00:00:00.000They're very judgmental, and they've decided that this is a racist country.
00:00:05.020I don't know why they decided, but I have my suspicions that when I look at them and I see Stanford professors or something, they feel they're not innately racist.
00:00:13.980They just are culturally, if they see an African-American professor, they're okay with him if he's in a certain income bracket, if he has a certain patois.
00:00:22.300If they say a poor black person or middle class, they just avoid them, and they feel terrible about it.
00:00:28.800They feel so terrible that they're going to go tell, you know, Bob Jones in Alabama on a forklift that he's the problem.
00:02:01.920What is the best historical parallel for the moment that we're living through
00:02:06.560over the last five years in the West, particularly in the Anglosphere?
00:02:11.080There's a lot of ancient and modern and even contemporary parallels.
00:02:17.380The historian Thucydides recounts a moment of madness that took place
00:02:22.400on the island of Corsaira in 427 BC. It's called the Stasis at Corsaira. It's modern Corfu when
00:02:29.280political differences morphed into tribal differences, to ideological differences,
00:02:35.500to class differences, and people started really resorting to violence. They changed the language
00:02:40.340and people who were moderate or circumspect or calling for calm were the first to be killed.
00:02:46.980We had the same thing in periods of 19—I guess to say the so-called Reign of Terror, the summer of 1793, when the Jacobins hijacked the French Revolution. Robespierre, his brother, and others, and people who had seemed revolutionary and were not satisfied with a constitutional republic, maybe people like Danton, even St. Juiced, all of these people were done away with as the revolution took on a life of its own.
00:03:15.260They renamed the days of the month, the founding date of France, months of the year, et cetera.
00:03:23.520Religion, they worshipped a new god, they toppled statues, they went after religious institutions, clerics, nuns.
00:03:32.800In our country, during the McCarthy period, because of the sudden defection of our so-called ally,
00:03:40.880It was never a defection, but we were very naive about the Soviet Union during the wartime alliance.
00:03:45.480Suddenly we found out it was a monstrous country and it absorbed all of Eastern Europe in violation of its oath.
00:03:52.500And then it had spawned communist China and the loss of China.
00:03:57.280Who lost China in that furor that began with the Cold War?
00:04:02.500There were people in the State Department who had very naively greenlighted a lot of the Soviet influence.
00:04:07.880And there became sort of a witch hunt. Witch hunt's not the right word because there were not witches in Salem, but there were communists in our State Department, but not to the degree that the hysteria suggested.
00:04:20.020And finally, you know, I can remember a little boy out in a rural, out here where I am today in the same house, getting something in the mail and it was all in pink.
00:04:28.920And it said, did you know your local assemblyman is a communist and what are you going to do about it?
00:04:33.600So there was a hysteria that gripped that and then that ended.
00:04:37.880So we have the democratic societies, Tocqueville, Democracy in America, if you remember, he warned about that and why a constitutional republic was essential.
00:04:47.540And political scientists from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Tocqueville have warned us that in a democratic, radically populist, egalitarian society without checks and buy-ins, it's very easy to convince the majority.
00:05:02.500you know Herodotus said when the Persians came when the Ionian Greeks came to Greece and they
00:05:07.860wanted help and that was a very controversial thing to send mainland Greeks who were impoverished
00:05:13.220to go fight Persians all the way across the Aegean it was easier he said to convince 30,000
00:05:19.620in the democratic Athens than a few oligarchs in that in Sparta meaning that once the hysteria
00:05:25.340sets in it's like a wave and Professor Hansen there will be people who say well hang on a second
00:05:31.360You know, the examples that you've given people have died and so on and so forth.
00:05:36.900Aren't we over-egging the pudding somewhat?
00:05:43.840I don't know how this is going to end, whether it's going to end like Corsaira or it's going to end like the Reign of Terror or it's going to end like the McCarthy period.
00:05:52.540When people just said, remember, the Army Council, Joseph Welch, finally testified before Congress.
00:05:59.720McCarthy said, I have in my hand a list of 200 communists.
00:06:03.020And he said, have you no decency, sir?
00:06:06.260And that was sort of like taking a hammer to crystal.
00:06:10.740And I don't know if people are going to do that.
00:06:12.340So I don't know how this is going to end up.
00:06:14.360I can tell you that in this country right now, there is a hysteria.
00:06:20.160And most people are against it. And the people who are promulgating it, the woke movement, know that. And they feel that their influence in social media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the corporate boardroom, the campus, Hollywood, professional sports, the federal bureaucracy are such that they do not need 51 percent of support.
00:06:45.380That they can, through commercials or communications, they can create a sense that it's inevitable.
00:06:52.300And when I say it, I'm talking about the ability.
00:06:56.680I work at Stanford University, and I saw what happens.
00:07:10.620They being the faculty, senate, the professors, go after anybody who suggests that the United States was making enormous progress in racial harmony, that it's the fairest, most secure, affluent country in the world.
00:07:24.380It's the only multiracial democracy that's really worked.
00:07:27.400Brazil and India may be coming a distant second and third, but it requires people to have
00:07:33.800allegiance to an idea of a racially irrelevant society, that your first loyalty is to
00:07:40.980the idea of America and that your own ethnic appearance is incidental, not essential to
00:07:47.800your persona. And Professor Hansen, you use the word hysteria. What do you mean by this? Can we
00:07:53.760break this apart? What do you mean by the hysteria? And what is the cause of this hysteria,
00:07:59.080as you say? Well, we can see the cause and the effect. Yesterday in San Francisco,
00:08:07.240people there who had been supported all of this, there was a poll taken. 40% of San Franciscans
00:08:15.120expressed a desire to leave their liberal city, not because of conservatives, not because of the
00:08:20.160police because there's rampant chaos. What do they mean by that? They mean that Target,
00:08:26.400that Walgreens are pulling out. They're either shutting the stores or they're having limited
00:08:30.720hours. Now, why are they doing that? Because ideologically, left-wing people believe
00:08:35.860that the district attorney, who was the child of 60s revolutionaries and the police department
00:08:42.180either can't or won't prosecute crimes for ideological reasons, i.e. people of color,
00:08:47.100If they commit crimes, that's a method of redistribution and social justice, getting back at the system.
00:08:53.120So the hysteria is you're in Walgreens, somebody's taking a picture, an African-American youth goes into a bicycle, goes into the store, robs everything in front of the security guard and the reporter.
00:09:10.680And then a week later, you have Neiman Marcus at the heart of San Francisco in Union Square, an upscale, very luxury orientated boutique.
00:09:21.840And these are not essentials like food. These are handbag, Gucci's things.
00:09:26.520And all of a sudden, 10 or 12 African-American youth come in, they loot, they come out, they jump in the cars and there's no consequences.
00:09:33.880And I'm not being racially interested in crime, except that that was the description of the criminals.
00:09:44.160And the idea is that the state is incapable of saying we have an epidemic that 100 people were shot in Chicago over 4th of July and 16 were killed and 400 people were shot in the United States and 150 died in the last four days.
00:10:04.200We are incapable of saying this is primarily an inner-city phenomenon of people of color shooting people of color, and they need help.
00:10:12.720To say what I just did would have my email filled, getting to your question, with you are a racist.
00:10:19.780I am going to contact Stanford University.
00:10:22.280I'm going to write the Hoover Institution, and I'm going to get a call from that.
00:10:25.920I probably will from this interview, and I'm not exaggerating.
00:10:29.660My colleague, Scott Atlas, was put on probation.
00:10:32.440His pay was suspended for suggesting that Dr. Fauci's guidelines were porous and that it would be much better to focus resources on elderly communities and the elderly and long-term health care facilities, but not quarantine everybody.
00:10:51.520That got him into trouble. Everybody understands this, that the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and I'm talking, you know, whether it's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs who gives a lecture on woke recommended reading, chief of naval operations, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Combs, nobody has the traditional references.
00:11:16.820that this person is non-political. They're a professional. Their job is to protect the
00:11:22.800United States through intelligence or security. They don't believe that anymore because they feel
00:11:27.600that they've been woke. And you said that you have, you don't know if this, if we've reached in,
00:11:34.460so we don't know if this is peak woke, for example, but do you think we've reached the
00:11:38.720peak of this kind of hysteria or do you actually think that we have some way to go?
00:11:42.820Let me put it this way. In 1917, a very small minority who had no popular support in Russia, the Bolsheviks, upper middle class kids. Lenin was upper middle. They were all that way. And they had thugs around them. Stalin was a bank robber. People liked that.
00:12:01.560But they were not a majority. The Mensheviks had the majority. The white Russians had the majority.
00:12:05.620The constitutional reformers had the majority. The old czarist aristocracy were part of this anti-czarist coalition.
00:12:13.040And they were hijacked successfully by the Bolsheviks because they understood that violence and blacklisting and killing their opponents were something that their opponents would not match tit for tat.
00:12:25.280And they terrorized people. When they tried it earlier in the French Revolution, it didn't work.
00:12:29.660The thermodores came in one night and did the same thing to them. I'm not suggesting that's a solution, but it petered out. I don't know what's going to happen, but I will say that we're starting to see, in reaction specifically to your question, school boards where children were taught, you know, you live in a racist country. It was always racist. Your founding documents are racist. You need to have public expiation and penance to don't do that anymore.
00:12:58.520We don't want to talk about race. We want to be ecumenical. We want to be racially blind. We believe in Martin Luther King, not Malcolm X. So we want you to teach math and science and literature. And these protests are sweeping the country now at school boards and recall. We have more recall elections of board members.
00:13:18.000And in my case, just talk about something that's idiosyncratic and irrelevant, but Neil Ferguson and Scott Atlas and I that were brought up on charges of writing things that were hostile to Joe Biden or endangering public safety by medical recommendations.
00:13:36.180Or in the case of Neil, writing an email was considered rude or I don't know what to a private email to a student that those charges were unsuccessful.
00:13:49.200They couldn't get they couldn't pursue them.
00:13:52.040And so I think there is a pushback and a lot of people are angry.
00:13:55.580And in our country, how that works is we have elections every two years, presidential elections and what we call midterm, where one third of the Senate turns over and all 435 House seats.
00:14:08.160So when Donald Trump is considered by the media to be an existential threat, two years later, he lost the House.
00:14:14.780When Barack Obama's health care, Obamacare enraged the country because of the costs and the poor services in 2010, he lost 63 seats in the House.
00:14:26.540So if there's going to be a peak woke backlash, we will see it in 16 months in the House.
00:14:33.280And if they win the House, they being the Republican Party, then Barack Obama is the model for Joe Biden.
00:14:41.380Joe Biden will be a president of executive orders.
00:14:44.080he will have no ability to get any legislation,
00:15:06.600She was alive during the time of the purges.
00:15:08.800She was alive during that whole period.
00:15:10.600and she was telling me how when she was a student at school the teacher would come in once every
00:15:17.620few months and say children turn turn to page 34 of your Russian literature book and cross out this
00:15:24.400name this man is now enemy of the people. Now the other point you mentioned was about the
00:15:31.640the teaching of the idea that our in your case your country but broadly speaking our civilization
00:15:39.260civilization is evil, based and founded on prejudice and bigotry and so on and so forth.
00:15:46.280Is there a historical precedent or historical example of a civilization that has done this
00:15:51.540before, that has at some point just decided that actually it's evil, it's bad, it's wrong,
00:15:57.760and decided to indoctrinate the next generation to hate their own country?
00:16:03.080Well, you mentioned the Soviet Union. As you know, Soviet ideology and Maoist ideology
00:16:09.260uh assumed it's a little different than ours that the previous system of government was evil
00:16:18.160and it wasn't nationally i mean nationalism was evil patriotism was evil and they were there was
00:16:23.260a new man that was created 1917 or 1947 we have something like that in the united states every
00:16:29.760time that we have a conservative president he is hated and then when he's out of office
00:16:36.740and people do not want that hate reciprocated to a democratic president so ronald reagan's
00:16:42.200present for eight years and george hw bush is for four and then we have bill clinton everybody says
00:16:48.720well they're going to do to us what we did to them they say reagan was a great guy actually
00:16:52.320we're going to name their airport in washington after george hw bush was a great guy we're going
00:16:56.640to name an airport texas after and then it starts then w bush is a war criminal a nazi
00:17:02.300And now what is W. Bush? We don't want to call people Nazis, not when Barack Obama is president. George W. Bush was a reasonable person. And now he's a saint. He's against Trump. And now Trump is hated. He's a monster. Now people are saying, well, he's not on social media anymore. And you know what? I'm a little bit worried about the president. It seems a little scary that he's Joe Biden rather than just not Donald Trump.
00:17:27.560And so that's what we do in our country.
00:17:40.200Nobody's told me what Frederick Douglass did long or Abraham Lincoln.
00:17:43.780Sometimes it's quite out of Shakespeare, you know, and Julius Caesar when they get the wrong Senna, not the conspiracist, but the poet, and they kill him, the name.
00:17:52.060The iconoclasts actually went into a park and destroyed the statue of J.C. Lee, the World War II army general who was in charge of logistics for the Normandy and then subsequent European campaigns.
00:18:08.060And they thought it was Robert E. Lee.
00:18:10.000They don't look anything alike, but Lee is all these ignorant generation know.
00:18:14.000Remember, this is a part of the educational system where you're combining ignorance and arrogance among young people.
00:18:20.120so they all say well you know like if you're asked them as there was a people are doing that
00:18:25.700frequently are you proud of the united states well you know like like like maybe you know like
00:18:30.400maybe i don't like like it's racist or like like can you specifically tell me where it is racist
00:18:36.880identify what manifest symptom you see what document makes us race there's there's just a
00:18:44.480blank stare. And that's a very Soviet or Maoist trait. I'm expecting a Maoist dunce caps pretty
00:18:51.360soon where people who object in class will have to sit in the back and wear a cone on their head
00:18:56.220or they're persecuted for wearing eyeglasses or something. And Professor Hanson, how did we
00:19:02.300get here? And, you know, whenever we ask people this question, they always come out with Foucault
00:19:06.840and this and that and postmodernism, blah, blah, blah, which is all fine. It's all well and good.
00:19:11.900And I'm sure that's a part of it. But the question for me, much more interestingly, I think, is why are particularly young people, but we as a society more generally, susceptible to these ideas right here, right now?
00:19:25.080Is it the fact that you talked recently in one of your lectures about the erosion of the middle class that's happened over the last 40 and 50 years, the fact that young people don't have access to the only form of capital that poorer people traditionally ever had access to, which is housing.
00:19:40.900Is that really what's driving this, a generation of people who don't see a better future for themselves?
00:19:46.700And as a result, they're not really attached to anything, and therefore they are vulnerable to this sort of ideology.
00:19:52.200Yeah, I think what you're talking about are two things.
00:20:09.300people had said well there was the frankfurt school and then there was gramsky and there
00:20:12.940was post-structuralism post-modernism and academy and it was all anti-western and it was all based
00:20:18.780on this romance about you know going back to rousseau and dryden about the noble savvy all
00:20:24.280this stuff okay and then there was structural transformations in america and one of the things
00:20:31.800is that all of the traditional catalysts for what i would call traditionalism were eroded
00:20:37.180We have $1.7 trillion in collective student debt, and they're carrying about 30 percent, and they're not all subsidized. These were outsourced to big banks, and they're paying 7 percent on some of these loans.
00:20:51.160and their BAs, especially in the social sciences, environmental sciences, humanities, were not
00:20:59.360competitive. In other words, employers looked at them and said, I don't see a guy with a BA any
00:21:04.200better writer, analyst, or thinker than a guy with a high school diploma. I'm talking now about
00:21:10.240the BLM and Antifa, especially profiles of kind of woke people that are half educated enough to
00:21:17.680know that the politics but they don't have the skills and they're angry so what do they do they
00:21:22.480can't buy a house they don't get married if at all but then not until their 30s they don't have
00:21:28.260children into their 30s and when you look at the data people were getting married 23 24 one or two
00:21:34.280children 26 27 now that's 35 37 and maybe not even a house so and those are we know from data
00:21:41.300that that creates traditionalism when you have to divert attention from you to your children to
00:21:46.780your spouse, to your house. That's one thing, the middle class, and you're right. And then another
00:21:50.900thing, of course, was we have a new tribalism, partly because we went from a binary 90 to 10%,
00:21:58.70010% black and assimilated 90% of so-called white. And sometimes it was kind of ridiculous. If you
00:22:06.380were Armenian, you weren't white, or Arab America, you weren't white, or Near Eastern, you weren't
00:22:10.840white, or Mexican, and then suddenly Italians, you were white, whatever that meant. It was based on
00:22:15.780success. And even Asians, you could be, if you were the, you know, ophthalmologist making $150,000
00:22:22.200from Korea and you were white, so white didn't have anything to do with skin color in America
00:22:27.580anymore. It was a state of mind, but the African-American minority had not progressed as
00:22:32.920rapidly, although it was assembling very, very successfully the last 20 years. So that was
00:22:37.720another question that we started to identify by our tribal loyalties. I think that started with
00:22:44.160obama when he created this word or i guess the mainstream diversity which meant suddenly class
00:22:50.220didn't matter that you could be from india and you could be worth 150 million dollars or an
00:22:56.180argentine lawyer or you could be a spanish aristocrat but if you were not white or you
00:23:01.120trilled your r's or you had a funny last name you were a oppressed even though you were privileged
00:23:07.380so we got this ridiculous thing in america where opa from her 90 million dollar mansion talks to
00:23:12.900Meghan Markle at her $15 million mansion in Montecito, and they're both victims as Michelle
00:23:18.780and Barack from their $15 million mansion at Martha's Vineyards weigh in. So that's tribalism.
00:23:25.520And then we had globalization and enriched our, sort of like what you're experiencing
00:23:29.160with London and rural Britain, we had with the coast. Silicon Valley, the major research
00:23:36.280universities. Hollywood looked to Asia. We had Boston to Miami, looking toward Europe and South
00:23:44.080America. And anybody who had skills that could be replicated globally, lawyers, media, academics,
00:23:51.680insurance, corporate investors became staggering rich beyond our wild imagination. You know,
00:23:59.920not just multi-million, but multi-billion dollars. And anybody in the middle whose labor could be
00:24:05.020xeroxed, lathe worker, auto worker, small farmer. They were sort of redundant. And we kind of
00:24:13.280created a juxtaposed cause and effect. Well, the jobs left because you were on meth,
00:24:19.800or you were a dead ender, or you were dregs, or deplorable, or redeemable, or a clinger,
00:24:25.260or a chump. I'm just quoting directly now from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.
00:24:31.640And then when you add in, we have this elite, this global elite that were really revolutionary.
00:25:14.740And then finally, as I said, globalism got rid of the idea.
00:25:18.780And you add all of those together with this, what we were talking earlier about these ideologies.
00:25:23.940And then we come to 2020. We could have survived the pandemic and the lie that this thing came from a bat or a pangolin when we had a level four biology lab just at ground zero run by the Chinese military and indirectly funded in some sense by American government officials like Anthony Fauci.
00:25:44.340but when you we lied about the origins we scared people and then we had a real pandemic wasn't
00:25:50.940a construct 600 000 people died and we had our first national quarantine we've never reacted
00:25:57.860that way to any type of plague um we made fun of the idea of herd immunity it didn't exist suddenly
00:26:04.440and we didn't really protect our elderly as we if you try to protect everything as you know
00:26:09.760and military history, you protect nothing. So we didn't protect the people who were vulnerable,
00:26:16.000but we did protect everybody, many of whom were not vulnerable, especially those under 18.
00:26:21.740And then we had a first artificially induced recession. We've never done that before. We had
00:26:27.920record low minority unemployment, about 5.2. American unemployment was 3.3. It hadn't been
00:26:33.560that way since World War II in peacetime. We had a booming economy, richest oil and gas producer
00:26:39.740in the world, et cetera, et cetera, and we shut it all down. And then we had George Floyd's death.
00:26:46.460It did not matter. When you saw that horrific look of Officer Chauvin on his face,
00:26:51.420it looked, that went around the world with the knee. That was the end of the story. If you said,
00:26:56.220well, African-Americans, 12 of them, 12 out of 11 million arrests in the United States in the
00:27:03.480Last year, we have statistics, 2012 were shot while unarmed and police shot more white suspects.
00:27:12.000And if you look at the number of people arrested by race versus the number shot while unarmed lethally by race,
00:27:19.460then the white population who's arrested is more likely to be lethally shot by police.
00:27:29.300And I mean trying to take over, burn down a federal courthouse in Minneapolis, burn down a police precinct in Portland, create a whole autonomous home in Seattle.
00:27:40.860120 days, $2 billion of damage, 25 killed, 14,000 arrested.
00:27:47.320Almost all the charges either reduced or dropped because of ideological reasons.
00:27:51.320Then we had an election year. Donald Trump is the most divisive president and the most radical in some ways. And he was running against somebody we've never had, A, 78 years old, and two, never campaigned.
00:28:07.500It was outsourced to the media and his party, but he stayed in his basement as if he was William McKinley in the 19th century. Never had that happen.
00:28:14.080We never had an absentee election. We had 102 million ballots cast. 63% were not cast on election day, either early voting or mail-in. So the last debate didn't matter because 60 million people had already voted.
00:29:01.100I can't see you. I can't look at your intonations. I have an impression of them and vice versa of me.
00:29:07.120If I was in the room, it would be different. Or suspicions grow or paranoia.
00:29:13.400You add all of that proximate and remote causes and the United States went stark raving mad.
00:29:21.020And you people over there in Europe and South America are worried because whether it's fair or not,
00:29:26.960the United States is the largest economic and military power in the world.
00:29:31.100And it has certain global responsibilities.
00:29:33.640We may not like them, but we secretly know that they're important.
00:29:37.560And if we are woke and the alternative is China or Russian aggression or an Iranian bomb pointed at Europe, that's scary.
00:29:48.240And yet we have people in this country.
00:29:51.100One of our greatest capitalists, three days ago, Charles Munger, the Bertha Hatchaway person, said he congratulated what the Chinese did to Jack Ma.
00:30:25.120But, yeah, I mean, we joke about it, and I'm going to use technical language here.
00:30:29.320It sounds like we're fucked, aren't we?
00:30:31.100well i thought looking back at the united states we were screwed in 1933 when we had 25 percent
00:30:40.980unemployment and the house that i'm sitting in which six generations of my family have owned i
00:30:46.120was told when i grew up and it wasn't nice in the 1950s it was kind of shit but they had 27 people
00:30:52.980living here relatives and they would go each week down to the train station find another person
00:30:57.860starving. And they got, uh, I think it was $31 a ton for 2000 pounds of raisins. And that's what
00:31:07.620they lived on. So, you know, they made an income about $700. So that was bad. And then my family
00:31:14.120told me that my father said I had to fly 40 times over Japan and a B-29 and we got shot down twice
00:31:21.180and let crash landed in Iwo Jima and 14 planes of my squadron didn't make it. And you're, by the
00:31:27.520way your namesake victor hansen was killed on okinawa first marine division college graduate
00:31:33.220and then i would sit around christmas and then one relative would say hey i rode with pat and
00:31:38.700right through france and he got killed and he got killed and then i'd say to my brother who's
00:31:43.460belled in cather well he was our first cousin he got shot in the head at normandy and then somebody
00:31:47.660would say a guy at dinner and said well i was up in alaska fighting a japanese it was cold it was
00:31:52.820worse than you guys had it. And that was what I grew up with. So our generation is the most
00:31:58.300pampered and leisured in the world. So this is a psychological problem. It's not a material problem.
00:32:05.920Let me just push back. So may I push back a little bit on what you said? Because coming back to what
00:32:11.160we talked about, the erosion of the middle class, the student debt building up, the lack of housing,
00:32:16.380you can't i mean it's very tempting for me and i try not to use the word snowflake but it is very
00:32:23.140tempting to say well these are just these stupid kids there they didn't read their history they
00:32:28.440don't know about the history of my country and the evils of communism and blah blah blah they're
00:32:33.940just stupid what they're just ignorant we need to give them that information but but if if when if
00:32:39.900they if the incentives of the society they live in don't give them a future they can look forward
00:32:45.320to. Aren't they right to be revolutionaries? Well, yes and no. I hate that term, it's all
00:32:53.280relative. But in terms of historical or world poverty, no. Because I teach, I see students,
00:33:01.720I see people that are living on Winnebago's on the streets of Palo Alto, right next, by the way,
00:33:07.740to Menlo Park, Google, Amazon, all that. But what I'm getting at is when I see people who are
00:33:14.660impoverished. I live in southwestern Fresno County, where the per capita income is less than
00:33:20.500Appalachia, and we're ground zero for illegal immigration. So 95% of the people I see are
00:33:24.860Hispanic. And I go to Walmart. I'm probably about the only non-Hispanic that goes in. Most of the
00:33:30.680so-called white or Asian people have left. But when I look at the level of affluence,
00:33:36.020I lived overseas, and I had to get in a line for 20 minutes to pay $10 to call home in the 1970s,
00:33:43.200and a terrible line. These people are calling all over the world on cell phone. I go into Walmart
00:33:48.640and I can't believe how inexpensive things are. People are not, when we talked about theft in San
00:33:56.720Francisco, are you suggesting to me that the 10 people that broke into Neiman Marcus took those
00:34:02.300Gucci bags and went and ate them because they were so hungry? No. Or when they went and fenced
00:34:08.260them and they took a thousand dollar bag and got a hundred dollars so in terms of actual poverty
00:34:14.360and deprivation no we're the most pampered affluent in the world and and you can survive but
00:34:19.300second and here's i think your point when they see the staggering amounts of wealth that others enjoy
00:34:26.500and they see this worship of mammon and they look at esquire and vanity fair and these ads and they
00:34:32.760turn on TV and that the cool people are doing this. And, you know, David Geffen is twittering
00:34:39.680that I'm on COVID on my $700 million yacht kind of in isolation, ha ha, down in the car. They
00:34:45.700don't like that. You know, Tocqueville said another good thing. I don't want to quote him twice, but
00:34:50.300he said people would, in a democracy, people, the majority would all prefer to be poor if everybody
00:34:58.320was equal. In other words, they would be willing not to have it so well if they knew that everybody
00:35:03.000else didn't have it so well. If you told them you will have it pretty well, but others will have it
00:35:08.000really well, they'll oppose that, given human nature. He was right about that. So a lot of this
00:35:13.160anger is, I borrowed all this money, and I got my BA in community studies, or I got mine in
00:35:20.060environmental protection, or I got mine in race and journalism. And guess what? I didn't get
00:35:26.18060,000, 70,000. And I need 70,000 to buy a house and a car and to have a suburban life. So yeah,
00:35:34.200they're angry about that. And when they see the disproportionate wealth, and that's why I think
00:35:40.380class is a very important thing. And I think the left knows that because the biggest secret is,
00:35:48.800If you look at the Fortune 400 in America, almost all that wealth is not timber, agriculture, steel, mining.
00:35:57.800It is social media, Internet, insurance, law, investment.
00:36:03.220We're talking about Jeff Bezos or Michael Bloomberg or Mark Zuckerberg or Lisa Jobs.
00:36:11.760And they're all woke. They're all left wing.
00:36:14.160and you look at the last election by zip code, and you look at it by congressional district,
00:36:20.620all of the blue strongholds are woke, and they're wealthy. This is the biggest secret that these
00:36:27.660parties have flipped. The Democratic Party no longer, and I was a registered Democrat. My family
00:36:33.020were for four generations, and I'm an independent now, but the Republicans used to be a country club
00:36:38.380white guy golf course caricature. They're not now. They are the working class, angry people
00:36:43.980of all different races, increasingly. And the Democratic Party is the very wealthy and the
00:36:49.060woke and the very poor and the professional classes. And so this is what's so stunning
00:36:56.740about it, that the traditional check on the accumulation of wealth and monopolies was the
00:37:02.600loudmouth left Marxists and media. And now they're all part of that system, that Borg.
00:37:08.740And so nobody in the left, they love Mark Zuckerberg. They love Warren Buffett. They love Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg gave $500 million illegally in the sense that you're not supposed to take private money and target precincts in a presidential election to enhance voter turnout, drop off boxes for absentee ballots, hiring additional workers, and pre-selected precincts in swing states to alter the outcome.
00:37:36.280And he did that. Everybody thought it was wonderful. But that's what's so bizarre about these times that I always thought the left was sort of, wow, they have two things I grew up with.
00:37:47.120They are for free speech and they're very suspicious of the accumulation of massive amounts of capital that can lead to monopolies.
00:37:54.580And now I understand that everywhere I go to every campus I speak or where I work on, the biggest enemies of free speech are the left. They just call it hate speech.
00:38:02.580but professor hansen don't you think we're we're denigrating the left to some extent and i'll
00:38:09.220explain why because when we talk about the left we said that the left is well but not not all
00:38:13.960aspects of the left are woke and certainly not all aspects of the left are in support of these
00:38:18.840huge conglomerates like your facebooks or your amazons that barely pay any taxes there's plenty
00:38:24.220of people on the left who are fiercely critical of these corporations as they should be but they're
00:38:29.360impotent because if you just do a little experiment after we're going, look at very
00:38:37.580prominent names in the Clinton and Obama administration. Where did they go after they
00:38:43.400left? And you'll find that the most prominent went to Silicon Valley. And I work right in
00:38:48.560there. I can tell you, everybody from Anita Dunn to the Obama EPA director, they all went
00:38:54.300to Apple or Facebook. So they're part of that system. But what's insidious about it is
00:38:59.940your J.D. Rockefeller or Guggenheim or Mellon or Henry Ford today is Mark Zuckerberg in a tie-dye
00:39:11.240t-shirt on a surfboard on 4th of July. Or I see them in downtown Palo Alto. Somebody, I'll be
00:39:19.020walking to get something and somebody will say, see that guy right there? That guy is worth $2
00:39:24.320billion. I'll say, how do you know? He said, I used to work for him. Or he said, that guy was
00:39:29.860my student. He's worth $500 million. What did they look like? They're indistinguishable from
00:39:34.100homeless people in the way they dress. Cutoffs, flip-flops. They're cool. They're hip. And so
00:39:39.900it's very hard for the left wing to consolidate their anger at them. If you look at the people
00:39:45.760Right now, maybe it's for partisan or probably is political reasons, but you go to the U.S. Congress, look at the congressional record.
00:39:53.900Who is making speeches on the floor of the Senate in the House saying we've got to break up the monopolies?
00:39:58.540We've got to make them adhere to the principles of the Constitution.
00:40:03.780It's former free market Milton Friedman Republicans that have switched.
00:40:07.820And who is defending them is former, you know, there's a private enterprise capitalist octopus that's strangled.
00:40:17.580Maybe Elizabeth Warren, when she's not flipping houses and writing one of her books, How to Get Rich, is still a liberal crusader.
00:40:26.600But I don't see any effort on the part of the left, at least in this country, to break up these pernicious monopolies that are stifling free expression and free speech.
00:40:37.820because they're too valuable in promoting a cause that otherwise would not enjoy 51% popular support.
00:40:44.400And Professor Hansen, that therefore leads me on nicely to the next question,
00:40:47.720which is, therefore, are these labels like left and right become totally redundant?
00:40:56.140And that's why I sometimes have people on the right get angry at me,
00:41:01.200because I think class, I'm not a Marxist by any means.
00:41:03.540I'm kind of a populist, and that's an inexact term.
00:41:06.980But I think really that we've been fooled by this race, race, race, deliberately so.
00:41:12.140I think the left decided somewhere in the 21st century that Marxism doesn't work here because of upward mobility and fluidity.
00:41:21.420And they thought, you know what, we tried it.
00:41:25.140The last guy who was successful at it was Bill Clinton, middle class agenda.
00:41:32.080But race is different because race is immutable and it doesn't change.
00:41:36.980And you can be LeBron James and worth a billion dollars and still say the police are going to kill you or they're horrible people or they're murderous, even though you have a security guard up in the L.A. hills.
00:41:46.840So once you said that oppression, oppressors and oppressed victims and victimizers are not based on your actual living conditions, but on the color or the hue of your skin, then you had a permanent, a permanent victim.
00:42:46.200And I said, that's because you're a multimillionaire.
00:42:50.120And you bring up this important point, which I know your upcoming book deals with, which is tribalism.
00:42:57.320And one of the things that scares me about the time that we're in is I don't think enough people understand something, which I think you do, that tribalism is the default setting for human beings.
00:43:11.360And when people talk about tribalism coming in or happening now, what they don't realize is we're going back to the default setting.
00:43:22.900And the reason it's so powerful, I think, is that it's very easy to activate these mental switches on people and to get people to be tribal based on things like race, sex, a little bit less, but particularly race, because we're just pre-wired to do that.
00:43:37.440It was Plato who said that first. He said, birds, believe it or not, he actually did write, birds of a feather flock together, quoting Socrates.
00:43:44.940I have four or five dogs, and I noticed the Queensland Australian cattle dogs hang out together, and they don't like the labs.
00:43:53.340And when I look outside, I see all of the mourning dogs on one wire, and the quail below them, and the hawks hang out together.
00:44:01.940So it's hardwired in, I guess, from our pre-civilization Neanderthal days that we feel more comfortable with people who superficially resemble us.
00:44:10.920So the work of civilization was to see that that's a bad idea, to always hire your first cousin when he's not qualified.
00:44:18.980And societies that are meritocratic succeed, and societies that are tribal don't.
00:44:23.880And that was a great contribution of Rome to the world.
00:44:29.800They had 1,600 city-states, all ethnically.
00:44:32.800There was no hellas in the sense of a federated nation, as there was with Rome, that superseded finally race.
00:44:40.140We did that in the United States pretty well.
00:44:42.600Some European countries are doing it, are starting to do it better than they have in the past.
00:44:48.040And to throw that away for cheap political gain is very scary.
00:44:53.780I could show you campaign speeches on the floor of the Democratic Party in 1992 and 1996 by Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi when they were running successfully against George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, the Republicans.
00:45:47.160I noticed that about five years when I was speaking of Walmart, sometime around 2000, the so-called white and Asian family farmers where I live, partly because of globalization, part because of corporate takeover of agriculture, they left, partly because of illegal immigration.
00:46:04.400And we have a very high crime rate here, very high.
00:46:07.780So if you were from Japan or Korea or Armenia or Scandinavia or Germany, they just moved to the coast or out of state.
00:46:16.880But there's still a few so-called white people, and I don't know them very well.
00:46:21.160But if I go to Walmart now for the first time in my life, I've noticed something.
00:46:26.260At about 7 o'clock in the morning to 9, there's about 25 white people in this huge store.
00:46:48.320Or somebody will come up and go, you need help?
00:46:50.860And what they're doing is they're retribalizing because instinctually they think they're the minority now.
00:46:58.420And they know that you can't say publicly because they're still the majority in the country.
00:47:03.700But in these areas, they're thinking La Raza, those guys, BLM, those guys.
00:47:09.700How am I going to protect our guys? Even though some of the, we're so intermarried, it's ridiculous. We need DNA badges to find out our racial fee days. But I, that's very scary because, uh, and I know a lot of African American, Hispanic friends that will tell me, they'll say to me, I just had breakfast with somebody that was not so-called white. And he said to me, so when are the white people going to start this? I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we're doing it.
00:47:45.440Remember, it's the white liberal on the coast that thought this up, that we all identified by a race because he was so guilty that he never wanted to live next to a Mexican guy.
00:47:55.100Or he didn't want to put his kids in the public schools.
00:47:57.500Or at Stanford, he wanted Castilea or Sacred Heart or the Harker School.
00:48:03.740And he wanted to live in Atherton with wealthy Asians or whites.
00:48:07.060but he didn't want to live on East Palo Alto or San Jose.
00:48:11.040And psychologically, this was kind of a, I'm not a big Freudian fan,
00:48:15.680but it was an effort to square the circle of being uncomfortable
00:48:18.220with poor people, poor white people, poor brown people,
00:48:21.460and not wanting to hang out with them.
00:48:22.960So they create this superstructure of, I am so woke.
00:48:27.320Look at how they live and say they're woke.
00:49:12.800And I don't think a lot of African-Americans are for it, other than being human and saying if they're going to give us stuff, yeah, I'll take it.
00:49:19.040But the point is that this was a phenomenon.
00:49:22.200And in this country, I mean, you know better than I do, we were formed by Puritans.
00:49:26.500Sometimes they can be very good in their zealotry of human perfection on Earth.
00:49:30.800the Great Awakening, the abolitionist movement. But often, these Americans are self-righteous,
00:49:38.000sanctimonious, and they're children of the hyper-enlightenment. They don't believe in any
00:49:42.600religion. They don't believe in any frailty. They don't believe in any mystery. They believe that
00:49:47.540they can solve every question with the science. And so they're very judgmental, and they've decided
00:50:26.780uh you know bob jones in alabama on a uh a forklift that he's the problem his racism
00:50:36.820is the problem in america he has nothing his kids can't get affirmative action they've never
00:50:42.220nobody's been the colleague in his entire life but he's the problem no the problem is white
00:50:47.820wealthy liberals who will not integrate tutor assimilate people there are the other or won't
00:50:55.080adopt policies that make it possible to do so because they're never subject to the consequences
00:51:01.800of their own ideology they have power influence and they always find a way of saying we want
00:51:07.360everybody to have solar power but if it's 27 cents a kilowatt that's your problem down there
00:51:12.380in bakersfield where it's 110 we're on the coast or you know what we don't think water should go
00:51:17.900to farmers but we god damn it we want that hatch hatchy water all the way from yosemite for san
00:51:23.200Francisco. They always have this bizarre way of squaring the circle about their own privilege and
00:51:29.660their own superiority, but they take it out on other people psychologically. And that makes them
00:51:37.320feel like they're woke. That's what woke's all about. We can solve the race problem with parody.
00:51:44.320I taught classical languages for 21 years when 75% of the students were not white at California
00:51:50.540State University, a third tier. And what did I do? I started with the idea that Jose was from Mexico.
00:51:56.820He wanted to be in my class. He wanted to be a citizen and he wanted an education. So I said,
00:52:01.560Jose, here's what we're going to do. You're going to give lectures on Cicero. You're going to learn
00:52:05.040Latin, Greek. You're going to be able to read French and German. It's going to take you four
00:52:08.460years. And every time you speak, you're going to speak the king's English. Perfect grammar,
00:52:13.460syntax. I'm going to correct the grammar. And when I get done with you, you will have an education.
00:52:18.000But boy, who were the biggest critics of that? It was white liberals in the administration and the ethnic studies department. And so all of these woke liberals, if they just say to themselves, 100 people were shot in Chicago. There's no fathers in those homes. There's a teenage mothers raising these kids. There's no traditional education.
00:52:41.240who in that community can I help? Maybe I should move there for the summer. Let me open an academy.
00:52:46.440Let me teach. Let me give some of my time. No. Or if you want two million people coming in and
00:52:51.800they're in so-called cages, a word that was invented for four years when Trump was president,
00:52:57.080Obama created them and Biden's using them, then why don't they just say this? We have about two
00:53:03.460million empty dorm rooms right now in America. They're at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Texas,
00:53:08.480or everywhere. No students are in session. Why don't we just allow those poor people coming
00:53:13.440to go use university dorms for the summer? You think they're ever going to do that?
00:53:18.960No. That would raise support for the wall pretty quick, I would imagine.
00:55:00.640So when you have Jeff Bezos with $170 billion wealth, and he's controlling all of the merchandise and commercial, not all, but 50% of it in some cases, and the small business person's going out of business, we have to say to ourselves, how do we preserve personal liberty, personal freedom, the capitalist, private enterprise, private property only society?
00:55:21.600and yet have help for people that are working hard.
00:55:48.260Professor Hansen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:55:51.000we always end our show with the same question we're going to have some questions for our
00:55:56.540locals patrons afterwards but our final question for this interview is always what is the one thing
00:56:02.560we're not talking about but we really should be well we're not talking i i think it's china and
00:56:10.960i know people say we talk about but china is very different than western europe or your eastern
00:56:16.480or Europe or the United States to the former British Commonwealth. China has 1.4 billion
00:56:21.760people. It's run by a communist cadre that is linear descent to Mao, who killed 70 million
00:56:28.780people. It currently has about a million and a half people in education camps. It's destroyed
00:56:34.340the indigenous culture of Tibet. It's destroyed democracy in Hong Kong. It's created artificial
00:56:39.600islands in the Spratly archipelago. And it's got about 100 new silos that it's building.
00:56:45.960right now, as we speak, for intercontinental missiles with nuclear tips to hit any target
00:56:50.660in the world. And it's got a Belt and Road initiative that is buying off all the choke
00:56:55.680points, whether it's the Panama Canal or Suez or the Piraeus or Naples in the world. And it's
00:57:02.940very different than the West. I'm not talking about Chinese tradition. I'm talking about the
00:57:07.700Chinese Communist Party. And when they take over world leadership, it's not going to be freedom of
00:57:13.440the seas. It's not going to be the International Criminal Court. It's not going to be the United
00:57:18.000Nations, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund. It's going to be what you see in China
00:57:24.940today. And it's a scary idea. And there are very brilliant people, the Communist Party in China.
00:57:30.760And so if you start to criticism, as I just did, they will say, you're a racist. And you're speaking
00:57:37.780in the long tradition of Western racism against Oriental people. They'll use that term deliberately.
00:57:42.740Or they will say you're jealous or they will say, hey, Victor, we've got a great billet at a university in China.
00:57:50.600Would you like to write a blog for us? And we will pay you four hundred thousand dollars a year if you just do that.
00:57:56.000And so they're insidious. They being the Communist Party and it's cadre.
00:58:00.720I speak as somebody who taught a lot of Chinese students are wonderful people.
00:58:06.060But every tenth one was, you know, pretty much. This is a terrible country.
00:58:12.740And we know that one or two percent of the three hundred eighty thousand here are engaged in helping the Chinese Communist Party.
00:58:21.140So when you have I'll just finish with this uplifting thought, when you have Michael Bloomberg saying that China is pretty much a consensual society or when Charles Munger says, I'm really glad that Johnny Ma got what was coming to him in China.
00:58:37.420I mentioned Bill Gates. And you've got Hunter Biden, who was getting money from Chinese interest. I don't know who is invulnerable or who is immune. But the good thing about it is I think it will draw Europe, the United States together, I hope, and people all over the world that are so-called westernized.
00:58:59.420westernized they believe in a different paradigm than the communist party in china because uh this
00:59:05.320is orwellian what we're facing and it's it's gaining power and cloud especially after the
00:59:10.340covid disaster that's a very good point it's an issue we've covered extensively on the show and
00:59:16.480i believe we do actually have a locals question for you on this very issue but for the moment
00:59:20.300thank you very much for coming on the show i can't wait to read your book which is coming out in
00:59:24.520october the dying citizen really looking forward to that and of course thank you for your time
00:59:29.260and thank you all for watching at home we will see you very soon with another brilliant episode
00:59:33.760like this one or raw show all of them go out 7 p.m uk time take care and see you soon guys
00:59:39.240we hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so
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