From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Victor Davis Hanson: "The Left Controls All Forms of Indoctrination"

Episode Date: October 30, 2021

This week, Sean & Rachel bring author Victor Davis Hanson to The Kitchen Table to discuss his latest book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America.    Victor explains why he believes America has been in decline and how the decline of the middle class has affected everything from the economy, the Afghanistan withdrawal, the border crisis, and the debate on Critical Race Theory curriculum. Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Mejuri. From November 25th to December 2nd, get 25% off everything on orders over $150 in Mejuri's biggest sale ever. From bold hoops to minimalist stacks, Mejuri has something for everyone. Mejuri makes handcrafted fine jewelry for every day made with responsibly sourced materials.

So you can look and feel good about gifting and wearing them. Shop your wishlist 25% off at Mijeri.com today. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I am your host, Sean Duffy, along with my co-host and partner in life, Rachel Campos-Duffy. Thank you, Sean. Hello everyone. We're back with more conversations from our kitchen table. And today, we actually have a really special guest. He might be the smartest guest we've ever had, Sean. That's thanks. I think we just had Vivek Ramaswamy. So here we are. He's the author of The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying

the Idea of America. Please welcome to the kitchen table, Victor. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. So as well as Victor Davis Hanson, let me just make one comment. We've done this podcast for months now, and I've never seen Rachel prepare more for one podcast when she was nervous about having you on because we both respect the intellectual giant that you are. And again, we're honored to have you here. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Okay. So let's just start with why you wrote this book, The Dying Citizen. And maybe you want to start by just telling us, because I know you're such an observer of not just politics, but what's happening in the academy and culture. Tell me

how long this traditional notion of citizenry has been in decline that you've been able to observe. Oh, I think it's been in decline for maybe 30 years, but it's accelerating. It's not declining at an arithmetic rate, but a geometric. And as I said in the book, there's a lot of contributing factors to that, whether it's globalization or this diminishment of physical or muscular labor, the tech revolution, and immigration that did not emphasize legality or assimilation, integration, intermarriage, but was more haphazard, often in the majority of cases illegal, and then the salad bowl replacing the melting pot. So there was a lot of contributions. I kind of look at it as these were IEDs in the American

pathway or trajectory, and then that terrible year of 2020, maybe into 2021 where the ignition devices that let these things off so maybe we could have withstood i don't know maybe we could have had the self-induced recession of 2020 or maybe the quarantine or maybe the covid and the damage it did to the country or the George Floyd riots, 120 days, or the 102, first time in history we've had 102 mail-in ballots and the acrimony over that and then the Trump controversy and then going. But all of those together were force multiplier and they brought out to the surface these longstanding challenges to American democracy. And I think today, whether we look at Afghanistan

or we look at the open border or we look at critical race theory or the economy or the destruction of what was once a self-sufficient nation in oil and gas, it reflects these deep-seated problems that I discussed. Yeah, and I look at that, and you talked about the melting pot, that people come

to America and they adopt the American idea. They assimilate. They assimilate. That's right. And it seems like now, instead of celebrating assimilation, now there's a celebration of diversity of tribes and clubs. And we focus on what separates us as this history of America, which was always a focus on what unites us. How did that, I don't know if you studied this, but how did that happen? How do we, how do we let this transformation take place that we don't celebrate Americanism and we celebrate everything but that? Like what makes us different versus what unites us. Yeah, I think there were two contributing causes to that. And one was Ted Kennedy got passed in the early 60s, a change in the immigration law that was no longer going to be diverse or have meritocratic requirements and soon was going to be illegal. And the net result is that we have about 45 million

people who were not born in the United States, which can be very good if they came legally, and some did. 26% of California's population was not born in the United States. So that represented a great challenge. But that coincided with a loss of confidence in American custom, tradition, values by our elite. So when we let people come in, even illegally, we didn't say to them, you made the choice, not us. You left Oaxaca. You left Honduras. You left South Vietnam. You left Haiti. And we're here to fulfill your dreams of becoming an American. Instead, we said, we're toxic, we're misogynist, we're racist, we're protectionist, we're nativist, sexist, and we're xenophobic. And then the illegal immigrant

or the legal immigrant, either one said, oh my God, okay, if this is what it takes, and they found that it was in their economic, social, cultural benefit to be separate, and they did not assimilate as quickly. The forces of popular culture will assimilate people if immigration is legal and measured, but not when it's not measured and it's not diverse either. The second thing was, I think this is really important. We were dealing with a historic stain of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutionalized racism. And we've lost 700,000 Americans in the Civil War. We had the big fight over Reconstruction. And we had got to the point just two or three years ago where we also, you know, we had the lowest minority unemployment rate in history, about 4.5

for Latinos, about 5.5 for African-Americans. We were coming to the point where race was becoming incidental, not essential to who we all were. I agree with that. Barack Obama, though, did something that had a lot of dangers to it. He created this word, it was there, but he re-emphasized diversity. And that old binary between the African-American population and the non-African-American population, we were working on with all of these programs, but he redefined it. He said, no, no, the problem is not African-Americans and so-called whites. The problem is everybody who's not white is an oppressed, is oppressed. It's a victimizer. And what that did is that redefined the victim class from 12 or 11 to 12% to 30%. And then it said, class doesn't matter because race is

immutable. It's always going to stain a person. It's always going to hold them back. So we created this, I don't know what you'd call it, Orwellian Alice in Wonderland, where we have this billionaire LeBron talking as if he's a victim. Yeah, Oprah does too, and so does Michelle Obama. But how did Obama do that? Yeah, so does Meghan Markle.

Yeah, I mean, everybody does. And the Obamas venture out of their $25 million market in their state and talk about the oppression. Well, how they did it was they said it doesn't matter that you're wealthy because there had been so much upward mobility that the old Marxist paradigm that America's got a bunch of capitalist oppressors, they'd never worked here because the lower middle could become the middle middle, could be the upper middle, could be very wealthy. And we started to see that in ethnic terms, there were 16 ethnic groups above so-called whites, Punjabi Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans,

that made more money per capita than whites. And that was good. Everybody accepted that. So there was no absolute, you know, regression because you were of a different color or a different race other than white. But Obama came and said, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much money you have, you still have claims against the majority population. And that caught on. And then we've added now, you know, it was diversity equity, which we redefined as equality of result, meaning even if you have a quality of opportunity and that does not ensure equality, then somebody's culpable. We don't have

to prove who is, it's disparate impact with, you know with some major exceptions. If you're in the NBA, we don't apply that. If you're in the NFL, we don't apply that. If you're in the U.S. Postal Service, we don't apply. We only pick and choose which fields we consider are systemically racism. And so what's happened, another thing that's happened is when you look at per capita income of particular groups, which group has not progressed as quickly as other groups. It's white males without high school, without college educations. And yet they are the oppressor.

So we're in this, again, this fantasy world where a forklift driver in Bakersfield is somewhat the oppressor of Meghan Markle and Oprah because he happens to be of the white working class. And I think that's- Or a farmer in Wisconsin with a hundred dairy cows. Yes. Is oppressing LeBron James. And nobody talks about that.

Nobody talks about it. We have this vocabulary of disparagement, deplorable, irredeemable, clingers, dregs, chumps that Biden and Obama and the Clintons have used. And I think it's causing a lot of anger. And they don't know what they have awakened. I think they really, when you diminish and you attack people of the lower middle class, and you claim that they are privileged by their skin color, and that's not a tenable proposition. It's not. And they look at that and see the insanity of it. They put their boots on every day and they work really hard and they want to raise their

kids. They want to earn an honest dollar. They want to go to church, maybe drink a beer in Wisconsin, watch the Packers. And they love their neighbors no matter who their neighbors are. They're good people. But I think what's interesting here, and you touch on this in your book, is the peasant class. And you mentioned this because under Donald Trump and the idea of free enterprise, the

more freedom you have, the more everybody was lifted up. And we had very low unemployment rates for everybody. Wages were rising. Things were going great because of the policies that Trump implemented, which were the traditional American policy that gave us a wide, vibrant middle class. Inequality was diminishing. It was diminished. We had basically no inflation and we had the cheapest in real dollars energy cost in 50 years. Exactly. And so this idea, though, that if you have the peasant class,

the idea that people aren't financially autonomous, that they can't take care of themselves in a vibrant economy, they have to look to the government to support them, then you lose this idea of being a participant in America. Would you talk about that a little bit? I thought that resonated with me. I was in Congress for nine years, and you talk about that a little bit? I thought that resonated with me. And like, I was in Congress for nine years and the voters that I had really, I think that really would strike a chord with them. Well, I tried to point out

that you could look at the problem historically, or you could look at what people in the past in an abstract Aristotle, Plato, or more recently, Tocqueville said about it. And what they both show us, whether you examine historical data or you look at philosophical observation, is that the middle class, if it's autonomous and it's self-reliant, it's the only class that combines muscular labor with intellectual activity.

The classical critique is the poor are so poor they're just physical, and the intellectuals become a feat. And so the middle class has this broad-based capability across the spectrum of physicality and intellectual work. But more importantly, they're a check on the very wealthy, and they don't trust the very wealthy and they're a bulwark because of their numbers and aggregately they have more capital than the few that have a lot of money that's no longer true the very few have more capital now than the middle class and then they're not subsidized and so they don't depend either on the largest of a growing government as a dependent or do they don't make concessions to the wealthy in

exchange for some kind of subsidy? Because they don't need the wealthy, right? They don't need, they don't need the wealthy. And when you destroy that class, and you can look at all these, as I mentioned in the book, you can look at a 1.7 trillion in student debt. You can look at the age when people marry, the percentage of people who are getting married, the percentage of people having children, what age they're having children, what age they're buying a house, what percentage of people are buying a house, they're all negative. And I think that explains a political creature like AOC. So people make the necessary adjustments. So people make the necessary adjustments. Then this new generation says, I don't want to have children, or women should have sterilization,

or why bring in kids that pollute the planet, or there's this type of lifestyle, or this type of gender. And I think all of that is just, they don't want to admit that, but that is kind of a psychological projection of the fact that they're not viable. And we have a lot of people who are turning into the economy that have BAs that didn't get educated. They were politicized in college, and they owe a lot of money, and they can't buy a house, and they can't afford children, and they're angry. And that hurts the middle class. And then when half the people die with a net worth of less than $10,000, you lose the chief ingredient that the Athenians or the Romans or the people in Florentine, Italy, or in Venice, the Venetian Republic said was important. And that was a middle class. And

that's what our founders said. We have to have a yeoman class in the pre-industrial world. We've lost that. And that's why I call it the world. The dying citizen, it could be also the dying middle class, which is right in line with that. I want to move on to something else, but just a little tidbit on that. One, we have a daughter who's 22. She just got engaged. She's sort of breaking that cycle. She's also a student at the University of Chicago. And I want to talk to you a little bit later on in this podcast because one of the things I want to tap into with you is I want you to give parents like us advice. We've been very unimpressed, by the way, with University of Chicago.

We have nine children, Victor, and we've decided we're not going to make that name brand mistake again. And we've become better consumers of education. I want to talk to you a little bit later about that in the program. But before we go, we had a couple to pivot on what we were talking about before this sort of dying citizenship, our country in decline. We had a couple of Venezuelans on our podcast a few weeks back. It was a fascinating discussion. And we wanted to talk to them about what they saw in Venezuela that maybe parallels what's happening here in America, because both of them are living in America right now, and had seen the decline in Venezuela. And

they had lots of different anecdotes that were alarming to us. But one of the most interesting things that they told us was that the most telling sign that their democracy was in trouble was when the justice system got corrupted, when the party in power changes the definition of justice to punish their opponents. Of course, we can think about Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton getting away with things that you or I could never get away with or any other Trump supporter or Republican, but also the different treatment that the protesters on January 6th received from BLM and Antifa. I wondered if you might comment on that. Well, I discussed that in the epilogue because that took place as the book was in copyediting, but I did have a long epilogue. And the problem with the January 6th, everybody deplores the idea of anybody, of any political persuasion going in the Capitol and causing a riot. So everybody condemned it. But that was not what we were told that happened. We were told it was an armed insurrection aimed at having a coup. My criticism was, if that were true, where are the people charged with racketeering,

crossing state lines to commit an insurrection? Nobody's been charged with that. Number two, if they were armed, I don't think anybody inside the actual Capitol was ever arrested with a firearm. And the people outside the periphery never used it. They might have found them in their car. I think there were three people. One was a law enforcement. So it was not an armed and it was not an insurrection. And then when they said this fatal day and people killed, we learned much later that of the five people who died, four were Trump supporters.

And only one died violently at the hand of the other. One was trampled apparently or had a seizure. But the person who died at the hand of the other was an unarmed military veteran, 105 pound female who was shot in the neck by an officer. And usually that name is released, as we know happens all the time. The government never released it until the person came forward himself. Much, much later. But the point I'm making, she was an unarmed person. She wasn't even in police custody.

He just shot her. She had no weapons. person. She wasn't even in police custody. He just shot her. She had no weapons. And she was committing either a class four felony or a misdemeanor of breaking a window and coming in unauthorized. I think people have been charged mostly with unauthorized entry or parading. And then we had Officer Sicknick. The left made him in. It was a tragic death, but they made him into this victim of these Trump trolls or something. And yet we found out, well, he didn't die of a concussion or brain injury due to a fire extinguisher. Or bear spray.

And then we didn't hear, he didn't have allergic reaction to bear spray. He had a stroke or some type of seizure was an endemic, I mean, an intrinsic problem he had had. So everything about that was untrue. And then when you see these people are still not being tried and you compare it with 120 days of rioting, arson, looting, one and a half billion dollars in damage, 28 people, 28 people killed, over 1,400 officers injured. And 14,000 people arrested, most of whom were released. You ask what's going on, and what's going on is we've got a lot of unelected people in the federal government. That's what I call that chapter, the unelected. We call them the deep state, the administrative state.

But just think about Merrick Garland that represents that asymmetry. He's not worried about this at all. He's worried about sicking the FBI and a bunch of parents. And then if you go back in history, the last two years, we had the Robert Mueller, we've had James Clapper, we've had John Brennan, we've had Anthony Fauci, we've had General Milley. And what do they all have in common? They've lied under oath. Fauci has lied under oath about gain of function. Brennan lied under oath about tapping into Senate computers. Clapper lied under oath about suggesting the NSA didn't look at people. Andrew McCabe lied under oath.

Robert Mueller lied under oath when he said that he knew nothing about Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier, which were the twin pillars of his investigation. And so we've lost, as citizens, we've lost the ability to hold these, I guess you'd call them judge-jury executioners, but these unelected, very powerful figures that adjudicate our national security, our justice system, our investigative and intelligence and medical communities. And they're kind of legislative, judicial and executive branches all in one person. And I don't think the founders ever dreamed that they would have that much power.

We'll have more of this conversation after this. This episode is brought to you by Mejuri. From November 25th to December 2nd, get 25% off everything on orders over $150 in Mejuri's biggest sale ever. From bold hoops to minimalist stacks, Mejuri has something for everyone. Mejuri makes handcrafted fine jewelry for every day made with responsibly sourced materials, so you can look and feel good about gifting and wearing them. Shop your wishlist 25% off at Mijeri.com today. So I saw that in my nine years in Congress, Victor,

and as we would try to do oversight with the Obama administration, oftentimes our requests for documents, I did oversight for the Financial Services Committee. Our requests would not be honored. They would just stall or blow us off. And the one thing that I see that is critical for democracy is a press that is fair and unbiased and calls out a government. the Trump administration or the Bush administration was holding people in solitary confinement after January 6th, and there was not an equity in the way people were treated in the country, the press would be losing their minds over that. But here they say nothing.

At worst, they're apologists. Or the lies that you mentioned would be called out. And we used to have a press that would do that. And that raises or heightens the attention of the American people on bad government. But now that you have a press and a media that's in one camp or the other, they cover up or celebrate their side. And I think it's problematic. side. And I think it's problematic. And unless you get the press to pay attention to bad government or to the deep state, you can't get traction. You can't get the information out. And then if you get censored on big tech, it's even harder to get the message out. And so if the left controls the information flow, I know I get mad at Republicans too. It's like, why don't they

do more? Why don't they, we want them to say more and do more, but they don't have avenues and pathways to deliver that message to the American people. Yeah. I think what's happened, I think innately conservatives or even Republicans, they care about their families or communities or church, their traditions, their jobs. And over the last 50 years, insidiously, incrementally, the left has taken control of Silicon Valley, or they never relinquished it. It's a monopoly now. Google has 90% of the searches, Facebook about 65% of the world's social media, Twitter about 90% of the Twitter industry. They've taken control of K through 12, the universities, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, entertainment, Hollywood, professional sports.

And so even though there's not only probably 30% of the country that identifies as progressive, they control the indoctrination of people. control how they look at entertainment they control the media so when you get up in the morning and you say i want to read the newspaper i want to watch a network news morning news i want to go look at an nba maybe i'll catch a movie tonight i want to go look at mainstream programming and one of the standard you know know, CBS, NBC, whatever it is, they control it. And they're not Democrats. They're hardcore neo-socialist, I guess you could say, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, but they believe that they're so morally superior that any means necessary to achieve their aims are justified. And so nobody said, I'm sorry.

Robert Mueller never had any evidence. There was no Russian collusion. Or no one has ever said, I'm sorry, I'm James Comey. The FBI has no business trying to subvert a particular political campaign. Or John Brennan said the CIA should have no business interacting with intelligence operatives to hurt a campaign. Nobody said that. And Anthony Fauci would never say, just to give you an example, he'll never say, I'm sorry, gain of function is in a cost-benefit analysis, a dangerous method. That's why it was banned in the United States. I understood that. I went around it. I gave money to Echo Health and I channeled it into the, that was a mistake. I'm sorry. Because,

and this is my wordy explanation, they know that the media and the left sees them as ideological warriors and will always make the necessary adjustments to contextualize what they do that's very dangerous we don't have a even the media you think the media would be embarrassed there's once in a while it is worst when that's getting frequent joe biden embarrasses them because they say you know what we can't say he's dynamic anymore he sprinted up those steps or he was glib or he was clever or he had one liner because they know it's a complete farce. Yeah. And they created him.

I mean, they shielded him. They sure did. They allowed him to sit in a basement. I want to switch to something else really quick, Victor. I want to talk about Hunter Biden because you have this really fascinating theory about it. I've been trying to promote it because I find it interesting. theory about it. I've been trying to promote it because I find it interesting. You believe that his very public and embarrassing scandals, the hookers, the crackpipes, the art gallery, crazy stuff. By the way, my co-host Pete just for my birthday gave me one of those Hunter Biden

prints, which was kind of funny. But in any case, you believe that these scandals and these embarrassing moments are intentional. You think that he's trolling his dad, Joe Biden. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah, I say that for two reasons. So given all of the Ukraine mess and Burisma and given all of the intention that was focused on him with his China connect, he still owns apparently a 10% stake in a communist party affiliated financial organization. You would have thought that team Biden would have got him sort of in the way that they used to do. I don't know if you remember Billy Carter or Donald Nixon or, you know, Roger Clinton,

the brother that's problematic or the son or something. And they must have done that. But they were completely impotent because, my God, he's now hawking these paint by numbers pictures and we know who's buying them. We know why they're buying them. They can't stop. And so I thought this he's getting emboldened and rather than getting more circumspect. So how did this happen? So I started going back on the, you know, you can look at some of the internet communications. And if you look at it, you wanted to characterize them or thematize them.

He's angry. He says, you know, one of the relatives asked him for help. He said, you know, I've been carrying this family and I get all the bad rap. And then he refutes to his dad as the big guy, Mr. 10%. And somebody has been doing very well. And he's got an account that we share. And the totality of that communication, the fact that he lost three laptops, it suggests that he's either deliberately trying to be so reckless to gain attention and say, you know what? Joe Biden, my dad, would not have had three homes on a salary of a vice president or senator.

Just can't want some respect. Maybe there's some a little bit of competition between Beau Biden, who's been very honored. Right. And he was a bad seed. And then the other hangers on the uncle and the cousin. And when he talks about all these people and you think, well, he's saying basically this whole Biden plan is now living as if they're multimillionaires, which they are. And I'm the one that did all the dirty work. And yet it's the bad hunter and hunters are drunk and hunters are cokehead and hunters are womanizer. a drunk and Hunter's a cokehead and Connor's a womanizer. But you know what? You don't talk about, you don't talk like that to me when you want money, when Mr. 10% wants us. And so that's,

I think he's deliberately, he's out of control. And I think they're very scared because I don't think anybody either in the administration or the Biden family has any influence over him at all now. Which is shocking because as Rachel sometimes will point out, there's a concern that if there's been these deals with China and Joe needs to cover up for Hunter, Joe's potentially compromised with China. But I don't want,

that's going to be a rabbit hole because I want to get you on education. I'm going to switch. I'm not going to, Rachel's- We're obsessed with you because of the education part. So as Rachel mentioned before, our daughter goes to the University of Chicago. And I got to tell you, I had always told her I wish I had gone there and studied economics. They would have never let me in, Victor. But I mean, it's a great school. And what we've learned

is with a very high tuition bill that they've taught her how to work. She's made to work really hard, a lot of reading, a lot of writing. But when we start to see the things that she is required to read, it's all garbage. I mean, she's not getting the classics and Western civilization. And it is garbage women's studies, you know, BLM. Meanwhile, we took, so we had that experience and now we have another child who's now a senior. So we had another one go to a state school that we weren't very happy with. Now we have a senior and I took her to the University of Dallas and I was so impressed with the curriculum. And it was, you know, everybody, math majors, engineers, English majors, everyone had to read the same stuff, you know, Homer and Shakespeare.

The 1960s education. No, it's a wonderful school. Yeah, it's solid. And so I guess what I wish I had known all this. We're better consumers. We're better consumers of education. Learn about the Socratic method and how they should do it. Because by the way, Sean and I did not get that kind of education and wish we had.

So I guess my question to you is. We're both going to ask you a question here. Rachel, go first. No, no, no. I want you to, you know, what advice would you give to parents who are right now in the in the market right now searching for a good college? What do they need to look for and how do they not get so distracted by those name brands? All right. You can answer that, Victor, and I'll ask my education question after. Okay, go ahead. Very quick. I had three children, and that came up all the time.

And higher education is lost, and it's corrupt in the sense that, say, University of Chicago or Stanford or Harvard, they have these multibillion-dollar endowments. They don't pay taxes on the endowment income. They have the federal government increase the moral hazard by guaranteeing these students will pay the university, which raises the cost of tuition above the rate of inflation, blah, blah, blah. And they're politicized. And there's only 24 hours in the day. So when you start to add diversity, equity, inclusion, and anything with a dash followed by studies, ethnic studies, women's studies, black studies, leisure studies, peace studies, environmental, it's not, it's a therapeutic, it's a deductive class. We're going

to teach you how to get to this preconceived results, not inductive. Okay. So when you borrow all that money and you put your student, you're're not going to get a well-educated person. You're going to get a lot of bitterness because the money was wasted. And that's not even talking about the cultural and social milieu that you put your child in, where all of their contacts are going to be avatars of this progressive movement on campus. So there's only about eight or nine atolls on that sea of misery. And, you know, there's University of Dallas or St. Thomas Aquinas College, a small college in California. It's very good. Sometimes you can argue that depending on the faculty, you can find good

places at St. John, but the best remains Hillsdaledale. And so Hillsdale College now is, it's oversubscribed. It's got more students than ever has. It's got a billion dollars. It's booming, but it's in, you know, Hillsdale, Michigan. And so it's hard to get to. Its facilities are bursting at the seams and they're trying to add new campuses. But that model, I think, is going to, and I think I can think of five new colleges that people are starting to do that. That's one thing.

So there are alternatives, but right now the demand is such because most, half the country are parents like yourselves. The other half is I think a lot of people are saying to themselves, given online resources and given the shortage of skilled technicians, a lot of parents are stressing, well, I'm not going to force my child to go, but I am forcing my child to master something. I want the child to be the best she can be in something. If it's electrician, she doesn't have to be an electrical engineer. She can be the best electrician there is. Or a welder or whatever. Yes. And I think what's happened, because we've so shorted those muscular jobs that they pave. And I just talked to a professor and he came by my house and I had a master plumber going under my 140. And he said to me,

what do you think that guy makes? I said, he makes a lot more than you do. And he's a lot more skilled than both of us. It's kind of like an art, you know, it's a labyrinth of pipes under an old house. But so I think we've really deprecated, you know, we have this bi-coastal culture that, wow, we have skills that we got very rich because we're media people or we're lawyers or techies or investors or bankers. And then we have a 7 billion market, but we forgot that we all have to eat. We all have to have, you know, flooring. We have to have a shingle. Electricity. Electricity. And that, that sector is very important. So I always tell parents, I have so many people that I've had,

friends of the family, or even in my own family that got their degrees, but they didn't go into academia or a profession or teaching. And so I think it's important to pursue the mind, and they can do that either in college or online, but I'm not convinced anymore. And I'm trying to be very careful because I don't want to advise people not to get a BA because statistically we know that in the long run that enhances income for most people if they're not indebted. But there's something very wrong and pathological about the university. And it's a force for, it's not a positive force anymore. It's a force for deductive separatism, dissension, anger, racism.

Marxism. Yeah. And I'm sitting here at Stanford University. I have to speak here in a few minutes. Let me, so you're going to go in a second. So I want to get out, if I can get one more question for you. I mean, in your book, I mean, you give us some glimmer of hope that we can save it. Yes. The idea of America can be saved. And I'm a citizen. Yes. But here's my concern, and I want you to tell me why I'm wrong and what is the path forward.

Dr. Sean is very pessimistic about America these days. I'm just giving you a warning. No, but what's happening? So I look at this indoctrination of our children. It happens, and we see it now with CRT in middle school, elementary school, high school. We knew it was happening in colleges, but that's not all, Victor. We have kids of middle school, high school, college age, and these social media apps are all leftist socialists. I know. I know all this leftist garbage.

I know. They have a new liturgical calendar, Victor. It's like, you know, I know it. I know. I spend an hour. I spend an hour every day answering email from all over the country.

And they're angrier than you are. I just spoke last night in all places of Bakersfield, California to 500 farmers. And all they talked about were the destruction of their public schools, the indoctrination of their kids in kindergarten, this gender, that gender.

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And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Victor, isn't the way to save it, though? I mean, if you don't teach your history and the full history, but how great this country is, the ideas of our founders set millions and millions of people free over the last 250 years from the ideas of self-governance and free enterprise. If we don't talk about civics and how our government works. Let me give you, let me end with some. Yeah. Let me end with some optimism.

That's what I want from you. Yeah. So the concern. He's about to leave. Every, every, every poll that we look at of these agendas right now, whether it's transgendered restrooms, open borders, critical race theory, Afghanistan, new monetary, there's no support. It's less than 50%. And Joe Biden, who was old

Joe Biden from Scranton, who sort of, we packaged this farce that he was a moderate, and he kind of kept those issues going, and now he's below and they're imploding. And so it shows you that innately the American people can be fooled. So first of all, I think we're going to have a massive correction along 1938, 1994, 2010 in the House and Senate. And that speaks very well of the American people given the propaganda that they're inundated with. Number two, we're starting to see a lot of grassroots pushback. We see Mexican-American communities along the border in Texas that are doctrinary Democrats. They're electing Republicans and conservatives and say, we don't want this open border. Well, I live in the San Joaquin Valley in a community of 90%

Hispanics. About 50% of Mexican-American males voted to recall Gavin Newsom. They voted more than white males did. And so you're starting to see some of these immigrant communities and saying, we didn't want this. That's not why we came to America. So that's a good, you're starting to see people on the left, Larry Summers of all people, a left wing, this, you know, he says, this economic idea will not work. You're going to destroy the economy if you keep printing money. Barack Obama, of all people, said the border is not sustainable. He said that.

And then you look at people like Bill Maher or Dave Chappelle. These are hardcore people of the left. And they've concluded that if you feed this dragon, it's going to consume even the people who feed it. This is not progressivism. This is Marxism. This is Jacobinsen, right out of the French Revolution. And so I think they've awakened a sleeping dragon to the point now where millions of Americans are, if I could sum up from what I hear and where I go places, they're saying to the left, call me a racist. It has zero effect on me.

I think Donald Trump helped us all get thicker skin on that one. He did. We don't care what you call. We're going to speak out and we're going to speak out. And I think we're going to have a tsunami of reaction because a lot of people came to the conclusion, if you don't, then your pessimism, Sean, is justified because they're going to take over the country. We don't have a choice. So everybody's backs are against the wall and they're angry. And I think they're going to express that anger in a manifest number of ways. And you start to see it. I gave a talk to these farmers, and then they got up and clapped. And a lot of people started saying, you know, this,

let's go, Brandon. Our battle cry of the Republic, right? Yeah. What did that have to do with my, you know, I mean, they were all fired up. And then I have people in my family. I have a soccer mom daughter, who's a wonderful mom with three children, one special needs daughter. She's the most tolerant, independent people. And she just says to me, we went to the park. There were needles in the Santa Cruz, California park. Dad, they're homeless people. They let a fire.

The smoke is coming toward our house. Dad, we went down the mall. There's feces on the mall. is coming toward our house. Dad, we went down the mall. There's feces on the mall. Dad, these teachers in the union will not teach their special needs classes. My granddaughter, she says, my daughter has regressed back five years. They will not do it. They're making them wear masks. They're all vaccinated. She went from being indifferent to politics to Attila the Hun. I think that's happening with a lot of great... My sister is an independent, and she said that this last year turned her into Archie Bunker.

It does. I think a lot of very moderate apolitical people have been told, and a lot of Democrats, a lot of Democrats who went along with old Joe Biden from Scranton, they're saying, you know what? This is the vision of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and the squad. And those are the moderates compared to Antifa and BLM. They're nihilists. They want to destroy everything that our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents gave us. They want to wipe out the date 1776. They want to tear down statues, names.

They're anarchists, and we're not going to let them take over the country. And if we do let them take over the country, then we deserve what we get. And that's the attitude. And I think they have no idea how angry they've woken up people. I think they're going to get a message. And let's hope- Maybe in Virginia this Tuesday, they'll let us know. We'll see the first opening round of that on if mccullough wins that election i have a feeling that both of uh joe biden's financial you mean if you mean if if yunkin wins yes i mean if mccullough loses excuse me okay then i think that all of those congress people maybe a hundred of them in ambiguous

districts are not going to get behind this big multi-trillion dollar series of bills i just don't think they'll do it it'll be suicide to do it hey victor you're gonna get me to start chanting let's go brandon on this podcast well i won't know i i have to go but i want to leave on a upbeat note we appreciate so you lay this up more in in it's called the dying citizen it It's a New York times bestseller, the dying citizen, how progressive elites tribalism globalism are destroying the idea of America. I think this book is so important right now. And it's available, you know, on day two,

it went up to three on Amazon and then suddenly mysteriously with no explanation, Amazon froze it and said, out of stock. And they had 30,000 copies. So where should people get your book? Well, it just, for some reason, after all of the meat and everything, they waited till two weeks. And then five days ago, they put it back on for sale. So go get it now, everybody. Yeah.

Well, we appreciate you joining us. It's been a super enlightening conversation. Good luck with your speech. And thanks for joining us around the kitchen table this week. Thank you. All right. Both of you. Likewise.

Bye. Well, that was a great conversation, Sean. So smart. Do you feel dumb after that conversation? Do you feel dumber or smarter after talking to Victor Davis Hanson? Well, I feel smarter, but I recognize how dumb I am. That's the perfect way to say it. When we have a mom, because listen, he is a mental giant. And I just want to make one comment. I do

think there is hope for America and people are angry. And I know Democrats who aren't socialists, but they are ready to push back because they're traditional Democrats. And what the Democrat party is doing today is not in line with that traditional value. What, what frightens me is where are these young kids going to be as they start coming into voting age and in corporate boards. And they're already indoctrinated. We're going to have to do a lot of undoing and rejiggering of what they, you know, what their ideas are. I will say this, a lot of the grassroots work that was done in 2010, Sean, when people were really worried about Obama. So, you know, that a lot of that was, you know, the Koch network and AFP were part of that. The grassroots stuff that you and I are seeing now on the ground in Wisconsin is funded by no one.

It is very interesting to me the way it's happening. There's no- Can I make an analogy for you? Yeah. So what happens in politics is traditionally, your campaign is funded by some PACs or people who are wealthier. That's how in your community or in your state to help you run. And they hire leaders to help organize and that's good stuff. And it's important that you get small dollar contributions as well. Everyone is important because you need money to run races, right? It's important. That was what the past was. What's happening today is campaigns are being funded by five and $10 contributions across

America. So no one is even asking the big dollar folks. They're irrelevant. It's a complete shift. And what's happening also at the grassroots level is the same thing. Again, you have the George Soros guys on the left who are still organizing and funding. On the right, you don't have those huge funding mechanisms. It's happening organically where people are coming together, whether it's coming together whether it's for going to the school boards and they're connecting with each other through facebook pages maybe over being angry about mass mandates or vaccine mandates and there's just this different thing happening on the right that i don't think i've ever seen before you know victor is is right to point that out and so it gives me some hope. I appreciated what he had to say about

universities. I think that the other piece of the puzzle is the education. I wanted to talk to him about the elementary and high school levels. I'm so encouraged, Sean, by the parents that I see fighting back at these school boards. And yet, I don't think the changes, the fundamental changes are going to happen in time to help those kids. And so I know for us, we opted out of, of bad schools and we're doing something different. I'm happy there are people fighting, but I want to save my kids. And so I don't want us to go too far down that rabbit hole. I know, but we'll have another show on that. One of the issues is that even if you get CRT out of, you know, the, the school board or the curriculum, the teachers who are coming in have been steeped in this ideology from the teachers' colleges. And even though it's not official, they still feed the kids this toxic ideology.

Of hate America. It's going to take time to- Undo that. To cleanse. I think the last point I would bring up, Sean, is to not losing hope. So I recommend everybody get Victor Davis Hanson's book because I think understanding the roots of this is important to understanding the solutions. But on the most basic level, it's about family. It is.

And if you can make a difference with your kids, if you just say, not my kid, they are not going to take my kid or my grandkids. I think grandparents underestimate their influence and power over their children. So that is where it starts at the most basic level. And by the way, that's what America always was about. It was about the family. It was the most important unit in our society. And it really still is today. And I love your line. It's I'm not going to co parent with the government. Yeah, stop co parenting with the government. All right. All right. So again, great conversation. I really enjoyed having him around our kitchen table to do that again. One day, we have to just get maybe a little smarter, Sean, we'll have him back. All right.

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