The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: The Danger Of Making Race Everything

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

"When you say your racial identity is essential to who you are rather than incidental, then you've got the ingredients for tribal warfare." — Victor Davis Hanson  After decades of affirmative action, DEI programs, and identity politics, Americans are tired of seeing every issue through the lens of race. Racial preferences and identity-based politics have weakened social cohesion instead of strengthening it. A society built around shared values, assimilation, and equal treatment under the law is being replaced by a growing focus on group identity and grievance. 👉PEPPERDINE: Daily Signal listeners save 50–75% HTTPS://GO.PEPPERDINE.EDU/DAILYSIGNAL     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. America is going through a higher education transformation where students are realizing that what they want and need is a place that doesn't stifle their intellectual freedom. Standing out among the few graduate programs that value viewpoint diversity is Pepperdine's University School of Public Public Public Public. where I've taught the last two years. Their Masters of Public Policy is both applied and practical, preparing the next generation of leaders to participate in government agencies, the business sector, and think tanks.

Pursue your MPP at Pepperdine. Daily Signal listeners qualify for an automatic 50 to 75% tuition scholarship and can learn more at go.peperdine.edu slash daily signal. It's go.peperdine.edu slash daily signal. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. I think after 60 years of affirmative action and DEI and racial essentialism and racial fixation, especially in the United States, but also throughout the Western world in Europe, Australia, the former British Commonwealth, and let me just point out that our adversaries, China, Russia,

or other places in the globe don't have this racial. essentialism because they feel it is innate to human nature, and when you encourage it, you get something like Rwanda or what's going on now in Nigeria or something in the Balkans. The natural order of men and animals is birds of feather flock together. So why would you encourage that instead of having ecumenical assimilation, acculturation, and integration? So we're suffering from tribal fatigue in the Western world. We see it all of a sudden the straws are starting to break the camels back.

We saw the Belfast attempted beheading by an immigrant from Somalia. We saw Henry Norwalk bled to death why police watched him bleed and put handcuffs because his Sikh immigrant assailant lied and said that he was a victim of Henry's racism, which didn't happen. Here in the United States, we saw Arainia Zarutka, who was murdered on a subway. It was a very eerie video

to see her assailant kill her, and then five people who were also African American to walk right by her corpse, and then to him muttered something to the extent that he killed the white blank. We've seen, in addition to this,

this emphasis on white, white, white, white, white. It seems like every time that some of our politicians talk about it, they talk about white, white, white, white, always in a pejority of context, Jasmine Crockett can't finish a sentence without screaming and yelling. There's a whole internet phenomenon now of AI-generated people urinating on the grave of the victim of Carmelo Anthony. He has become a folk hero among the black community. it seems like, and his victim who was murdered is somehow the villain.

Then we see in the university this idea that we're going to have shift from affirmative action to DEI. What I mean by that, the old black-white binary would serve a larger purpose in saying, for the first time in our history, everybody who is non-white has some claim against, the majority because of their skin color. You can be an Indian aristocrat. Indians, as I keep saying, are the wealthiest ethnic group in the United States. You can be a Brazilian aristocrat. You can be anybody who has a claim, whether it's linguistic or religious or racial or ethnic,

that you're not part of the white establishment. And therefore, you expect, even if you're an immigrant, or especially if you're an immigrant, to come to the United States. But the problem with all this is the data doesn't support it. The data doesn't support it. If you look at crimes between non-white and white, depending on the type, whether it's assault or rape or murder or theft, it can be six to 10 to 20 to 30 to 50 times asymmetrical

with non-white committing the crime against white. And you know that's true because the pool of victimizers is not large enough for the pool of would-be victims. And so then you get some of these surreal Orwellian events like Juicy Smollett's suggesting that two imaginary MAGA people beat him up in the middle of the night. Or Michael Brown saying that the people around him said he was shot in the back when he raised his head. hands, hands up, don't shoot, complete lie, or the Duke La Crosse or Al Sharpton and Tijuana Brawley, they keep coming. And why do they keep coming? Because we're no longer a systemic racist country. We're not. And so people have learned that if you apply to the empathy of people and say that I am a victim, then you will get preference in admissions, hiring, retention, etc. And the problem with

This is twofold. Number one is class is completely divorced from race. And we are in a global environment. And as I said, we're in 60, 70 years post-Civil Rights. So we have on the one hand the victimizer class three generations away from Jim Crow in the south, not in the north, it never existed in the north. So what you're seeing is young people, middle-aged people, people in their 60s who have grown up only with racial preferences against them on the idea that they had privilege. But the white group, if you can even call it at, doesn't really rate at the top of income. Asian, very many Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Arab Americans, Indian Americans have higher incomes than white students.

And actual numbers, the greatest number of Americans on poverty assistance are white people, the people such as we saw in East Palestine, Ohio, that were pretty much neglected by the Biden administration when a toxic fume engulfed their community. So the pretenses of DEI and affirmative action was, if we say in the past there was to discrimination, and we want to repair that by giving you extra privileges or not using meritocracy or bringing in people from the so-called third world, then we can, we in the Western world who identify or are identified as white can seek atonement, and you will see that magnanimity as generosity to be reciprocated.

and then we will have an acculturated, integrated, and assimilated society. But human nature doesn't work like that way. Whether you're white or black or brown, it doesn't matter. Human nature means that if somebody gives you something a privilege and then removes deterrence from your behavior and says, if you do something, we're going to, wrong, we're going to calculate your childhood or the sins of society to exempt you from the full force of the law. And two things happen when people are confronted with that situation.

One, they naturally assume contempt, not gratitude for the people who are extending it. They think, wow, these people have no confidence in their civilization. They have no confidence in themselves. And that's one of the reasons that the word white is 90% used in a majority of context because people think these people must be guilty to have DEI or to give racial preferences or to have quotas or to always apologize. And two, when a person is given that preference, their own behavior is no longer scrutinized and they tend, as we all do, if you feel there are not going to be consequences to bad behavior, then you're going to engage in it

more likely than if there were consequences. So this great idea in the West that we were going to bring in millions of people. And by the way, we have 53 million people who weren't born the United States, 16% of the population. Those are both all-time highs. Some countries in Europe are even higher. The Republicans or the conservatives thought we're going to get inexpensive labor and then people will work their way up to the middle class. That happens a lot. But that's not necessarily of the rule when you bring in 10 million to 12 million in a mere four years, all from poor countries. And the left said nobody really agrees with our agenda, who would? You know, males in female sports, open borders, illegal 10,000 illegal immigrants a day,

get rid of the fossil fuel industry, et cetera. Nobody wants that, so they thought they could bring in constituencies and their counterpart in Europe thought the same thing. Where are we now? We're in tribal fatigue. Everybody has come to the point, and I think they're at the point. When you say your racial identity, no matter if you're white or black or brown or whatever, is essential to who you are rather than superficial or incidental, then you've got the ingredients for a tribal warfare. And unfortunately, the history of mankind is often the history of tribes killing each other. And let's hope that we stop it in time in the United States because tensions are rising and people are very tired of tribalism, a pre-civilizational concept.

Thank you very much, Victor Davis-Hansson, the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.