TRIGGERnometry - July 18, 2021


Is America a Racist Country？ - Victor Davis Hanson

Topics
hysteria woke backlash pampered affluent tribalism white guilt and woke culture
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Victor Davis Hanson
Mentioned
Barack Obama Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Victor Davis Hanson Joe Biden Mark Zuckerberg Hansen Michael Bloomberg Neil Ferguson Scott Atlas Bill Gates McCarthy George W. Bush Martin Luther King Charlie Munger Ronald Reagan Anthony Fauci Hunter Biden Jeff Bezos Greeks and 51 more
＂I Don't Believe In Progress＂ - Mary Harrington Fear and Spin： Government Manipulation on COVID-19

Episode Stats


Length

59 minutes

Words per minute

167.76

Word count

10,059

Sentence count

618

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

31

sentences flagged

Hate speech

38

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Victor Davis Hanson is an American historian, commentator, and author, including of his upcoming book, The Dying Citizen. In this episode, he talks about the current state of American politics and the parallels between the current political climate and that of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 They're very judgmental, and they've decided that this is a racist country.
00:00:05.020 I 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.
00:00:13.980 They 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.
00:00:22.300 If they say a poor black person or middle class, they just avoid them, and they feel terrible about it.
00:00:28.800 They feel so terrible that they're going to go tell, you know, Bob Jones in Alabama on a forklift that he's the problem. 0.97
00:00:41.320 His racism is the problem in America.
00:00:43.520 He has nothing. His kids can't get affirmative action.
00:00:47.160 They've never nobody's been the colleague in his entire life.
00:00:50.000 But he's the problem. No, the problem is white, wealthy liberals who will not integrate, tutor, assimilate people. 0.93
00:00:58.800 There are the other or won't adopt policies that make it possible to do so
00:01:03.320 because they're never subject to the consequences of their own ideology.
00:01:13.960 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:16.920 I'm Francis Foster.
00:01:18.420 I'm Constantine Kissin.
00:01:19.740 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:24.900 A fascinating person we have for you today.
00:01:27.580 He's an American historian, commentator, and author, including of his upcoming book, The Dying Citizen.
00:01:33.140 Professor Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:01:35.900 Thank you for having me.
00:01:37.280 It's a great pleasure to have you on.
00:01:38.860 And one of the reasons we're especially keen to speak with you is, you know,
00:01:42.360 we talk a lot on the show about wokeness and all this other sort of stuff that's day-to-day, the day-to-day of politics.
00:01:48.880 But we're always so happy to have historians on the show because we think that you offer a broader perspective
00:01:54.540 that's often very instructive as to the time that we're in at the moment.
00:01:59.420 So let me get straight into it.
00:02:01.920 What is the best historical parallel for the moment that we're living through
00:02:06.560 over the last five years in the West, particularly in the Anglosphere?
00:02:11.080 There's a lot of ancient and modern and even contemporary parallels.
00:02:17.380 The historian Thucydides recounts a moment of madness that took place
00:02:22.400 on the island of Corsaira in 427 BC. It's called the Stasis at Corsaira. It's modern Corfu when
00:02:29.280 political differences morphed into tribal differences, to ideological differences,
00:02:35.500 to class differences, and people started really resorting to violence. They changed the language
00:02:40.340 and people who were moderate or circumspect or calling for calm were the first to be killed.
00:02:46.980 We 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.
00:03:15.260 They renamed the days of the month, the founding date of France, months of the year, et cetera.
00:03:23.520 Religion, they worshipped a new god, they toppled statues, they went after religious institutions, clerics, nuns.
00:03:32.800 In our country, during the McCarthy period, because of the sudden defection of our so-called ally,
00:03:40.880 It was never a defection, but we were very naive about the Soviet Union during the wartime alliance.
00:03:45.480 Suddenly we found out it was a monstrous country and it absorbed all of Eastern Europe in violation of its oath. 0.99
00:03:52.500 And then it had spawned communist China and the loss of China.
00:03:57.280 Who lost China in that furor that began with the Cold War?
00:04:02.500 There were people in the State Department who had very naively greenlighted a lot of the Soviet influence.
00:04:07.880 And 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.
00:04:20.020 And 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.
00:04:28.920 And it said, did you know your local assemblyman is a communist and what are you going to do about it?
00:04:33.600 So there was a hysteria that gripped that and then that ended.
00:04:37.880 So we have the democratic societies, Tocqueville, Democracy in America, if you remember, he warned about that and why a constitutional republic was essential.
00:04:47.540 And 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.
00:05:02.500 you know Herodotus said when the Persians came when the Ionian Greeks came to Greece and they
00:05:07.860 wanted help and that was a very controversial thing to send mainland Greeks who were impoverished
00:05:13.220 to go fight Persians all the way across the Aegean it was easier he said to convince 30,000
00:05:19.620 in the democratic Athens than a few oligarchs in that in Sparta meaning that once the hysteria
00:05:25.340 sets in it's like a wave and Professor Hansen there will be people who say well hang on a second
00:05:31.360 You know, the examples that you've given people have died and so on and so forth.
00:05:36.900 Aren't we over-egging the pudding somewhat?
00:05:40.500 Well, we're looking at hindsight.
00:05:43.840 I 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.
00:05:52.540 When people just said, remember, the Army Council, Joseph Welch, finally testified before Congress.
00:05:59.720 McCarthy said, I have in my hand a list of 200 communists.
00:06:03.020 And he said, have you no decency, sir?
00:06:06.260 And that was sort of like taking a hammer to crystal.
00:06:09.320 It just shattered him.
00:06:10.740 And I don't know if people are going to do that.
00:06:12.340 So I don't know how this is going to end up.
00:06:14.360 I can tell you that in this country right now, there is a hysteria.
00:06:20.160 And 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.
00:06:45.380 That they can, through commercials or communications, they can create a sense that it's inevitable.
00:06:52.300 And when I say it, I'm talking about the ability.
00:06:56.680 I work at Stanford University, and I saw what happens.
00:07:00.960 In my case, they went after me.
00:07:02.380 They went after Scott Atlas, my colleague at the Hoover Institution.
00:07:05.300 They went after the distinguished historian from Great Britain, Neil Ferguson.
00:07:09.460 They go after anybody.
00:07:10.620 They 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.
00:07:24.380 It's the only multiracial democracy that's really worked.
00:07:27.400 Brazil and India may be coming a distant second and third, but it requires people to have 1.00
00:07:33.800 allegiance to an idea of a racially irrelevant society, that your first loyalty is to
00:07:40.980 the idea of America and that your own ethnic appearance is incidental, not essential to
00:07:47.800 your persona. And Professor Hansen, you use the word hysteria. What do you mean by this? Can we
00:07:53.760 break this apart? What do you mean by the hysteria? And what is the cause of this hysteria,
00:07:59.080 as you say? Well, we can see the cause and the effect. Yesterday in San Francisco,
00:08:07.240 people there who had been supported all of this, there was a poll taken. 40% of San Franciscans
00:08:15.120 expressed a desire to leave their liberal city, not because of conservatives, not because of the
00:08:20.160 police because there's rampant chaos. What do they mean by that? They mean that Target,
00:08:26.400 that Walgreens are pulling out. They're either shutting the stores or they're having limited
00:08:30.720 hours. Now, why are they doing that? Because ideologically, left-wing people believe
00:08:35.860 that the district attorney, who was the child of 60s revolutionaries and the police department
00:08:42.180 either can't or won't prosecute crimes for ideological reasons, i.e. people of color,
00:08:47.100 If they commit crimes, that's a method of redistribution and social justice, getting back at the system.
00:08:53.120 So 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. 0.95
00:09:04.740 They film it, they put it on YouTube.
00:09:07.260 And then everybody said, that's just incidental.
00:09:09.380 It's not essential to who we are.
00:09:10.680 And then a week later, you have Neiman Marcus at the heart of San Francisco in Union Square, an upscale, very luxury orientated boutique.
00:09:21.840 And these are not essentials like food. These are handbag, Gucci's things.
00:09:26.520 And 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. 1.00
00:09:33.880 And I'm not being racially interested in crime, except that that was the description of the criminals.
00:09:44.160 And 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.
00:10:04.200 We are incapable of saying this is primarily an inner-city phenomenon of people of color shooting people of color, and they need help. 0.83
00:10:12.720 To say what I just did would have my email filled, getting to your question, with you are a racist. 0.89
00:10:19.780 I am going to contact Stanford University.
00:10:22.280 I'm going to write the Hoover Institution, and I'm going to get a call from that.
00:10:25.920 I probably will from this interview, and I'm not exaggerating.
00:10:29.660 My colleague, Scott Atlas, was put on probation.
00:10:32.440 His 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.
00:10:51.520 That 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.
00:11:16.820 that this person is non-political. They're a professional. Their job is to protect the
00:11:22.800 United States through intelligence or security. They don't believe that anymore because they feel
00:11:27.600 that they've been woke. And you said that you have, you don't know if this, if we've reached in,
00:11:34.460 so we don't know if this is peak woke, for example, but do you think we've reached the
00:11:38.720 peak of this kind of hysteria or do you actually think that we have some way to go?
00:11:42.820 Let 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. 0.56
00:12:01.560 But they were not a majority. The Mensheviks had the majority. The white Russians had the majority.
00:12:05.620 The constitutional reformers had the majority. The old czarist aristocracy were part of this anti-czarist coalition. 0.93
00:12:13.040 And 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. 0.81
00:12:25.280 And they terrorized people. When they tried it earlier in the French Revolution, it didn't work.
00:12:29.660 The 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.
00:12:58.520 We 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.
00:13:18.000 And 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.
00:13:36.180 Or 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.
00:13:49.200 They couldn't get they couldn't pursue them.
00:13:52.040 And so I think there is a pushback and a lot of people are angry.
00:13:55.580 And 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.
00:14:08.160 So when Donald Trump is considered by the media to be an existential threat, two years later, he lost the House.
00:14:14.780 When 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.
00:14:26.540 So if there's going to be a peak woke backlash, we will see it in 16 months in the House.
00:14:33.280 And if they win the House, they being the Republican Party, then Barack Obama is the model for Joe Biden.
00:14:41.380 Joe Biden will be a president of executive orders.
00:14:44.080 he will have no ability to get any legislation,
00:14:46.500 woke legislation through.
00:14:48.500 So we'll see.
00:14:49.800 It's interesting.
00:14:50.640 I want to take the conversation back a little bit
00:14:52.520 to the sort of eagle eye view of the situation
00:14:55.160 that we started with.
00:14:56.200 You wouldn't know this,
00:14:57.080 but I am originally from the Soviet Union myself.
00:14:59.400 I was born in Russia.
00:15:00.580 Many of my family are from Ukraine.
00:15:02.660 And I was just in Ukraine visiting my grandmother,
00:15:04.860 who's 95 years old.
00:15:06.600 She was alive during the time of the purges.
00:15:08.800 She was alive during that whole period.
00:15:10.600 and she was telling me how when she was a student at school the teacher would come in once every
00:15:17.620 few months and say children turn turn to page 34 of your Russian literature book and cross out this
00:15:24.400 name this man is now enemy of the people. Now the other point you mentioned was about the
00:15:31.640 the teaching of the idea that our in your case your country but broadly speaking our civilization
00:15:39.260 civilization is evil, based and founded on prejudice and bigotry and so on and so forth.
00:15:46.280 Is there a historical precedent or historical example of a civilization that has done this
00:15:51.540 before, that has at some point just decided that actually it's evil, it's bad, it's wrong,
00:15:57.760 and decided to indoctrinate the next generation to hate their own country?
00:16:03.080 Well, you mentioned the Soviet Union. As you know, Soviet ideology and Maoist ideology
00:16:09.260 uh assumed it's a little different than ours that the previous system of government was evil
00:16:18.160 and it wasn't nationally i mean nationalism was evil patriotism was evil and they were there was
00:16:23.260 a new man that was created 1917 or 1947 we have something like that in the united states every
00:16:29.760 time that we have a conservative president he is hated and then when he's out of office
00:16:36.740 and people do not want that hate reciprocated to a democratic president so ronald reagan's
00:16:42.200 present for eight years and george hw bush is for four and then we have bill clinton everybody says
00:16:48.720 well they're going to do to us what we did to them they say reagan was a great guy actually
00:16:52.320 we're going to name their airport in washington after george hw bush was a great guy we're going 0.63
00:16:56.640 to name an airport texas after and then it starts then w bush is a war criminal a nazi 0.76
00:17:02.300 And 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.
00:17:27.560 And so that's what we do in our country.
00:17:29.360 We kind of rewrite the past. 0.81
00:17:30.520 With the iconoclism we're seeing, it's getting ridiculous.
00:17:34.460 Nobody has told me what's wrong with Miguel Cervantes and El Cid.
00:17:38.140 His statue was toppled.
00:17:40.200 Nobody's told me what Frederick Douglass did long or Abraham Lincoln.
00:17:43.780 Sometimes 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.
00:17:52.060 The 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.
00:18:08.060 And they thought it was Robert E. Lee. 0.95
00:18:10.000 They don't look anything alike, but Lee is all these ignorant generation know. 0.97
00:18:14.000 Remember, this is a part of the educational system where you're combining ignorance and arrogance among young people. 0.94
00:18:20.120 so they all say well you know like if you're asked them as there was a people are doing that
00:18:25.700 frequently are you proud of the united states well you know like like like maybe you know like
00:18:30.400 maybe i don't like like it's racist or like like can you specifically tell me where it is racist
00:18:36.880 identify what manifest symptom you see what document makes us race there's there's just a
00:18:44.480 blank stare. And that's a very Soviet or Maoist trait. I'm expecting a Maoist dunce caps pretty
00:18:51.360 soon where people who object in class will have to sit in the back and wear a cone on their head
00:18:56.220 or they're persecuted for wearing eyeglasses or something. And Professor Hanson, how did we
00:19:02.300 get here? And, you know, whenever we ask people this question, they always come out with Foucault
00:19:06.840 and this and that and postmodernism, blah, blah, blah, which is all fine. It's all well and good.
00:19:11.900 And 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?
00:19:25.080 Is 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.
00:19:40.900 Is that really what's driving this, a generation of people who don't see a better future for themselves?
00:19:46.700 And as a result, they're not really attached to anything, and therefore they are vulnerable to this sort of ideology.
00:19:52.200 Yeah, I think what you're talking about are two things.
00:19:55.000 There's proximate, immediate causes.
00:19:57.760 Imagine an IED.
00:19:59.020 What sets an IED off at that moment versus what's the technology or the desire to build it, which is long and coming?
00:20:07.720 So you're correct.
00:20:09.300 people had said well there was the frankfurt school and then there was gramsky and there
00:20:12.940 was post-structuralism post-modernism and academy and it was all anti-western and it was all based
00:20:18.780 on this romance about you know going back to rousseau and dryden about the noble savvy all
00:20:24.280 this stuff okay and then there was structural transformations in america and one of the things
00:20:31.800 is that all of the traditional catalysts for what i would call traditionalism were eroded
00:20:37.180 We 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.
00:20:51.160 and their BAs, especially in the social sciences, environmental sciences, humanities, were not
00:20:59.360 competitive. In other words, employers looked at them and said, I don't see a guy with a BA any
00:21:04.200 better writer, analyst, or thinker than a guy with a high school diploma. I'm talking now about
00:21:10.240 the BLM and Antifa, especially profiles of kind of woke people that are half educated enough to
00:21:17.680 know that the politics but they don't have the skills and they're angry so what do they do they
00:21:22.480 can't buy a house they don't get married if at all but then not until their 30s they don't have
00:21:28.260 children into their 30s and when you look at the data people were getting married 23 24 one or two
00:21:34.280 children 26 27 now that's 35 37 and maybe not even a house so and those are we know from data
00:21:41.300 that that creates traditionalism when you have to divert attention from you to your children to
00:21:46.780 your spouse, to your house. That's one thing, the middle class, and you're right. And then another 0.93
00:21:50.900 thing, of course, was we have a new tribalism, partly because we went from a binary 90 to 10%,
00:21:58.700 10% black and assimilated 90% of so-called white. And sometimes it was kind of ridiculous. If you 0.97
00:22:06.380 were Armenian, you weren't white, or Arab America, you weren't white, or Near Eastern, you weren't 0.78
00:22:10.840 white, or Mexican, and then suddenly Italians, you were white, whatever that meant. It was based on
00:22:15.780 success. And even Asians, you could be, if you were the, you know, ophthalmologist making $150,000 0.95
00:22:22.200 from Korea and you were white, so white didn't have anything to do with skin color in America
00:22:27.580 anymore. It was a state of mind, but the African-American minority had not progressed as
00:22:32.920 rapidly, although it was assembling very, very successfully the last 20 years. So that was
00:22:37.720 another question that we started to identify by our tribal loyalties. I think that started with
00:22:44.160 obama when he created this word or i guess the mainstream diversity which meant suddenly class
00:22:50.220 didn't matter that you could be from india and you could be worth 150 million dollars or an
00:22:56.180 argentine lawyer or you could be a spanish aristocrat but if you were not white or you
00:23:01.120 trilled your r's or you had a funny last name you were a oppressed even though you were privileged 0.91
00:23:07.380 so we got this ridiculous thing in america where opa from her 90 million dollar mansion talks to 0.99
00:23:12.900 Meghan Markle at her $15 million mansion in Montecito, and they're both victims as Michelle
00:23:18.780 and Barack from their $15 million mansion at Martha's Vineyards weigh in. So that's tribalism.
00:23:25.520 And then we had globalization and enriched our, sort of like what you're experiencing
00:23:29.160 with London and rural Britain, we had with the coast. Silicon Valley, the major research
00:23:36.280 universities. Hollywood looked to Asia. We had Boston to Miami, looking toward Europe and South
00:23:44.080 America. And anybody who had skills that could be replicated globally, lawyers, media, academics,
00:23:51.680 insurance, corporate investors became staggering rich beyond our wild imagination. You know,
00:23:59.920 not just multi-million, but multi-billion dollars. And anybody in the middle whose labor could be
00:24:05.020 xeroxed, lathe worker, auto worker, small farmer. They were sort of redundant. And we kind of
00:24:13.280 created a juxtaposed cause and effect. Well, the jobs left because you were on meth,
00:24:19.800 or you were a dead ender, or you were dregs, or deplorable, or redeemable, or a clinger, 1.00
00:24:25.260 or a chump. I'm just quoting directly now from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. 1.00
00:24:31.640 And then when you add in, we have this elite, this global elite that were really revolutionary.
00:24:37.380 And I mean that sincerely.
00:24:38.800 That's just not invective.
00:24:39.920 They really did want to, they do want to end the electoral college.
00:24:43.060 They're within one vote of doing that.
00:24:45.100 If they can get a senator from Arizona to end the filibuster, they will end the electoral college.
00:24:51.560 And they may be able to do it without a senatorial degree, much less the constitutional.
00:24:55.400 They want to pack the court after 150 years to 15 justices to get a liberal progressive majority by fiat.
00:25:05.800 They want to let in two new states after 60 years.
00:25:08.660 They want to end 180-year filibuster.
00:25:10.780 So they're truly evolutionaries, revolutionaries, evolutionaries.
00:25:14.740 And then finally, as I said, globalism got rid of the idea.
00:25:18.780 And you add all of those together with this, what we were talking earlier about these ideologies.
00:25:23.940 And 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.
00:25:44.340 but when you we lied about the origins we scared people and then we had a real pandemic wasn't
00:25:50.940 a construct 600 000 people died and we had our first national quarantine we've never reacted
00:25:57.860 that way to any type of plague um we made fun of the idea of herd immunity it didn't exist suddenly
00:26:04.440 and we didn't really protect our elderly as we if you try to protect everything as you know
00:26:09.760 and military history, you protect nothing. So we didn't protect the people who were vulnerable,
00:26:16.000 but we did protect everybody, many of whom were not vulnerable, especially those under 18.
00:26:21.740 And then we had a first artificially induced recession. We've never done that before. We had
00:26:27.920 record low minority unemployment, about 5.2. American unemployment was 3.3. It hadn't been
00:26:33.560 that way since World War II in peacetime. We had a booming economy, richest oil and gas producer
00:26:39.740 in the world, et cetera, et cetera, and we shut it all down. And then we had George Floyd's death.
00:26:46.460 It did not matter. When you saw that horrific look of Officer Chauvin on his face,
00:26:51.420 it looked, that went around the world with the knee. That was the end of the story. If you said,
00:26:56.220 well, African-Americans, 12 of them, 12 out of 11 million arrests in the United States in the
00:27:03.480 Last year, we have statistics, 2012 were shot while unarmed and police shot more white suspects.
00:27:12.000 And if you look at the number of people arrested by race versus the number shot while unarmed lethally by race,
00:27:19.460 then the white population who's arrested is more likely to be lethally shot by police.
00:27:24.820 It didn't matter.
00:27:26.420 So then we had 120 days of rioting.
00:27:29.300 And 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.
00:27:40.860 120 days, $2 billion of damage, 25 killed, 14,000 arrested.
00:27:47.320 Almost all the charges either reduced or dropped because of ideological reasons.
00:27:51.320 Then 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.
00:28:07.500 It 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.
00:28:14.080 We 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.
00:28:31.780 The air rate, usually it's about 4%.
00:28:35.340 It was that way when we had the last election.
00:28:38.760 It went down to 0.4.
00:28:40.400 So you have all these ballots, but somehow the air rate went down.
00:28:43.420 So there were all these questions.
00:28:45.020 Then we had this January 6th Capitol riot.
00:28:48.500 And maybe one of those storms we could take, but not all of those together in one year.
00:28:54.380 And the people who had no contact with humans for a year, just like you and I, I don't really
00:29:00.700 know you.
00:29:01.100 I can't see you. I can't look at your intonations. I have an impression of them and vice versa of me.
00:29:07.120 If I was in the room, it would be different. Or suspicions grow or paranoia.
00:29:13.400 You add all of that proximate and remote causes and the United States went stark raving mad.
00:29:21.020 And you people over there in Europe and South America are worried because whether it's fair or not,
00:29:26.960 the United States is the largest economic and military power in the world.
00:29:31.100 And it has certain global responsibilities.
00:29:33.640 We may not like them, but we secretly know that they're important.
00:29:37.560 And if we are woke and the alternative is China or Russian aggression or an Iranian bomb pointed at Europe, that's scary.
00:29:48.240 And yet we have people in this country.
00:29:51.100 One of our greatest capitalists, three days ago, Charles Munger, the Bertha Hatchaway person, said he congratulated what the Chinese did to Jack Ma. 0.97
00:30:00.080 It was great.
00:30:01.100 So they just took that, Sonny, and they said, listen, Sonny, you're not going to operate here.
00:30:05.900 Michael Bloomberg said China was a democratic country, essentially.
00:30:09.920 And Bill Gates said they did a terrific job with COVID.
00:30:12.480 So these are very scary things, I think, given our position of responsibility to the rest of the world.
00:30:18.640 Francis, I think we should call this episode 10 Reasons to be Cheerful with Professor Davis Hanson.
00:30:23.540 Yeah.
00:30:25.120 But, yeah, I mean, we joke about it, and I'm going to use technical language here. 0.99
00:30:29.320 It sounds like we're fucked, aren't we? 0.97
00:30:31.100 well i thought looking back at the united states we were screwed in 1933 when we had 25 percent 0.99
00:30:40.980 unemployment and the house that i'm sitting in which six generations of my family have owned i 0.96
00:30:46.120 was told when i grew up and it wasn't nice in the 1950s it was kind of shit but they had 27 people
00:30:52.980 living here relatives and they would go each week down to the train station find another person 0.97
00:30:57.860 starving. And they got, uh, I think it was $31 a ton for 2000 pounds of raisins. And that's what
00:31:07.620 they lived on. So, you know, they made an income about $700. So that was bad. And then my family
00:31:14.120 told me that my father said I had to fly 40 times over Japan and a B-29 and we got shot down twice
00:31:21.180 and let crash landed in Iwo Jima and 14 planes of my squadron didn't make it. And you're, by the
00:31:27.520 way your namesake victor hansen was killed on okinawa first marine division college graduate
00:31:33.220 and then i would sit around christmas and then one relative would say hey i rode with pat and
00:31:38.700 right through france and he got killed and he got killed and then i'd say to my brother who's
00:31:43.460 belled in cather well he was our first cousin he got shot in the head at normandy and then somebody
00:31:47.660 would say a guy at dinner and said well i was up in alaska fighting a japanese it was cold it was
00:31:52.820 worse than you guys had it. And that was what I grew up with. So our generation is the most
00:31:58.300 pampered and leisured in the world. So this is a psychological problem. It's not a material problem.
00:32:05.920 Let me just push back. So may I push back a little bit on what you said? Because coming back to what
00:32:11.160 we talked about, the erosion of the middle class, the student debt building up, the lack of housing,
00:32:16.380 you can't i mean it's very tempting for me and i try not to use the word snowflake but it is very 0.99
00:32:23.140 tempting to say well these are just these stupid kids there they didn't read their history they 1.00
00:32:28.440 don't know about the history of my country and the evils of communism and blah blah blah they're 1.00
00:32:33.940 just stupid what they're just ignorant we need to give them that information but but if if when if 1.00
00:32:39.900 they if the incentives of the society they live in don't give them a future they can look forward 1.00
00:32:45.320 to. Aren't they right to be revolutionaries? Well, yes and no. I hate that term, it's all
00:32:53.280 relative. But in terms of historical or world poverty, no. Because I teach, I see students,
00:33:01.720 I see people that are living on Winnebago's on the streets of Palo Alto, right next, by the way,
00:33:07.740 to Menlo Park, Google, Amazon, all that. But what I'm getting at is when I see people who are
00:33:14.660 impoverished. I live in southwestern Fresno County, where the per capita income is less than
00:33:20.500 Appalachia, and we're ground zero for illegal immigration. So 95% of the people I see are 1.00
00:33:24.860 Hispanic. And I go to Walmart. I'm probably about the only non-Hispanic that goes in. Most of the
00:33:30.680 so-called white or Asian people have left. But when I look at the level of affluence,
00:33:36.020 I lived overseas, and I had to get in a line for 20 minutes to pay $10 to call home in the 1970s,
00:33:43.200 and a terrible line. These people are calling all over the world on cell phone. I go into Walmart
00:33:48.640 and I can't believe how inexpensive things are. People are not, when we talked about theft in San
00:33:56.720 Francisco, are you suggesting to me that the 10 people that broke into Neiman Marcus took those
00:34:02.300 Gucci bags and went and ate them because they were so hungry? No. Or when they went and fenced
00:34:08.260 them and they took a thousand dollar bag and got a hundred dollars so in terms of actual poverty
00:34:14.360 and deprivation no we're the most pampered affluent in the world and and you can survive but
00:34:19.300 second and here's i think your point when they see the staggering amounts of wealth that others enjoy
00:34:26.500 and they see this worship of mammon and they look at esquire and vanity fair and these ads and they
00:34:32.760 turn on TV and that the cool people are doing this. And, you know, David Geffen is twittering
00:34:39.680 that I'm on COVID on my $700 million yacht kind of in isolation, ha ha, down in the car. They
00:34:45.700 don't like that. You know, Tocqueville said another good thing. I don't want to quote him twice, but
00:34:50.300 he said people would, in a democracy, people, the majority would all prefer to be poor if everybody
00:34:58.320 was equal. In other words, they would be willing not to have it so well if they knew that everybody
00:35:03.000 else didn't have it so well. If you told them you will have it pretty well, but others will have it
00:35:08.000 really well, they'll oppose that, given human nature. He was right about that. So a lot of this
00:35:13.160 anger is, I borrowed all this money, and I got my BA in community studies, or I got mine in
00:35:20.060 environmental protection, or I got mine in race and journalism. And guess what? I didn't get
00:35:26.180 60,000, 70,000. And I need 70,000 to buy a house and a car and to have a suburban life. So yeah,
00:35:34.200 they're angry about that. And when they see the disproportionate wealth, and that's why I think
00:35:40.380 class is a very important thing. And I think the left knows that because the biggest secret is,
00:35:48.800 If you look at the Fortune 400 in America, almost all that wealth is not timber, agriculture, steel, mining.
00:35:57.800 It is social media, Internet, insurance, law, investment.
00:36:03.220 We're talking about Jeff Bezos or Michael Bloomberg or Mark Zuckerberg or Lisa Jobs.
00:36:11.760 And they're all woke. They're all left wing.
00:36:14.160 and you look at the last election by zip code, and you look at it by congressional district,
00:36:20.620 all of the blue strongholds are woke, and they're wealthy. This is the biggest secret that these
00:36:27.660 parties have flipped. The Democratic Party no longer, and I was a registered Democrat. My family
00:36:33.020 were for four generations, and I'm an independent now, but the Republicans used to be a country club
00:36:38.380 white guy golf course caricature. They're not now. They are the working class, angry people 1.00
00:36:43.980 of all different races, increasingly. And the Democratic Party is the very wealthy and the
00:36:49.060 woke and the very poor and the professional classes. And so this is what's so stunning
00:36:56.740 about it, that the traditional check on the accumulation of wealth and monopolies was the
00:37:02.600 loudmouth left Marxists and media. And now they're all part of that system, that Borg.
00:37:08.740 And 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.
00:37:36.280 And 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.
00:37:47.120 They are for free speech and they're very suspicious of the accumulation of massive amounts of capital that can lead to monopolies.
00:37:54.580 And 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.
00:38:02.580 but professor hansen don't you think we're we're denigrating the left to some extent and i'll
00:38:09.220 explain why because when we talk about the left we said that the left is well but not not all
00:38:13.960 aspects of the left are woke and certainly not all aspects of the left are in support of these
00:38:18.840 huge conglomerates like your facebooks or your amazons that barely pay any taxes there's plenty
00:38:24.220 of people on the left who are fiercely critical of these corporations as they should be but they're
00:38:29.360 impotent because if you just do a little experiment after we're going, look at very
00:38:37.580 prominent names in the Clinton and Obama administration. Where did they go after they
00:38:43.400 left? And you'll find that the most prominent went to Silicon Valley. And I work right in
00:38:48.560 there. I can tell you, everybody from Anita Dunn to the Obama EPA director, they all went
00:38:54.300 to Apple or Facebook. So they're part of that system. But what's insidious about it is
00:38:59.940 your J.D. Rockefeller or Guggenheim or Mellon or Henry Ford today is Mark Zuckerberg in a tie-dye
00:39:11.240 t-shirt on a surfboard on 4th of July. Or I see them in downtown Palo Alto. Somebody, I'll be
00:39:19.020 walking to get something and somebody will say, see that guy right there? That guy is worth $2
00:39:24.320 billion. I'll say, how do you know? He said, I used to work for him. Or he said, that guy was
00:39:29.860 my student. He's worth $500 million. What did they look like? They're indistinguishable from
00:39:34.100 homeless people in the way they dress. Cutoffs, flip-flops. They're cool. They're hip. And so
00:39:39.900 it's very hard for the left wing to consolidate their anger at them. If you look at the people
00:39:45.760 Right now, maybe it's for partisan or probably is political reasons, but you go to the U.S. Congress, look at the congressional record.
00:39:53.900 Who is making speeches on the floor of the Senate in the House saying we've got to break up the monopolies?
00:39:58.540 We've got to make them adhere to the principles of the Constitution.
00:40:03.780 It's former free market Milton Friedman Republicans that have switched.
00:40:07.820 And who is defending them is former, you know, there's a private enterprise capitalist octopus that's strangled.
00:40:15.880 They're not that way anymore.
00:40:17.580 Maybe Elizabeth Warren, when she's not flipping houses and writing one of her books, How to Get Rich, is still a liberal crusader. 0.99
00:40:26.600 But 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.
00:40:37.820 because they're too valuable in promoting a cause that otherwise would not enjoy 51% popular support.
00:40:44.400 And Professor Hansen, that therefore leads me on nicely to the next question,
00:40:47.720 which is, therefore, are these labels like left and right become totally redundant?
00:40:52.640 They don't apply anymore.
00:40:54.820 I agree entirely.
00:40:56.140 And that's why I sometimes have people on the right get angry at me,
00:41:01.200 because I think class, I'm not a Marxist by any means.
00:41:03.540 I'm kind of a populist, and that's an inexact term.
00:41:06.980 But I think really that we've been fooled by this race, race, race, deliberately so. 0.98
00:41:12.140 I think the left decided somewhere in the 21st century that Marxism doesn't work here because of upward mobility and fluidity.
00:41:21.420 And they thought, you know what, we tried it.
00:41:25.140 The last guy who was successful at it was Bill Clinton, middle class agenda.
00:41:32.080 But race is different because race is immutable and it doesn't change.
00:41:36.980 And 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.
00:41:46.840 So 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.
00:42:03.340 And that's what the left has done.
00:42:04.600 They've changed all of their ideology, all of their rhetoric to race, race, race, race, race.
00:42:09.240 They don't talk about class.
00:42:10.840 And it's very ironic because of the great society programs, the affirmative action. 0.71
00:42:17.500 If you look at per capita income in the United States, the so-called white majority is not the biggest income.
00:42:24.500 Asians, whether that constitutes Korean Americans or people from India, make on average about $20,000 per capita in so-called whites.
00:42:34.380 That's impossible in a racist society.
00:42:37.300 And as one of my friends said, who's a Punjabi Sikh, he said, look at me, I'm pure black.
00:42:44.220 And I don't feel like a victim.
00:42:46.200 And I said, that's because you're a multimillionaire.
00:42:50.120 And you bring up this important point, which I know your upcoming book deals with, which is tribalism.
00:42:57.320 And 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.
00:43:11.360 And when people talk about tribalism coming in or happening now, what they don't realize is we're going back to the default setting.
00:43:22.900 And 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.
00:43:37.440 It 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.
00:43:44.940 I have four or five dogs, and I noticed the Queensland Australian cattle dogs hang out together, and they don't like the labs.
00:43:53.340 And 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.
00:44:01.940 So it's hardwired in, I guess, from our pre-civilization Neanderthal days that we feel more comfortable with people who superficially resemble us.
00:44:10.920 So the work of civilization was to see that that's a bad idea, to always hire your first cousin when he's not qualified.
00:44:18.980 And societies that are meritocratic succeed, and societies that are tribal don't.
00:44:23.880 And that was a great contribution of Rome to the world.
00:44:26.540 They actually invented a word natio.
00:44:28.920 The Greeks didn't have it. 1.00
00:44:29.800 They had 1,600 city-states, all ethnically.
00:44:32.800 There was no hellas in the sense of a federated nation, as there was with Rome, that superseded finally race. 0.89
00:44:40.140 We did that in the United States pretty well.
00:44:42.600 Some European countries are doing it, are starting to do it better than they have in the past.
00:44:48.040 And to throw that away for cheap political gain is very scary.
00:44:53.780 I 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.
00:45:16.980 And they said things almost verbatim.
00:45:19.900 We are a country of laws.
00:45:21.520 We cannot have the illegal immigration because we can't assimilate, integrate and intermarry people. 1.00
00:45:26.240 If you come to the United States, come measured, diverse, legally, and we want you to come. 0.74
00:45:30.940 But we cannot allow hordes to come through.
00:45:35.560 And assimilation and integration is the vision of Martin Luther King.
00:45:38.840 Everybody understood that.
00:45:40.580 And now we're going, we're reverting to a pre-civilization mentality.
00:45:46.340 It's very scary.
00:45:47.160 I 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.
00:46:04.400 And we have a very high crime rate here, very high.
00:46:07.780 So if you were from Japan or Korea or Armenia or Scandinavia or Germany, they just moved to the coast or out of state.
00:46:16.880 But there's still a few so-called white people, and I don't know them very well.
00:46:21.160 But if I go to Walmart now for the first time in my life, I've noticed something.
00:46:26.260 At about 7 o'clock in the morning to 9, there's about 25 white people in this huge store.
00:46:32.480 And they're gone.
00:46:33.660 And then the Mexican-American or Central American communities come over.
00:46:37.860 But my point is this.
00:46:38.760 When I walk by, white people do this to me. 0.93
00:46:41.220 Hi, how are you?
00:46:42.400 They don't know me.
00:46:44.240 I'm thinking, why the hell is he, you know, what do I have in common with this guy?
00:46:47.520 I've never met him.
00:46:48.320 Or somebody will come up and go, you need help?
00:46:50.860 And what they're doing is they're retribalizing because instinctually they think they're the minority now.
00:46:58.420 And they know that you can't say publicly because they're still the majority in the country.
00:47:03.700 But in these areas, they're thinking La Raza, those guys, BLM, those guys.
00:47:09.700 How 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.
00:47:38.340 But I said, are you worried about it?
00:47:40.220 He said, yeah, because they're 70% of the population.
00:47:43.700 And I said, well, they started it.
00:47:45.440 Remember, 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.
00:47:55.100 Or he didn't want to put his kids in the public schools.
00:47:57.500 Or at Stanford, he wanted Castilea or Sacred Heart or the Harker School.
00:48:03.740 And he wanted to live in Atherton with wealthy Asians or whites.
00:48:07.060 but he didn't want to live on East Palo Alto or San Jose.
00:48:11.040 And psychologically, this was kind of a, I'm not a big Freudian fan,
00:48:15.680 but it was an effort to square the circle of being uncomfortable
00:48:18.220 with poor people, poor white people, poor brown people, 0.67
00:48:21.460 and not wanting to hang out with them.
00:48:22.960 So they create this superstructure of, I am so woke.
00:48:27.320 Look at how they live and say they're woke.
00:48:29.380 They're not.
00:48:31.060 And so...
00:48:32.780 So what you're sort of alluding to is a lot of this
00:48:35.500 is basically derived from white guilt, wouldn't you say?
00:48:39.280 100%. 100%. They created it.
00:48:43.500 This is a class thing that we're seeing in the United States
00:48:45.800 and in the Western world in general.
00:48:47.860 I don't see, when I talk to Mexican-American people,
00:48:51.580 the middle class here, they say to me,
00:48:53.060 Victor, if we have an open border, M13 is going to come into our schools 1.00
00:48:57.380 and they're going to beat up Mexican kids that are US citizens 0.98
00:48:59.940 for three generations that don't speak Spanish. 0.89
00:49:02.220 It's inauthentic.
00:49:03.360 They're going to make us have bilingual education, no advanced placement.
00:49:07.080 When my grandmother wants to go into the dialysis clinic, it's going to be crowded with people. 1.00
00:49:11.460 They're not for it.
00:49:12.800 And 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. 1.00
00:49:19.040 But the point is that this was a phenomenon.
00:49:22.200 And in this country, I mean, you know better than I do, we were formed by Puritans.
00:49:26.500 Sometimes they can be very good in their zealotry of human perfection on Earth.
00:49:30.800 the Great Awakening, the abolitionist movement. But often, these Americans are self-righteous,
00:49:38.000 sanctimonious, and they're children of the hyper-enlightenment. They don't believe in any
00:49:42.600 religion. They don't believe in any frailty. They don't believe in any mystery. They believe that
00:49:47.540 they can solve every question with the science. And so they're very judgmental, and they've decided
00:49:58.020 that this is a racist country.
00:49:59.800 I don't know why they decided,
00:50:01.020 but I have my suspicions
00:50:02.100 that when I look at them
00:50:03.080 and I see Stanford professors
00:50:04.620 or something,
00:50:05.740 they feel they're not innately racist.
00:50:08.820 They just are culturally,
00:50:10.600 if they see an African-American professor,
00:50:13.080 they're okay with him
00:50:14.100 if he's in a certain income bracket,
00:50:15.940 if he has a certain patois. 0.98
00:50:17.460 If they say a poor black person 0.96
00:50:19.620 or middle class, 0.99
00:50:20.400 they just avoid them.
00:50:22.100 And they feel terrible about it.
00:50:23.680 They feel so terrible
00:50:24.680 that they're going to go tell
00:50:26.780 uh you know bob jones in alabama on a uh a forklift that he's the problem his racism
00:50:36.820 is the problem in america he has nothing his kids can't get affirmative action they've never 0.93
00:50:42.220 nobody's been the colleague in his entire life but he's the problem no the problem is white 0.98
00:50:47.820 wealthy liberals who will not integrate tutor assimilate people there are the other or won't 0.73
00:50:55.080 adopt policies that make it possible to do so because they're never subject to the consequences
00:51:01.800 of their own ideology they have power influence and they always find a way of saying we want
00:51:07.360 everybody to have solar power but if it's 27 cents a kilowatt that's your problem down there
00:51:12.380 in bakersfield where it's 110 we're on the coast or you know what we don't think water should go
00:51:17.900 to farmers but we god damn it we want that hatch hatchy water all the way from yosemite for san 1.00
00:51:23.200 Francisco. They always have this bizarre way of squaring the circle about their own privilege and 0.80
00:51:29.660 their own superiority, but they take it out on other people psychologically. And that makes them
00:51:37.320 feel like they're woke. That's what woke's all about. We can solve the race problem with parody.
00:51:44.320 I taught classical languages for 21 years when 75% of the students were not white at California
00:51:50.540 State University, a third tier. And what did I do? I started with the idea that Jose was from Mexico.
00:51:56.820 He wanted to be in my class. He wanted to be a citizen and he wanted an education. So I said,
00:52:01.560 Jose, here's what we're going to do. You're going to give lectures on Cicero. You're going to learn
00:52:05.040 Latin, Greek. You're going to be able to read French and German. It's going to take you four
00:52:08.460 years. And every time you speak, you're going to speak the king's English. Perfect grammar,
00:52:13.460 syntax. I'm going to correct the grammar. And when I get done with you, you will have an education.
00:52:18.000 But 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.
00:52:41.240 who in that community can I help? Maybe I should move there for the summer. Let me open an academy.
00:52:46.440 Let me teach. Let me give some of my time. No. Or if you want two million people coming in and
00:52:51.800 they're in so-called cages, a word that was invented for four years when Trump was president,
00:52:57.080 Obama created them and Biden's using them, then why don't they just say this? We have about two
00:53:03.460 million empty dorm rooms right now in America. They're at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Texas,
00:53:08.480 or everywhere. No students are in session. Why don't we just allow those poor people coming 1.00
00:53:13.440 to go use university dorms for the summer? You think they're ever going to do that?
00:53:18.960 No. That would raise support for the wall pretty quick, I would imagine.
00:53:22.420 I think we'd have it built tomorrow.
00:53:25.280 Listen, it's been quite a, let's say, a pessimistic conversation, maybe a realistic one.
00:53:31.420 Yes, let's end on a high note. Before we ask you our last question,
00:53:35.400 what's the solution here what is the answer how can this be unwound let's say
00:53:43.480 i think what we need to do is first of all say we're all human and i'm not going to judge a
00:53:54.300 person by the color of their skin but by the content of their character and i am not going
00:53:59.820 to feel more comfortable or less comfortable with a person who superficially resembles me a
00:54:04.740 and then b we are very affluent and we're very blessed and we're the luckiest generation in the
00:54:12.700 history of civilization and we have gratitude to those who gave us this and we're not going to
00:54:17.740 desecrate the past they were they were people in a pre-industrial age that had to suffer horrendous
00:54:23.660 physical ailments, poverty, and yet we're not going to judge them by the values of the 20th
00:54:30.240 century, 21st century. And then finally, we're going to have to say, there is disparity in this
00:54:37.500 world. And we're going to have to take a greater look, not at the Davos people's Great Reset
00:54:45.460 program, but on the vast accumulation of wealth. We've never seen anything like this.
00:54:52.420 Herodes Atticus in, you know, second century Athens didn't quite have all this.
00:54:57.460 Nero didn't quite have all this.
00:54:59.240 Crassus didn't have all this.
00:55:00.640 So 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?
00:55:21.600 and yet have help for people that are working hard.
00:55:25.500 And we used to think like that.
00:55:26.980 That was Harry Truman.
00:55:28.640 That was Bill Clinton.
00:55:29.640 That was Dwight Eisenhower.
00:55:31.640 That was Donald Trump.
00:55:33.060 They hated him.
00:55:33.820 But if you actually forget all of his excesses and just think, what did he say?
00:55:37.600 It was middle class, middle class, middle class, working man, working man, working man.
00:55:41.300 And who hated him?
00:55:42.800 It was the Republican silk-stalking elite. 0.91
00:55:45.280 They hated his guts.
00:55:48.260 Professor Hansen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:55:51.000 we always end our show with the same question we're going to have some questions for our
00:55:56.540 locals patrons afterwards but our final question for this interview is always what is the one thing
00:56:02.560 we're not talking about but we really should be well we're not talking i i think it's china and
00:56:10.960 i know people say we talk about but china is very different than western europe or your eastern
00:56:16.480 or Europe or the United States to the former British Commonwealth. China has 1.4 billion
00:56:21.760 people. It's run by a communist cadre that is linear descent to Mao, who killed 70 million
00:56:28.780 people. It currently has about a million and a half people in education camps. It's destroyed
00:56:34.340 the indigenous culture of Tibet. It's destroyed democracy in Hong Kong. It's created artificial 0.92
00:56:39.600 islands in the Spratly archipelago. And it's got about 100 new silos that it's building.
00:56:45.960 right now, as we speak, for intercontinental missiles with nuclear tips to hit any target
00:56:50.660 in the world. And it's got a Belt and Road initiative that is buying off all the choke
00:56:55.680 points, whether it's the Panama Canal or Suez or the Piraeus or Naples in the world. And it's
00:57:02.940 very different than the West. I'm not talking about Chinese tradition. I'm talking about the 0.99
00:57:07.700 Chinese Communist Party. And when they take over world leadership, it's not going to be freedom of 0.98
00:57:13.440 the seas. It's not going to be the International Criminal Court. It's not going to be the United
00:57:18.000 Nations, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund. It's going to be what you see in China 1.00
00:57:24.940 today. And it's a scary idea. And there are very brilliant people, the Communist Party in China.
00:57:30.760 And so if you start to criticism, as I just did, they will say, you're a racist. And you're speaking
00:57:37.780 in the long tradition of Western racism against Oriental people. They'll use that term deliberately. 1.00
00:57:42.740 Or they will say you're jealous or they will say, hey, Victor, we've got a great billet at a university in China.
00:57:50.600 Would you like to write a blog for us? And we will pay you four hundred thousand dollars a year if you just do that.
00:57:56.000 And so they're insidious. They being the Communist Party and it's cadre.
00:58:00.720 I speak as somebody who taught a lot of Chinese students are wonderful people.
00:58:06.060 But every tenth one was, you know, pretty much. This is a terrible country.
00:58:12.740 And we know that one or two percent of the three hundred eighty thousand here are engaged in helping the Chinese Communist Party.
00:58:21.140 So 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.
00:58:37.420 I 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.
00:58:59.420 westernized they believe in a different paradigm than the communist party in china because uh this
00:59:05.320 is orwellian what we're facing and it's it's gaining power and cloud especially after the
00:59:10.340 covid disaster that's a very good point it's an issue we've covered extensively on the show and
00:59:16.480 i believe we do actually have a locals question for you on this very issue but for the moment
00:59:20.300 thank you very much for coming on the show i can't wait to read your book which is coming out in
00:59:24.520 october the dying citizen really looking forward to that and of course thank you for your time
00:59:29.260 and thank you all for watching at home we will see you very soon with another brilliant episode
00:59:33.760 like this one or raw show all of them go out 7 p.m uk time take care and see you soon guys
00:59:39.240 we hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so
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