Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - A "Shock and Awe" Special: Culture Shock

Episode Date: November 25, 2023

Bill analyzes the vast societal changes in America with Victor Davis Hanson and Dr. Ben Chavis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I grew up in the 1950s and 60s. I figure I was about seven, eight years old when I started to realize that there was actually a world out there. That coincided with the beginning of rock and roll, Elvis Presley in particular. But Chuck Berry and some black artists were there, Little Richard. And that was a shock to my parents, a cultural shock because after World War II, the GIs came back, American society was based on conformity. So if you watch the sitcoms of the early 60s,

leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, all of these shows, you see that it was just like a milk toast. Everybody was white, everybody was happy, no dissent. Well, then rock and roll comes in and shakes it all up, pardon a pun, and then you have James Dean in the movie, and you have a lot of turbulence, challenges. The culture then stayed pretty even until 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated.

That was a huge shock to America. And the Camelot that had been installed in politics was gone in a flash. And then the culture was shocked again in 1967 by the Vietnam War. and the college demonstrations, and the sex, drugs, rock and roll era, which lasted a fairly long time. Everything changed. Country divided. Hippies against traditionalists. A lot of angst, a lot of anger, a lot of new mores, religion declined, tradition decline. All right. Then after Vietnam subsided Watergate, Big Scandal, Richard Nixon,

politics upheaval. And again, the society was almost exhausted by that time. All right? Between 1960 and 1973, American society was exhausted. So then things kind of evened out. Disco, mindless disco took over in the 70s. The me generation of the 80s, where it was all about me? Give me mine. Where it's mine? How come I don't have? everything handed to me, then the 90s and extension of the 80s. And now after 9-11, there was a flip back to traditional America because we were attacked and people wanted to kill us and we rallied behind a more traditional America, George W. Bush. That's shattered down, gone. And we are in progressive pathway. Now, the key to the progressive movement was Barack Obama, President Obama.

Here's what he said in 2016 when he was first, I'm sorry, in 2008, let me get my dates correct, 2008 when he was first running for president. Go. I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, For me, as a Christian, it's also a sacred union. You know, God's in the mix. So, traditional Barack Obama, but four years later, 2012, running for re-election, different story. At a certain point, I've just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

Okay, four years, big change. Now we have the Biden administration thoroughly invested in progressive tenants, wanting to change and challenge all of the Judeo-Christian tenants, and I mean all of them. Okay, so there is my analysis. two very, very smart guys. Smarter than me. The first one is Victor Davis Hansen. You know him if you watch the news. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He wrote a book called The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are destroying the idea of America. I have said publicly that Mr. Hanson is a better

columnist than I am. Now that shows you about my ego, but it's a compliment to Victor Davis Hansen, who joins us now from California. Okay, so there is my spiel about American culture. You and I are contemporaries. How do you see it? I agree with you, Bill. And I think there's three things that I've watched in the last 10 years that have been accelerants to what you outlined, that have really picked up the pace and maybe neither one of us thought that it would accelerate to the point we are now. One was this asymmetrical globalization and we had this bi-coastal elite, one looking at the EU, one looking at Asia that had levels of wealth that we that were staggering in the history of civil with seven

trillion dollars in market capitalization. So the Zuckerbergs, the Bloomberg's, the Soros, the Bill Gates, there were people who had enormous influence and they were left-wing. So the Democratic Party really metamorphosized from the old lunch bucket constituencies to a boutique agenda that was you know not they were never subject to the consequences of their own ideology and they didn't care about the middle class the second thing was that we have never seen either percentage wise or in actual numbers 50 million people that were not born in the united states 27 percent of all californians were not born in america and that was an enormous challenge for legal diverse meritocratic immigration and assimilation, integration, intermarriage, and we failed.

So we created a kind of a tribal idea that your first identity was your superficial appearance, tribalism, which is an age-old enemy of civilization. The third thing, and I think this was important, we gave up on the Martin Luther King, even though we had made enormous progress of the content of our character rather than the color of our skin and we substituted race for class. So the Democratic Party came to the conclusion that if you had never gone to high school and you're on a forklift in Bakersfield, California,

and you're a white working person, you have white privilege. And the Oprah or LeBron or Julian Castro or somebody like that has no privilege. And that was a fundamental change in direction that we, and I think Barack Obama did that when he redefined affirmative action, that 90, 10, or 88, 12 binary that had historical justification and slavery and Jim Quote to diversity.

And by diversity, he meant, I don't care how wealthy you are. I do not care what your historical circumstances are. You can be an Indian aristocrat. You can be an Argentine aristocrat. But if you are so-called not white, you were part of the diversity, and that's 30% of the population. And those things really changed everything in my view. This could not have happened without the entertainment industry, Hollywood, and the news industry, getting on board, promoting, not favoring, but actively promoting that if you aren't progressive, if you don't believe the tenants of equity, which is favoritism toward certain groups, if you don't want your children to be taught one thing, school, that equity is best, that you are a villain.

All right, so both of us have had to face that media, which not only disagrees, but wants to destroy, actively destroy people who will say, no, traditional America is better because if you look at history, that's how we became the most successful economic country that ever existed by tradition. work, self-reliance. You take that tack now, the media will try to destroy you. I think that's a huge component in all of this. Let's face it, the U.S. economy is under stress. National debt rising, trade war, shaking the markets. And meanwhile, China is dumping the dollar and stockpiling gold. That's why I protected my savings with physical gold and silver. Theroux, the only

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the juicy details in the world's politics, business, pop culture, and everything in between. It's what you want from the New York Post wrapped up in one snappy show. Ask your smart speaker to play the NY Postcast podcast. Listen and subscribe on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think you're right. I think they define their agenda, the woke agenda, that if there is any detectable inequality, It has to be attributed to somebody who's culpable. It can't be chance or fate or individual difference.

And therefore, an annoyed and separate group, superior group, should have the power to redistribute and make things even according to what they feel. And that does not appeal to 51%. The border doesn't, the Sorrel's crime philosophy doesn't, the energy problem doesn't Afghanistan. So what they have done in the last 25 years, they control all of the levers of thought, influence through institutional powers, professional sports, Hollywood, media, Silicon Valley, corporate boardroom, Wall Street, the foundation, my gosh.

And through those institutions, they feel that they don't really need a grassroots 51% consensus because they can affect public opinion. And so we're going into a midterm and we're not discussing these issues. We're discussing January 6th, hiatus, then we go into the raid, the media bombshells, walls are closing in. Then we do the phantom of the opera. Everybody's an enemy speech by Biden, and now we're going to go back to January 6th, and I think we'll probably end up with an indictment. But they have the ability through the permanent state or the media or all of these things that we talked about

to bypass an appeal to 51% of the people. Revolutionaries, Bill, they don't believe in the Constitution and the custom and traditions. They don't feel that's a reliable, a reliable companion for them. No, they want to break it out. Right, no doubt about it. But how culpable are the vast numbers of Americans who do not pay attention, who live their lives on this, who will not discipline themselves to actually hear both sides of the story and figure out, you know, what is best for them, their families, and their country.

So it seems to me that group has risen, and they are the targets of the propaganda that are put out by the mass media and the entertainment industry. How culpable are they? Very much so, but when you look at civic education, it doesn't exist in the public school. So one of the things we don't talk about is the woke education, this therapeutic detour the last 10 years, it's really one of laziness. These teachers are not qualified to teach competitive mathematical or historical or English skills

and it's sort of off-topic topics and these kids are not educated and yeah we're culpable. We're a Democratic Federal Constitutional Republic but this couldn't have happened without being susceptible to these influences

whether it's Facebook or Twitter or the Super Bowl halftime show or the commercials on television. But it's not, nobody in the Democratic Party says we have midterms coming out. We want to convince America that that open border is well and that these big city district attorneys are working for you and you must pay $7 a gallon for diesel fuel. These are all in your interest.

Instead, we have these psychodramas and melodramas and we've all been diverted attention. The Republican establishment, it seems, unable except until desantis with this latest martha's vineyard they have been unable to bring back the issues in a in sort of a media fashion that the populace understands but it was a brilliant move the martha's vineyard that was one of the most brilliant political moves i've seen in my lifetime yeah i agree because now it's focused it's focused attention on something that's quite wrong and morally wrong on the border and it's disrupted the left-wing media circus for a while

And the hypocrisy that is active in the progressive circus. Last question for you. It used to be if you were a classic liberal, as overwhelmingly most college professors are, that you believed in free speech, that you believed in life, human rights. And now the progressives have said, you know, we don't really want free speech on Facebook. We don't really want Twitter throwing out vaccination. dissent or election dissent. We're going to knock that out. And if you are among the unborn, we can terminate your existence right up until the moment of birth. That seems to be 180 degrees

opposite what the liberal philosophy used to be. How did that happen? Because they're not liberals. They've been hijacked by, I call them Jacobins, that French Revolutionary Party. They believe that they are so morally superior that they deserve to use any means possible. In the 60s, they were protesting to have free speech. Now they're the deans that are suppressing free speech. They were marching on the Pentagon. Now they're in the Pentagon with woke education. They used to congregate in front of, you know, IT&T or General Motors to protest. Now they are running the corporate boardroom. So they feel they've taken in a long march these institutions over and they can affect public opinion and they do not what's in it what's in it for them the progressives and this is as simple as it gets

what's in it for the progressive elite to terminate the unborn without any restrictions what's in it for them they have certain ideological ideas about utopia and they feel that people are subject to dark forces that are going to support make women have a child they don't want and they don't really care about human life and they feel that whether it's blasting the walls at the border and living in a compound or praising open borders but not in Martha's vineyard or saying that the teachers unions are great and charter schools are awful why their kids are in prep school it's based on a group of people several million with enormous power and they're not subject because of their wealth and influence and institutional control to the ramifications of their own ideology.

They're like the Jacobins or Robespierre, and they have to be stopped because they're revolutionaries. They're not liberals. They're not Democrats. I don't even think they're progressive. I think they're more, I don't know, neo-socialist Stalinists. They really do not like America. They don't like its history or tradition. It's not perfect. In their way, it's not good. But if it's not perfect, it's not good. And they have to destroy it. I think they're trying to destroy it and reconstitute it and something that you and I could not even imagine.

Victor Davis-Hanson, thank you very much. We really appreciate it, sir. Thank you, Bill. Hey, it's Sean Spicer from the Sean Spicer Show podcast. Reminding you to tune into my show every day to get your daily dose inside the world of politics. President Trump and his team are shaking up Washington like never before, and we're here to cover it from.

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Listen to Podforce One with me, Miranda Devine, every week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. You don't want to miss an episode. So all aspects of American society are affected by cultural change, but one group in particular has really been affected over the past 50 years, and that is African Americans. Some stats for you. In 1965, at the beginning of the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson-led movement, 25% of black children were born to a single mother, 25%. In 2018, 70% of black children born to an unmarried mother, according to federal census statistics. In the prison population, and remember, African Americans make up 13% of the total people living in the USA. In 1964, 33% of the prison population in America were black.

In 2022, this year, 39%. So you can see that the cultural change, particularly starting in the mid-1960s, influenced the black culture in a tremendous way. So joining us now is a man you probably have heard of. Dr. Benjamin Chavis is the president, CEO, of the National Newspaper Publishes Association. He is the former executive director and CEO of the MAACP.

And we were pleased to have Dr. Chavis on this program. So many people believe that the unmarried child situation has led to deprivation in the African American community, generally speaking. Would you agree with that? Thank you, Bill, for an opportunity to be on your first. program. Generally speaking, there are a lot of pressures on the black family. Of course, not only for black families, white families, Latino families, having families together is always much better

than not having families together. And the statistics that you cite are real, they're accurate, and also speaks to, we've got to do a better job. We're making sure that families are whole. And of course, in the African-American community, families are not only nuclear families, but they're also, you know, broader families where you have this situation where women are the head of households much more in the later years than in the 1960s. So we got work to do. I was very fortunate. I was born in 1948, had a great mother and father, all of my sisters, all college graduates. did well. But those families that, unfortunately, don't have a nuclear family, they have greater challenges. And so the thing is what we need to focus on, Bill, I think, is how do we fix this?

How do we correct this? So all families will have a better chance at life. But there's a problem, doctor. So the progressive movement doesn't see it the way you see it. I mean, take the Black Lives Matter organization. They clearly on their website, that you don't need to have two parents, that a family, an alternative family, whatever, is fine. And the progressive movement downgrades traditional America in almost every area. And you see the rise now in violent crime, young black males without male supervision, fathers in the home, are becoming a blight on society. So it seems to me and others that this progressive,

movement away from traditional America, the classic nuclear family, as you say, all right, has harmed the whole country, but most of all the African-American community. Am I wrong? Well, I think you're right to point that there's a serious problem with having nuclear families in black America. But the question, I don't think it's accurate, though, Bill, just to say this is the cause of the progressive movement. I think that this is the problem. I think that this is something that goes beyond politics, right, to the right or to the left or to the middle. This is something that all committees, including, if I can speak for the African American community, those are problems that we have to work on.

We have to work on. But when you said we, who's we? I mean, who are you talking about? The government can't legislate personal morality. Government can't come in and say to people. I'm not asking for, I don't think you right now. We are people who live in our communities. One of the reasons why we've made progress in some of our communities that we take greater responsibility for what's happening with our children, what's happened with our young people, what's to counter crime in our community as well.

And I just think that the Black Lives Matter movement, as you refer to, came as a response to all these serious cases of police brutality that Black Lives Matter movement, believe, were racially motivated. But in terms of the family, I think that no one in our community would argue that we need to, would argue that we don't need to do something better to restore families in our communities. I think across the board, you will get an agreement on that. Okay. I'm not disagreeing that a community-based analysis and encouragement of married people siring children would be the best solution because government can't do it. But it's not happening into south side of Chicago.

It's not happening in a lot of places where the violent crime is just through the roof because of the progressive movements, de-emphasis on the police and incarceration. And that has been proven time and time and time again, and you know it. So there are good African-American poor people who live in fear of young black males armed to the teeth who are roaming around selling narcotics and killing people at will. All of this comes out of a lack of discipline, and that is a cultural thing. That is a hallmark of the progressive movement. Do not impose discipline on criminals or students who misbehave in the classroom or anyone else.

Look at what you and I are pretty much the same age. When you grew up, you had Motown. You had Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson. You had unbelievable positive black role models. Now you got rappers spewing out. All of this vile stuff. Kids with the headphones listening all day long to it, four-letter words sprinkled into every sentence,

crude entertainment coming out these young people, and it's all the hallmark of progressives, not conservatives. Do you disagree? Yeah, Bill, I respectfully, I do disagree. I think that, you know, you're entitled to your analysis, but your analysis is not the only analysis. I believe that crime in African American communities,

drugs, self-destruction, we don't manufacture guns in our community. Where did all these guns come from? There are too many guns in our community. There are too many guns in America. And so this has nothing to do with being progressive or conservative. Some of it has to do with racism, someone has to do with economic inequity, some of it has to do with the lack of having a positive role model.

You need guidance. Every human being needs it. The progressive movement does not buy into that concept. Again, Bill, when you identify the progressive movement, you are presupposing that the progressive movement has some psychological, some sociological control over the thinking and the pattern of behavior of black people. That's not true. Has influence? No, I think that there are much more systemic causes to the disparities in our society, the health disparities.

We know something now about the social determinities of health. We know something also about environmental conditions. Do you know, Bill, that African Americans are disproportioned exposed to environmental hazards that causes asthma, that causes cancer, that causes hard conditions. Sure, because it all goes back to poverty. If a child does not, if a child does not have adequate nutrition or when they go to school, Bill, there's no way they're going to pass the third grade reading test, which determines how many juvenile prisons are going to be built rather than media programs to help young people have to read. So you're absolutely right. There's no doubt about it, that African Americans, and I've said this throughout my whole career, of a much tougher

road than Caucasian Americans, Hispanic Americans, any other group. But the only solution to that is to get the 70% born in a single family home back down to a reasonable level. Or it's just going to be a cycle because you have to have a father. I think that's one of the solutions. That's not the only solution, but I think that's one of the solutions. I think we have a complex problem of what I would call racial oppression in America. And you're not going to solve it with a simplistic solution. It's complex. But you have a very permissive. A group of solutions to resolve this. You have an administration now that believes in equity, that believes in actually favoring African Americans for income redistribution for entitlements down the line.

So the oppression of African Americans is not in play currently at the federal level. It's now the other way, the pendulum has swung the other way, that we have to favor this group to get them back to a parity with the other American groups. But I'll submit to you that that's not going to work. Because it's all personal. I just want to make sure, look, reparations is not favoritism. Reparations with paying the damage that was done. You can't, you can't.

You and I can agree. But, you just agree. This is good. I have a different social condition than once. But don't you understand the bitterness that would arise if you punish the rest of America to pay reparations to black America? Repairing the damage has been done. Repairing the damage to black Americans does not injure white Americans.

Why would you say that? It comes out of our pockets. Yeah, but what? Because it's taxpayer dollars. Those reparations would be into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Bill, blacks, whites, whites, Latinos, Asian, Native Americans, all of us would benefit from having a society where there's no crime. That's right. benefit when having society was help people access to health care with all

us. And so the only thing that's going to stop, doctor, the only thing that's going to stop, or it's not going to stop, the only thing is going to bring down violent crime. And African Americans make up, what, 70% of the victims, 75% of the victims. It's talking victims now, not even perpetrators. The only thing that's going to bring that down is a return to traditional upbringing. discipline, morals,

and that has to be instilled in the home. That's the only solution. Last word. Well, Bill, I think there's no such thing as one only solution. I think there are many solutions.

What you cited is a solution, but it is not the only solution. I think we need to continue in this discussion. I think it's a great discussion. And we can have this discussion without using foul language at each other. and trying to demonize the other.

I listen to you, you listen to me. We ought to continue this discussion. I want to say one more thing, doctor. I wish I had met your father and mother. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for appearing. Okay, so there you have it.

Cultural change, cultural wars. I try to present the smartest people I can get.