want their kids in lily white, Asian and white prep schools.
00:28:54.640They want to use people to clean their home.
00:28:58.280And 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.
00:29:07.500But they don't want to live next to the people.
00:29:10.340And I'm speaking as somebody whose two brothers have Mexican, one had a Mexican-American wife, the other has Mexican-American children.
00:29:18.040And 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.
00:29:27.900And when I get up in the morning, I choose to live here, but I don't see anybody who's not Mexican-American.
00:29:34.320And 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.
00:29:48.980So then they don't have to live with the other that they champion.
00:29:52.940Because they do not want to put their kids in the same school.
00:29:55.520They do not want to live next to them.
00:29:57.120They do not want to entertain with them.
00:29:58.680They don't want to be friends with people.
00:30:00.020That'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.
00:30:11.080You'll hear a lot from the liberals up here.
00:30:16.340And they skip over the part where it was done legally.
00:30:19.080And 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.
00:30:51.880And the next, the officer told me to leave.
00:30:55.340And the next day when I filed insurance, there was no record of that arrest.
00:30:58.760They let him off because I guess they knew him or he was related, the local police department.
00:31:03.260And 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.
00:31:44.740Well, one of two reasons they give me.
00:31:47.380One is it's so ubiquitous and frequent that it would be futile to do so.
00:31:52.040And 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.
00:33:26.860And they think I'm always going to have a wall around my estate as I damn walls on the border.
00:33:32.860I'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.
00:33:42.360So you can see how it works, at least the short term thinking of the people who enable this to happen long term.
00:33:50.220It'll finally catch up to them as it does with every disastrous decision.
00:33:54.740I think also just briefly, I think we have to be cognizant or candid about the role of race.
00:34:04.060We used to believe that class was the determinant of victimization and oppression.
00:34:09.900We 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.
00:34:19.300We accepted that we wanted to help the poor of all different races.
00:34:23.200There's more people who are poor that are non-minority than all minorities put together.
00:34:28.880I think it's about 27 million versus 22 million or something.
00:34:44.780Yesterday's poor person is tomorrow's wealthy person.
00:34:47.400Tomorrow's wealthy person was yesterday, et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:50.920But something happened with that formula where we created this new thing called diversity.
00:34:57.140And that was in the Obama administration, really, that it came into the fore.
00:35:02.140Before, it was a black-white binary, and everybody else was working around it.
00:35:06.240But 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.
00:35:17.360Suddenly, all of a sudden, we dropped all class considerations.
00:35:21.240I remember 2009-10, all of a sudden, Sikhs in this area, Punjabis, third-generation optometrists who were Asian.
00:35:32.760Anybody who was non-white was now a new group called diversity.
00:35:39.500And 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,
00:35:48.520and you had him in your department, you were considered diverse.
00:35:52.500And what that did was it just divorced all ideas of oppression and victimization from class considerations.
00:36:01.280And 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.
00:36:14.640And what that did is, you could be very, very wealthy, and we saw that in that interview with Oprah.
00:44:52.400Not 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.
00:44:59.520She should just not be moralizing to anyone about anything like the nerve of her to go out there and play this.
00:45:05.660Like, oh, Hillary's going to stand up for Meghan.
00:45:12.380And by the way, let's not forget about her associations with Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.
00:45:19.500And 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.
00:45:27.700Now that the guy denied that, but she also reportedly had a conversation with Lena Dunham about the same thing.
00:45:34.500And 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.
00:45:41.440She should spend more time working on her hair and less time working on fake statements about female empowerment.
00:45:57.700Coming up with the George Floyd trial, because that's that's a taboo subject.
00:46:03.120But 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.
00:46:24.120And had he not had apparently near toxic levels or toxic levels of drugs, there would have been a different outcome.
00:46:31.540But that balanced view is not going to be on it's not going to be what the trial is about.
00:46:37.400It's going to be about utter fear of a huge multimillion dollar damage, death, riot, mayhem.
00:46:45.460If that verdict is anything other than second degree murder.
00:46:48.740I 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.
00:46:56.880And 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.
00:47:07.100So it's going to require some intestinal fortitude to follow the evidence wherever it goes in that courtroom.
00:47:14.700But that case in particular is just so controversial.
00:47:18.200And 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.
00:47:29.840Perhaps 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.
00:47:44.360And the second one was about people's attitudes toward BLM, Black Lives Matter and police.
00:47:59.200And they found that 73% of the public now considers Antifa a terrorist organization.
00:48:07.100And by about 12-point margin, they feel that it was given too much leniency.
00:48:12.340And whereas BLM had about 55% of public support, it's down, I think, in the high 30s now.
00:48:17.900And the police have just, they've just risen.
00:48:20.820It's no longer people feel you should defund the police or that they're culpable, that they're the aggrieved party.
00:48:25.960And 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.
00:48:38.700But not all, they didn't all end peacefully.
00:48:41.340And people thought there had to be consequences and there was none.
00:48:44.800And then, as you say, and as I've written, it was asymmetrical, the way that we reacted to the Capitol assault.
00:48:52.660And the other problem with the George Floyd is that May 25th is now an iconic date among our cultural elites.
00:49:02.620I know that after May 25th, my life, everybody's life at Stanford University changed.
00:49:12.720All of a sudden, we were presented with a narrative that we had no control over that said,
00:49:16.940George Floyd's death revealed that we are a racist, inherently evil society going back to 1619.
00:49:26.360And there's nothing you can do other than make the proletary efforts.
00:49:31.560And that means changing standards, going to workshops, being reeducated, confessing that your privilege is honored, all of that.
00:49:39.180And 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.
00:50:03.320And that narrative that we now have institutionalized for a year is over with.
00:50:08.180And I don't think people can afford on the left to let that happen.
00:50:11.860It's like, how can that jury, how are they going to be able to offer an unvarnished assessment of the case?
00:50:22.640Everyone 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,
00:50:35.920if they don't come to, quote, the right conclusion, if they find anything other than murder in this case.
00:50:41.100And the odds on murder are pretty long, according to legal experts.
00:51:39.220There'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.
00:51:55.580And he didn't actively hit the officer, but he passively resisted arrest.
00:52:01.860I mean, so the officer, after his death, the officer's name was released right away.
00:52:10.240I mean, it was a matter of a few hours.
00:52:13.040But 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.
00:52:24.160But nevertheless, she too was unarmed, but she was shot and killed.
00:52:28.460To this day, we have no idea who that officer was.
00:52:31.860And 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.
00:52:41.680And 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.
00:52:53.700They have ideological agendas or they have ideological agendas or they're scared.
00:52:58.180They 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.
00:53:08.680And 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.
00:53:28.560And 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.
00:53:36.280She wasn't not supposed to be in that area.
00:53:37.980And they were just worried for the other people who were going to come in.
00:53:40.820And yet, if you read what the academics said, it was all this virtual signaling that we're shocked.
00:53:48.320And the subtext was we're going to destroy poor people's lives because they really don't matter.
00:53:53.180They're just poor working class white people and they're not anointed academics like we are.
00:53:58.460Yeah, it was back to lived experience.
00:54:00.200Her lived experience made her perceive something in a way that wasn't factual.
00:54:05.000And so the destruction of those lives must be tolerated because of the respective colors of their skins.
00:54:12.480Yeah. 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.
00:54:23.300And then they are victimized and suddenly they are outraged.
00:54:27.280We saw that Mr. McNeil at the New York Times or Barry Weiss, when that starts happening, then people, they think, wow,
00:54:34.400I'm one of you. Why is this happening to me?
00:54:40.560I hate Donald Trump just as much as you do.
00:54:43.180And yet they don't, because once these forces are unleashed, there's no logic about where they're going to fall or lead to.
00:54:51.580But why did you write that, and I quote, peak wokeness is nearing?
00:54:57.900And 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.
00:55:04.880So that's a good news, bad news sentence.
00:55:36.760The reign of terror was not a sustainable situation when the Jacobins hijacked the French Revolution in 1790.
00:55:43.500The say them witch trials were not sustainable.
00:55:46.040You couldn't just go say, she's a witch, he's a witch.
00:55:48.980And 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.
00:56:02.200You couldn't allow that to happen in the sense that the system then wouldn't work.
00:56:05.840So 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.
00:56:28.040History 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.
00:56:34.320And 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.
00:56:50.800But 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.
00:57:07.040And 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.
00:57:27.660And it's happened to me at Stanford University.
00:57:32.760It was written about with Scott Atlas, the advisors, who's a colleague of mine, and Neil Ferguson, the historian.
00:57:38.960All 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.
00:57:53.040The majority of Hoover fellows voted Democratic in the last two elections or three elections.
00:57:58.680But nonetheless, they couldn't tolerate the idea there were some conservatives on campus.
00:58:04.740And 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.
00:58:18.280100 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.
00:58:30.700Nonetheless, I'm responsible for five dead in the Capitol.
00:58:34.460So I just want to say, I listen, as I pointed out earlier, I listen to you.
00:58:39.320I listen to you throughout the election.
00:58:40.980And 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.
00:58:55.240And 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.
00:59:07.580That'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.
00:59:21.820No, I know it. I got in an argument with Lou Dobbs on Fox News one afternoon, whom I like.
00:59:27.920I like him very much. I respect him a great deal.
00:59:29.960But I didn't believe that there was a problem with the voting machines along the Sidney Powell lines.
00:59:35.140And I said so. I think it was November 9th on Laura Ingraham's show.
00:59:40.880I 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.
00:59:50.160You might as well work on the Georgia Senate races. So that was ironic.
00:59:54.820But the thing about it was these professors, at least one of them, I don't want to mention all four, lump them together.
01:00:02.620But that professor had started an anti-fascist. So you know what that means.
01:00:07.160It's short for anti-network on campus. Earlier, a few years earlier, he told Stanford students,
01:00:13.220he 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.
01:00:23.140And he had posted on his website. This all took about five seconds to find this out.
01:00:28.080All you had to do was go to his website.
01:00:29.480And he was recommending one of the most anti-Semitic tracks you could see if America knew all about the terrible Jews and terrible Israelis.
01:00:42.300I guess what I'm trying to say is that this would have continued and continued.
01:00:46.920I wrote a letter to the Daily. It didn't stop them.
01:00:49.180Neil 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.
01:00:58.740That's what they were saying. Some people at Stanford said, well, everybody has liars. Let's just call it quits.
01:01:03.600We said, we have not lied. We haven't said anything wrong. Don't conflate us with these people.
01:01:09.520And we respect, we're not the ones trying to censor them, even though they're not telling the truth.
01:01:15.420But we didn't really get help until we helped ourselves.
01:01:20.220It 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.
01:01:33.660And the left in these matters are bullies.
01:01:37.920And they will not stop until they feel in a cost-benefit analysis they have more to lose and to gain.
01:01:43.000And 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.
01:02:01.560As soon as that happened, it dropped. It was dropped.
01:02:03.700Oh, 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?
01:02:14.000I wasn't around for the McCarthy era, and I don't know how the Salem witch trials wound up dying out.
01:02:20.460Well, the first thing that happens is it cannibalizes the sacrosancts.
01:02:25.500So 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.
01:02:40.780And once the Republicans said, you know what, he's not going to get exemption from us.
01:02:45.900So 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.
01:03:00.600And then the other thing is the sheer amount of capital and labor and time that's invested in it.
01:03:05.340I 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.
01:03:26.960And 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.
01:04:02.300Well, 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.
01:04:17.200There will be some who feel that they can dodge the bullet and make a deal, but most won't.
01:04:22.360When it gets to that extreme, and we're getting close to that extreme.
01:04:25.800So I think we're already seeing in polls that people are starting to push back.
01:04:30.360And what killed the Me Too movement, which I thought had a lot of justifiable causes in the beginning.
01:04:41.820But what really did it in was when they went after Brett Kavanaugh.
01:04:46.960And 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.
01:04:58.140And then they started going after luminaries on the left.
01:05:02.860I mean, Tara Reid going after Joe Biden.
01:05:05.400And she had far more, I thought, credible charges than did Ms. Ford against Kavanaugh.
01:05:12.100And 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.
01:05:27.800But what was not tolerable was that he had touched or been acted inappropriately toward women.
01:05:33.840And so at that point, everybody said, well, if there is a Me Too credo and a culture, then let's follow it.
01:05:51.060I mean, some of it was institutionalized, the good part, but it doesn't have the same force that it did two years ago.
01:05:56.480Well, 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.
01:06:08.520Parents don't want their kids showing up at the third grade to be told they're white supremacists.
01:06:13.580And I think we're starting to see real pushback on that more and more, which gives me some hope.
01:06:31.160And we just passed $2 trillion we printed, and we had a trillion dollars that we haven't even used.
01:06:37.420And 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.
01:06:51.860And use that zero interest to keep borrowing money and not paying interest on it, because that's not sustainable either.
01:07:00.620At some point, we're going to have a stagflation, inflation, recession.
01:07:03.380And 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?
01:07:18.420It'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.
01:07:28.720So that's what I'm most worried about.
01:07:31.760All 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.
01:07:40.060For somebody like me who doesn't really understand it, I have a confession for you.
01:07:54.660As 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?
01:08:06.240Well, I would, to be frank, I would not read anything after 2000, because it's ideological.
01:08:13.060What we're talking about today, infected classics.
01:08:16.040So there's a good book, a classic book by Edith Hamilton called The Greek Way.
01:08:26.140I co-authored a book called Who Killed Homer?
01:08:28.460What Classics and What Happened to It?
01:08:31.120There's a good book called Greek Ways by Bruce Thornton.
01:08:34.560And 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.
01:08:49.240And it has nothing to do with being white or male or anything.
01:08:56.200So 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.
01:09:17.760Why do you forgive somebody or does that only empower them?
01:09:23.360All 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.
01:09:49.140Or 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?
01:10:01.620Why not just make square boxes like the Bauhaus movement?
01:10:04.840And so classics means that throw anything you want in the human experience out there.
01:10:10.720But there are certain archetypes of literature.
01:11:09.160And it's quite spectacular to see a grave come to life all of a sudden.
01:11:13.860And so it's a multidisciplinary experience.
01:11:18.240And I wish it was there because I created a classics department in Cal State Fresno for 21 years for minority kids.
01:11:24.720I think 90% of my kids were from Southeast Asia or Mexico.
01:11:29.860And 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.
01:11:50.820And for all of them, race became incidental to who they were.
01:11:56.960They were so meritocratic and they were so skilled and adept.
01:12:01.700And these are people who came from Mexico without even speaking English in some cases.
01:12:05.420But I just wish we would get back to that meritocratic system.
01:12:08.940And 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.
01:12:16.760And so I'm not worried about immigration from a racial point of view.
01:12:22.700I'm worried from a cultural legal point of view.
01:12:25.020If 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.
01:12:43.060My worry is because we're undermining the sanctity of the law, mostly.
01:13:50.160They don't do that in Europe, you know.
01:13:52.280And so there's this spontaneous, innovative, highly individual streak that's inherent in America.
01:13:58.160And that's why once we get going, we're always, we screw things up.
01:14:04.320But 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.
01:14:13.640The U.S. Navy was larger than every single Navy in the world by 1945.
01:14:18.000And yet it wasn't, we had the 19th largest army behind Portugal when World War II started.
01:14:25.340And when it ended, we had 12.5 million.
01:14:27.840For whatever people say about vaccinations, this country was the one that gave us four vaccinations.
01:14:35.100And we are going to be eventually the largest country with the most vaccination once we gear up to it.
01:14:41.020And once we just let, get the government out and say, you know what, Walgreens, you do this, CVS, you do that.
01:14:47.600The purpose is as many arms get jabbed as possible, as quickly.
01:14:52.480And once you unleash this American individualism and imagination, it's quite scary, but in a positive way.
01:14:59.920So that's what I like best about the United States.
01:15:02.000And what I like worst is when people try to artificially repress it or stigmatize it or demonize it.
01:15:08.400But there's a natural exuberance about this country that's ecumenical, too.
01:15:13.100And Americans are the most charitable people in the world.
01:15:16.000When 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.
01:15:25.040I'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.
01:15:34.480Or, you know, you go up in Europe and you'll just see an American come up and you say, hey, where are you from?
01:16:17.280This is the Navy SEAL commander that all the SEALs want to work under.
01:16:22.600And 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.