TRIGGERnometry - Is America a Racist Country? - Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Date: July 18, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson is an American conservative commentator, classicist the author of several books including “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won” Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They're very judgmental, and they've decided that this is a racist country. 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. They just are culturally, if they see an African American professor, they're okay with him if he's in a certain income bracket. He has a certain patois. If they say a poor black person or middle class, they just avoid them. And they feel terrible about it. 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. His racism is the problem in America.

He has nothing. His kids can't get affirmative action. Nobody's been a colleague in his entire life. But he's the problem. No, the problem is white, wealthy liberals who will not integrate, tutor, assimilate people. There are the other, or won't adopt policies that make it possible to do so, because they're never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry.

I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you, if you want, honest conversations with fascinating people. A fascinating person we have for you today. He's an American historian, commentator, and author, including of his upcoming book, the dying citizen, Professor Victor Davis-Hansom, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure to have you on.

And one of the reasons we're especially keen to speak with you is, you know, 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. But we're always so happy to have historians on the show because we think that you offer a broader perspective that's often very instructive as to the time that we're in at the moment. So let me get straight into it. What is the best historical parallel for the moment that we're living through over the last five years in the West, particularly in the Anglo-Sphere?

There's a lot of ancient and modern and even contemporary parallels. The Eucydides, the historian Thucydides, recounts a moment of madness that took place on the island of Corsaira in 427 BC. It's called the Stasis at Corsaira. It's modern Corfu when political differences morphed into tribal differences, to ideological differences, to class differences, and people started really resorting to violence. They changed a language, and people who were moderate or circumspect or calling for calm were the first to be killed. We had the same thing in periods of 19, like I was 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 Dantan, even St. Jus.

All of these people were done away with as the revolution took on a life with its own. They renamed the days of the month, the founding date of France, months of the year, months of the year, etc. Religion, they worshipped a new god, they toppled statues, they went after religious institutions, clerics, nuns. In our country, during the McCarthy period, because of the sudden defection of our so-called ally, it was never a defection, but we were very naive about the Soviet Union during the wartime alliance. Suddenly, we found out it was a monstrous country, and it had absorbed all of Eastern Europe in violation of its oath, and then it had spawned communist China and the loss of China. Who lost?

China. In that furor that began with the Cold War, there were people in the State Department who had very naively green-lighted a lot of the Soviet influence, and there became sort of a witch hunt. Which hunt's not the right word, because there were not witches and say them, but there were communists in our State Department, but not to the degree that the hysteria suggested. And finally, you know, I can remember of a little boy out in a rural, out here where I am today in the same house, getting something in the main. and it was all in pink. And it said, did you know your local assemblyman as a communist and what are you going to

do about it? So there was a hysteria that gripped that and then that ended. So we have the democratic societies, Tocqueville, Democracy in America, if you remember, he warned about that and why a constitution republic was essential. And political scientists from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Tocqueville have warned us that in a democratic, radically populist, egalitarian, society without checks and byons. It's very easy to convince the majority. Herodica said when the Persians came, when the Ionian Greeks came to Greece and they wanted

help, and that was a very controversial thing, to send mainland Greeks who were impoverished to go fight Persians all the way across the U.G. And it was easier, he said, to convince 30,000 in Democratic Athens than a few oligarchs in Sparta, meaning that once the hysteria sets in, it's like a wave. And Professor Hansen, there will be people who say, well, hang on a second. You know, the examples that you've given, people have died and so on and so forth. Aren't we over-egging the pudding somewhat? Well, we're looking at hindsight.

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, when people just said, remember the Army Council, Joseph Welch, finally testified before Congress, McCarthy, said, I have in my hand the list of 200 communists, and he said, have you no decency, sir? And that was sort of like taking a hammer to crystal, it just shattered him. And I don't know people are going to do that. So I don't know how this is going to end up. I can tell you that in this country right now, there is a hysteria. And most people are against it. And the people who are promulgating it, the Walt 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% of support, that they can, through commercials or communications, they can create a sense that it's inevitable. And when I say it, I'm talking about the ability, I, I, I, I, I, I, work at Stanford University, and I saw what happens. In my case, they went after me. They went after Scott Atlas, my colleague at the Hoover Institution. They went after the distinguished historian from Great Britain, Neil Ferguson. They go after anybody, 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. It's the only multiracial democracy that's really worked, Brazil, and India may be coming a distant second and third, but it requires people to have allegiance to an idea of a racially irrelevant society, that your first loyalty is to the idea of America and that your own ethnic appearance is incidental not essential to your persona. And Professor Hansen, you use the word hysteria. What do you mean by this? Can we break this apart?

What do you mean by the hysteria? And what is the cause of this hysteria, as you say? Well, we can see the cause and the effect. Yesterday in San Francisco, people there who had been supported all of this, there was a poll taken. 40% of San Franciscans expressed a desire to leave their liberal city, not because of conservatives, not because of the police, because there's rampant chaos.

What do they mean by that? They mean that Target, that Walgreens are not, are pulling out. They're either shutting the stores or they're having limited hours. Now, why are they doing that? Because ideologically, left-wing people believe that the district attorney, who was the child of 60s revolutionaries and the police department either can't or won't prosecute crimes for ideological reasons, that, e, people of color, if they commit crimes, that's a method of redistribution and social justice, is getting back at the system.

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 barge and the reporter. They film it,

they put it on YouTube. And then everybody said, that's just incidental. It's not essential to who we are. And then a week later, you have Neiman Marcus, at the heart of San Francisco, in Union Square,

an upscale, very luxury-oriented, boutique and these are not essentials like food. These are handbag, Gucci's things. 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. And I'm not being racially interested in the crime,

except that that thereon, that was the description of the criminals. And the idea is that the state is incapable of saying, we have an epidemic that 100 people were shot in Chicago or 4th of July and 16 were killed and 400 people were shot in the United States and 150 died in the last four days. We are incapable of saying this is primarily an inner city phenomenon of people of color shooting people of color and they need help. To say what I just did would have my email filled, getting to your question, with you are a racist, I am going to contact Stanford University.

I'm going to write the Hoover Institution, and I'm going to get a call from that. I probably will from this interview, and I'm not exaggerating. My colleague, Scott Atlas, was put on probation. 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. 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 Com,

nobody has the traditional reference, that this person is non-political, they're a professional, their job is to protect the United States through intelligence or security. They don't believe that anymore because they feel that they've been woke. And you said that you have, you don't know if this, if we've reached, so we don't know if this is peak woke, for example, but do you think we've reached a peak of this kind of hysteria or do you actually think that we have some way to go? 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. Lennon was upper middle. They were all that way. And they had thugs around them. Stalin was a bank robber. People like that. But they were not a majority. The Mensheviks had the majority.

The white Russians had the majority. The constitutional reformers had the majority. The old czarist aristocracy were part of this anti-Zarist, the coalition 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 and they terrorized people when they tried it earlier in the french revolution it didn't work the thermadores 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 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. 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 don't, we want you math to teach math and science and literature, but, and these,

protests are sweeping the country now at school boards and recall. We have more recall elections of board members. 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 or in a case of Neil, writing an email was considered rude. or I don't know what, to a private email to a student, those charges were unsuccessful. They couldn't pursue them.

And so I think there is a pushback, and a lot of people are angry. 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. So when Donald Trump is considered by the media to be an excellent, substantial threat. Two years later, he lost the House. 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. So if there's going to be a peak, woke backlash, we will see it in 16 months in the House. And if they win the House, they being the Republican Party, then Barack

Obama is the model for Joe Biden. He'll be a Joe Biden. be a president of executive orders, he will have no ability to get any legislation, woke legislation through. So we'll see. It's an interesting. I want to take the conversation back a little bit to the sort of eagle eye view of the situation that we started with. You would know this, but I am originally from the Soviet Union myself. I was born in Russia, many of my family are from Ukraine. I was just in Ukraine visiting my grandmother, who's 95 years old. She was alive during the time of the purges. She was alive during that whole period. And she was telling me, how when she was a student at school, the teacher would come in once every few months and say,

children turn to page 34 of your Russian literature book and cross out this name. This man is now enemy of the people. Now, the other point you mentioned was about the teaching of the idea that in your case, your country, but broadly speaking, our civilization is evil based. and founded on prejudice and bigotry and so on and so forth. Is there a historical precedent or historical example of a civilization that has done this before that has some point just decided that actually it's evil, it's bad, it's wrong, and decided to indoctrinate the next generation to hate their own country?

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They said Reagan was a great guy, actually. We're going to name their airport in Washington after. George H.W. Bush was a great guy. We're going to name an airport, Texas after. And then it starts. then W. Bush is a war criminal, a Nazi, 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 the saying, 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. And so that's what we do in our country, we try to rewrite the past. With the iconicalism we're seeing, it's getting

ridiculous. Nobody has told me what's wrong with Miguel Cervantes and El Cid. His statute was toppled. Nobody's told me what Frederick Douglass did long or Abraham Lincoln. 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. The iconoclast 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. And they thought it was Robert E. Lee. They don't look anything alike. But Lee is all these ignorant generation know. Remember, this is a part of the educational system where you're combining ignorance and arrogance among young people.

So they all say, well, you know, if you're asked them, as there was a, people are doing that frequently, Are you proud of the United States? Well, you know, like, like maybe, you know, maybe I don't like it's racist or like, like, can you specifically tell me where it is racist? Identify what manifest symptom you see. What document makes us racist? There's just a blank stare. And that's a very Soviet or Maoist trait.

I'm expecting a Maoist dunce caps pretty soon where people who object in class will have to sit in the back and wear a cone on their head. or they're persecuted for wearing eyeglasses or something. And Professor Hanson, how did we get here? And, you know, whenever we ask people this question, they always come out with Foucault and this and that and postmodernism, blah, blah, blah, which is all fine.

It's all well and good, 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? 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? Is that really what's driving this, a generation of people who don't see a better future for

themselves? And as a result, they're not really attached to anything, and therefore they are vulnerable to this sort of ideology. Yeah, I think what you're talking about are two things. There's proximate, immediate causes. Imagine an IED. What sets an IED off at that moment versus what's the technology or the desire to build it, which is long and coming? So you're correct. People have said, well, there was the Frankfurt School and then there was Gramsci, and there was post-structuralism, post-modernism, and the academy. And it was all anti-Western. And it was all based on this romance about going back to the and Dryden about the noble savvy, all this stuff. Okay. And then there was structural transformations in America. And one of the things is that all of the traditional catalysts for what I would call traditionalism were eroded.

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. And their BAs, especially in the social sciences, environmental sciences, humanities were not competitive. In other words, employers looked at them and said, I don't see a guy with a BA any better writer, analysts, or thinker than a guy with a high school diploma. I'm talking now about the BLM and Antifa, especially profiles of kind of woke people that are half educated enough to know that the politics, but they don't have the skills.

And they're angry. So what do they do? They can't buy a house. They don't get married, if at all, but not until their 30s. They don't have children into their 30s. And when you look at the data, people were getting married 23, 24, one or two children, 26, 27. Now that's 35, 37, and maybe not even a house.

And those are, we know from data that that creates traditionalism, when you have to divert attention from you to your children, to your spouse, to your house. That's one thing. The middle class and you're right. And then another thing, of course, was we have a new tribalism, partly because we went from a binary 90 to 10%, 10% black and assimilated 90% of so-called white. And sometimes it was kind of ridiculous. If you were Armenian, you weren't white, or Arab America, you weren't white,

or near eastern you weren't white or Mexican. And then suddenly Italians, you were white, whatever that meant. It was based on success. And even Asians, you could be, if you were the, you know, ophthalmologists making 150,000 from Korea and you were white, so it called. White didn't have anything to do with skin color in America anymore. It was a state of mind. But the African-American minority had not progressed as rapidly,

although it was assimilating very, very successfully the last 20 years. So that was another question that we started to identify by our tribal loyalties. I think that started with Obama when he created this word, or I guess the mainstream diversity, which meant suddenly class didn't matter, that you could be from India and you could be worth $150 million or an Argentine lawyer or you could be a Spanish aristocrat, but if you were not white or you trilled your R's or you had a funny last name, you were oppressed, even though you were privileged. So we got this ridiculous thing in America where Opa from her $90 million mansion talks to Megan Markle at her $15 million.

$15 million mansion in Montecito, and they're both victims, as Michelle and Barakfam, their $15 million mansion at Martha's Vineyards weigh in. So that's tribalism. And then we had globalization and enriched our sort of like what you're experiencing with London and rural Britain we had with the coast. Silicon Valley, the major research universities, Hollywood looked to Asia. We had Boston to Miami looking toward Europe and South America. And anybody who had skills that could be replicated globally, lawyers, media, academics, insurance, corporate investors became staggering rich beyond our wild imagination, you know, not just multimillion, but multi-billion dollars.

And anybody in the middle whose labor could be Xerox, lathe worker, auto worker, small farmer, they were sort of redundant. it and we kind of created a juxtapose cause and effect. Well, the jobs left because you were on meth or you were a dead ender or you were drags or deplorable or a redeemable or a clinger or a chunk. I'm just quoting directly now from Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And then when you add in, we had this elite, this global elite that were really revolutionary. And I mean that sincerely. That's just not invective.

they really did want to, they do want to end the electoral college. They're within one vote of doing that. If they can get a senator from Arizona to end the filibuster, they will end the electoral college. And they may be able to do it without a senatorial degree, much less the constitutional. They want to pack the court after 150 years to 15 justices to get a liberal progressive majority by Fiat. They want to let in two new states after 60 years. They want to end 180-year filibuster. So they're truly evolutionaries, revolutionaries, evolutionaries.

And then finally, as I said, globalism got rid of the idea. And you add all of those together with this, what we were talking earlier, about these ideologies. 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. But we lied about the origins, we scared people, and then we had a real pandemic. It wasn't a construct.

600,000 people died. And we had our first national quarantine. We've never reacted that way to any type of plague. We made fun of the idea of herd immunity. It didn't exist suddenly. And we didn't really protect our elderly. If you try to protect everything, as you know from military history, you protect nothing. So we didn't protect the people who were vulnerable, but we did protect everybody, many of whom were not vulnerable,

especially those under 18. And then we had a first artificially induced recession. We've never done that before. We had record low minority unemployment about 5.2. American unemployment was 3.3. It hadn't been that way since World War II in peacetime. We had a booming economy, richest oil and gas producer in the world, et cetera, et cetera, and we shut it all down. And then we had George Floyd's death.

It did not matter when you saw that horrific look of Officer Shalvin on his face. That went around the world with the knee. That was the end of the story. If you said, well, African Americans, 12 of them 12, out of 11 million arrests in the United States. In the last year, we have statistics, 2012. were shot while on armed, and police shot more white suspects. And if you look at the number of people arrested by race versus the number shot while unarmed lethally by race, then the white population who's arrested is more likely to be

lethally shot by police. It didn't matter. So then we had 120 days of rioting, and I mean trying to take over, burn down a federal courthouse in Minneapolis, burned down a police precinct in Portland, create a whole autonomous phone in Seattle. 120 days, $2 billion of damage, 25 killed, 14,000 arrested, almost all the charges either reduce or drop because of ideological reasons. 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. It was outsourced to the media in his party, but he stayed in his basement as if he was William McKinley in the 19th century. Never had that happen. 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. The error rate, usually it's about 4%, it was that way when we had the last election, it went down to 0.4. So you had all these ballots, but somehow the air rate went down.

So there were all these questions. Then we had this January 6th Capitol riot, and maybe one of those storms we could take, but not all of those together in one year. And the people who had no contact with humans for a year, just like you and I. I don't really know you. I can't see you. I can't look at your intonations. I have an impression of them, vice versa of me. If I was in the room, it would be different.

So we, or suspicions grow or paranoies or paranoia. You add all of that proximate and remote causes. And the United States went stark, raving mad. And you people over there in Europe and South America are worried because whether it's fair or not, the United States is the largest economic and military power in the world. And it has certain global responsibilities. We may not like them, but we secretly know that they're important. And if we are woke and the alternative is China or Russian aggression or an Iranian bomb

pointed to Europe, that's scary. And yet we have people in this country. One of our greatest capitalists, three days ago, Charles Munger, they birthed her hatchaway and said he congratulated what the Chinese did to Jack Maul. It was great. So they just took that Sonny and they said, listen, Sonny, you're not going to operate here. Michael Bloomberg said China was a democratic country essentially. And Bill Gates said they did a terrific job with COVID. So these are very scary things, I think, given our position of responsibility to the rest of the world. Francis, I think we should call this episode 10 reasons to be

cheerful with Professor Davis Hanson. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, we joke about it, and I'm going to use technical language here. It sounds like we're fucked, aren't we? Well, I thought, looking back at the United States, we were screwed in 1933 when we had 25% on employment. And the house that I'm sitting in, which is six generations of my family of own, I was told when I grew up, and it wasn't nice in the 1950s, it was kind of shit. But they had 27 people living here, relatives, and they were. would go each week down to the train station, find another person starving.

And they got, I think it was $31 a ton for 2,000 pounds of raisins. And that's what they lived on. So, you know, they made an income about $700. So that was bad. And then my family told me that my father said, I had to fly 40 times over Japan and a B-29. And we got shot down twice and crash landed in Iwojima and 14. planes of my squadron didn't make it.

And by the way, your namesake, Victor Hansen, was killed in Okinawa, First Marine Division, college graduate. And then I would sit around Christmas and then one relative would say, hey, I rode with Patton right through France and he got killed and he got killed. And then I'd say to my brother, who's Belden Cather? Well, he was our

first cousin. He got shot in the head at Normandy. And then somebody would say, a guy at dinner and said, well, I was up in Alaska fighting a Japanese. It was cold. It was worse than you guys had it. And that was what I grew up. up with. So our generation is the most pampered and leisured in the world. So this is a psychological problem. It's not a material problem. Let me just push back. So may I push back a little bit on what you said? Because coming back to what we talked about, the erosion of the middle class, the student

debt building up, the lack of housing. You can't, I mean, it's very tempting for me. And I try not to use the word snowflake, but it is very tempting to say, well, these are just these. stupid kids. They didn't read their history. They don't know about the history of my country and the evils of communism and blah, blah, blah. They're just stupid. They're just ignorant. We need to give them that information. But if the incentives of the society they live in don't give them a future they can look forward to, aren't they right to be revolutionaries? Well, yes and no. I hate that term. It's all relative. But in terms, it's in terms, In terms of historical or world poverty, no.

Because I teach, I see students, I see people that are living on Winnebago's on the streets of Palo Alto, right next, by the way, to Menlo Park, Google, Amazon, all that. But what I'm getting at is when I see people who are impoverished, I live in southwestern Fresno County, where the per capita income is less than Appalachia and we're ground zero for illegal immigration. So 95% of the people I see are Hispanic. And I go to Walmart. I'm probably about the only non-Hispanic that goes in. Most of the so-called white or Asian people have left. But when I look at the level of affluence, I lived overseas and I had to get in a line for 20 minutes to pay $10 to call home in the 1970s. And a terrible line.

These people are calling all over the world on cell phone. I go into Walmart and I can't believe how inexpensive things are. People are not, when we talked about theft in San Francisco, are you suggesting to me that the 10 people that broke into Neiman Marcus took those Gucci bags and went and ate them because they were so hungry? No. Or when they went and fenced them, they took a $1,000 bag and got $100. So in terms of actual poverty and deprivation, no, we're the most pampered affluent in the world and you can survive. But second, and here's, I think, your point, when they see the staggering amounts of wealth that others enjoy, and they see this worship of Mamum, and they look at Esquire and Vanity Fair and these ads, and they turn on TV and the cool people are doing this. And, you know, David Geffen is twittering that I'm on COVID on my $700 million yacht kind of in isolation, ha-ha down in the character.

They don't like that. You know, Tocqueville said another good thing. I don't want to quote him twice, but he said people would, in a democracy, people, the majority, would all prefer to be poor if everybody was equal. In other words, they would be willing not to have it so well if they knew that everybody else didn't have it so well. If you told them you will have it pretty well, but others will have it really well, they'll oppose that, given human nature.

He was right about that. So a lot of this anger is, I borrowed all this money. and I got my VA in community studies, or I got mine in environmental protection, or I got mine in race and journalism. And guess what? I didn't get 60,000, 70,000, and I need 70,000 to buy a house and a car and to have a suburban life. So, yeah, they're angry about that. And when they see the disproportionate wealth, and that's why I think class is a very important thing. And I think the left knows that. Because the biggest secret is, if you look at the Fortune 400 in America, almost all that wealth is not timber, agriculture, steel, mining.

It is social media, internet, insurance, law, investment. We're talking about Jeff Bezos or Michael Bloomberg or Mark Zuckerberg or Lisa Jobs. And they're all woke. They're all left wing. And you look at the last election by zip code and you look at it by congressional district. All of the blue strongholds are woke and they're wealthy. This is the biggest secret that these parties have flipped. The Democratic Party no longer, and I was a registered Democrat.

My family were for four generations. And I'm an independent now. But the Republicans used to be a country club white guy golf course caricature. They're not now. They are the working class angry people. all different races increasingly. And the Democratic Party is the very wealthy and the woke and the very poor and the professional classes. And so this is what's so stunning about it that the traditional check on the accumulation of wealth and monopolies was the loudmouth left Marxists and media.

And now they're all part of that system, that Borg. And so nobody in the left, they love Mark Zuckerberg. They love Warren Buffett. They love Bill Gates. Mark Zucker 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. He did that. Everybody thought it was wonderful. But that's what's so bizarre about these times. I always thought the left was sort of, wow, they have two things I grew up with. They are for free speech, and they're very suspicious of the accumulation of massive amounts of capital that can lead to monopolies. And now I understand that everywhere I go to every campus I speak are where I work on.

The biggest enemies are free speech or the left. They just call it hate speech. But Professor Hansen, don't you think we're denigrating the left to some extent? And I'll explain why, because when we talk about the left, we said that the left is but not all aspects of the left awoke, and certainly not all aspects of the left are in support of these huge conglomerates like your Facebooks or your Amazon's that barely pay any taxes. There's plenty of people on the left who are fiercely critical of these corporations, as they should be.

But they're impotent, because if you just do a little experiment afterward. Look at very prominent names in the Clinton and Obama administration. where did they go after they left? And you'll find that the most prominent went to Silicon Valley. And I work right in there. I can tell you everybody from Anita Dunn to the Obama EPA Director, they all went to Apple or Facebook. So they're part of that system.

But what's insidious about it is your J.D. Rockefeller or Guggenheim or Mellon or Henry Ford today is Mark Zuckerberg. in a tie-dye t-shirt on a surfboard on 4th of July. Or he, I see them in downtown Powell, so somebody I'll be walking to get something and somebody will say, see that guy right there? That guy is worth $2 billion. I'll say, how do you know? I said, I worked, I used to work for him.

Or he said, that guy was my student. He's worth $500 million. What did they look like? They look, they're indistinguishable from homeless people in the way they dress. Cutoffs, flip-flops. They're cool. They're hip.

And so it's very hard for the left wing to consolidate their anger at them. If you look at the people 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. Who is making speeches on the floor of the Senate in the House saying we've got to break up the monopolies. We've got to make them adhere to the principles of Constitution. It's former free market, Milton Friedman Republicans that have switched. And who is defending them as former, you know, there's a private enterprise capitalist octopus that's strang that they're not that way. Maybe Elizabeth Warren, when she's not flipping houses and writing in one of her books, how to get rich, is still a liberal crusader.

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. because they're too valuable in promoting a cause that otherwise would not enjoy 51% popular support. And Professor Hansen, that therefore leads me on nicely to the next question, which is, therefore, are these labels left and right, become totally redundant? They don't apply anymore. I agree entirely, and that's why I sometimes have people on the right get angry at me, because I think class, I'm not a Marxist by any means, I'm kind of a populace, and that's an inexact term, but I think really they're,

We've been fooled by this race, race, race, deliberately so. I think the left decided somewhat where in the 21st century that Marxism doesn't work here because of upward mobility and fluidity. And they thought, you know what? We tried it. The last guy who was successful at it was Bill Clinton, middle class agenda. But race is different because race is immutable. And it doesn't change.

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. So once you said that oppression, oppressors and oppressors, victims and victimizers are not based on your actual living conditions, but on the color or the you of your skin, then you had a permanent victim. And that's what the left is done. They've changed all of their ideology, all of their rhetoric to race, race, race, race, race, race. They don't talk about class. And it's very ironic because of the great society programs, the affirmative action. If you look at per capita income in the United States, the so-called white majority is not the biggest income. Asians, whether that constitutes Korean Americans or people from India, make on average about $20,000 per capita and so-called whites.

that's impossible in a racist society. And as one of my friends said, who's a Punjabi Sikh, you said, look at me, I'm pure black, and I don't feel like a victim. And I said, that's because you're a multimillionaire. And you bring up this important point, which I know your upcoming book deals with, which is tribalism. 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. 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. 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. It was Plato who said that first. He said birds, believe it or not, he actually said, right, birds that were feather flocked

together, quoting Socrates. I have four or five dogs, and I notice the Queensland Australian catalogs hang out together, and they don't like the labs. And when I look outside, I see all of the morning doves on one wire and the quail below them and the hawks hang out together. So it's hardwired in, I guess, from our pre-civilization Neanderthal days, that we feel more comfortable with people who superficially resemble us. 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. And societies that are meritocratic succeed and societies that are tribal don't.

And that was a great contribution of Rome to the world. They actually invented a word natio. The Greeks didn't have it. They had 1,600 city states. ethnically, there was no hellos in a sense of a federated nation, as there was with Rome, that superseded finally race. We did that in the United States pretty well. Some European countries are doing it, are starting to do it better than they have in the past. And to throw that away for cheap political gain is very scary. 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, successfully against George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, the Republicans, and they said things almost verbatim. We are a country of laws. We cannot have the illegal immigration because we can't assimilate, integrate, and intermarried people. If you come to the United States, come measured, diverse, legally, and we want you to come, but we cannot allow hordes to come through. And assimilation and integration is the vision of Martin Luther King. Everybody understood that. And now we're reverting to a pre-civilization mentality. It's very scary. I noticed it 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. We have a very high crime rate here, very high. So if you were from Japan or Korea or Armenia or Scandinavia or Germany, they just moved to the coast or out of state. But there's still a few so-called white people, and I don't know them very well. But if I go to Walmart now for the first time in my life, I've noticed something at about, about seven o'clock in the morning to nine, there's about 25 white people in the shoot store. And they're gone.

And then the Mexican American or Central American communities come over. But my point is this, when I walk by, white people do this to me. Hi, how are you? They don't know me. I'm thinking, why the hell is these, you know, what do I have in common with this guy? I've never met him. Or somebody will come up and goes, you need help? And what they're doing is they're retribalizing because instinctually they think they're

the minority now. And they know that you can't say publicly because they're still the majority in the country. But in these areas, they're thinking, La Raza, those guys, BLM, those guys. How am I going to protect our guys? Even though we're so intermarried, it's ridiculous. We need DNA badges to find out our racial feedays. But that's very scary because, and I know a lot of African-American Hispanic friends that will tell me,

he'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. But I said, are you worried about it? He said, yeah, because there's 70% of the population. And I said, well, they started it. 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 or he didn't want to put his kids in the public school, so he wanted, you know, where I, at Stanford, he wanted Castilea or Sacred Heart or the Harker school, and he wanted to live in Atherton with wealthy Asians or whites, but he didn't want to live on East Palo Alto or San Jose. And psychologically, this was kind of a, I'm not a big Florian fan, but it was an effort to square the circle of being uncomfortable with poor people, poor white people, poor brown people, and not wanting to hang out with them. So they create the superstructure of, I am so woke.

Look at how they live and say they're woke. They're not. And so... So what you're sort of alluding to is a lot of this is basically derived from white guilt, wouldn't you say? 100%. 100%. They created it. This is a class thing that we're seeing in the United States and in the Western world in general.

I don't see... When I talk to Mexican-American people, the middle class here, they say to me, Victor, if we have an open border, M-13 is going to come into our schools and they're going to beat up Mexican kids that are U.S. citizens for three generations that don't speak Spanish. It's inauthentic. They're going to make us have bilingual education, no advanced placement. When my grandmother wants to go into the dialysis clinic, it's going to be crowded with people. They're not for it. 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. But the point is that this was a phenomenon, and this country, I mean, you know better than I do. We were formed by Puritans. Sometimes they can be very good in their zealotry of human perfection on earth, the Great Awakening, the abolitionist movement. But often, these Americans are self-righteous, sanctimonious, and they're children of the hyper-enlightment. They don't believe in any religion. They don't believe in any frailty. They don't believe any mystery. They believe that they can solve every question with the science. And so they're very judgmental, and they've decided that this is a racist country. 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. They just are culturally, if they see an African American professor, they're okay with him if he's in a certain income bracket. He has a certain patois.

If they say a four black person or middle class, they just avoid them. And they feel terrible about it. 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. His racism is the problem in America. He has nothing. His kids can't get affirmative action. Nobody's been the colleague in his entire life.

But he's the problem. No, the problem is white, wealthy liberals who will not integrate tutor, assimilate people there are the other, or won't adopt policies that make it possible to do so because they're never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. They have power, influence, and they always find a way of saying, we want everybody to have solar power, but if it's 27 cents a kilowatt, that's your problem down there in Bakersfield, which is 110. We're on the coast. Or, you know what, we don't think water should go to farmers, but we, God Damn it, we want that hetch-hetchy water all away from the Lysmany for San Francisco.

They always have this bizarre way of squaring the circle about their own privilege and their own superiority, but they take it out on other people psychologically. And that makes them feel like they're woke. That's what it woke's all about. We can solve the race problem with parity. I taught classical languages for 21 years when 75% of the students, were not white at California State University, a third tier. And what did I do?

I started with the idea that Jose was from Mexico. He wanted to be in my class. He wanted to be a citizen, and he wanted an education. So I said, Jose, here's what we're going to do. You're going to give lectures on Cicero. You're going to learn Latin, Greek. You're going to be able to read French and German. It's going to take you four years.

And every time you speak, you're going to speak to King's English. Perfect grammar, syntax. I'm going to correct the grammar. And when I get done with you, you will have an education. 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. Who in that community can I help? Maybe I should move there for the summer. Let me open an academy. Let me teach. Let me give some of my time.

No. Or if you want two million people coming in and they're in so-called cages, a word that was invented for four years when Trump was president, but Obama created them and Biden's using them, then why don't they just say this? We have about two million empty dorm rooms right now in America. They're at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Texas, or everywhere. No students are in session. Why don't we just allow those poor people coming to go use university dorms for the summer? You think they're ever going to do that? That would raise support for the wall pretty quick, I would imagine. I think we'd have it built tomorrow. Listen, it's been quite a, let's say, a pessimistic conversation or maybe a realistic one. Yes, let's end on a high note. Before we ask you our last question, what's the solution here? What is the answer? How can this be unwound, let's say?

I think what we need to do is, first of all, say, we're all human and I'm not going to judge a person by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. And I am not going to feel more comfortable or less comfortable with a person who superficially resembles me. A. And then B, we are very affluent and we're very blessed and we're the luckiest generation, the history of civilization.

And we have gratitude to those who gave us this. And we're not going to desecrate the past. They were people in a pre-industrial age that had to suffer horrendous physical ailments, poverty, and yet we're not going to judge them by the values of the 20th century, 21st century. And then finally, we're going to have to say there is disparity in this world, and we're going to have to take a greater look, not at the Davos people's Great Reset Program, but on the vast accumulation of wealth. We've never seen anything like this.

Perodes Atticus in second century Athens didn't quite have all this. Nero didn't quite have all this. Krasis didn't have all this. 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 is going out of business, we have to say to ourselves,

How do we preserve personal liberty, personal freedom, the capitalist, private enterprise, private property owning society, and yet have help for people that are working hard? And we used to think like that. That was Harry Truman. That was Bill Clinton. That was Dwight Eisenhower. That was Donald Trump. They hated him. But if you actually forget all of his excesses and just think, what did he say?

It was middle class, middle class, middle class, working man, working man, working man. And who hated him? It was a Republican silk-stalking elite. They hated his guts. Professor Hansen, thank you so much for coming on the show. We always end our show with the same question. We're going to have some questions for our locals, patrons afterwards. But our final question for this interview is always,

what is the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? Well, we're not talking. I think it's China. And I know people say we talk about, But China is very different than Western Europe or Europe or the United States to the former British Commonwealth. China has 1.4 billion people. It's run by a communist cadre that is a linear descent to Mao who killed 70 million people. It currently has about a million and a half people in education camps.

It's destroyed the indigenous culture of Tibet. It's destroyed democracy in Hong Kong. It's created artificial islands in the Spratley. archipelago, and it's got about 100 new silos that is building right now as we speak for intercontinental missiles with nuclear tips to hit any target in the world. And it's got a belt and road initiative that is buying off all the choke points, whether it's the Panama Canal or Suez or the Piraeus or Naples in the world. And it's very different than the West. I'm not talking about Chinese tradition. I'm talking about the Chinese Communist Party. And when they take over world

leadership. It's not going to be freedom of the seas. It's not going to be the international criminal court. It's not going to be the United Nations, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund. It's going to be what you see in China today. And it's a scary idea. And they're very brilliant people, the Communist Party in China. And so if you start to criticism, as I just did, they will say you're a racist. And you're speaking in the long tradition of Western racism against Oriental people. They'll use that term in deliberately. Or they will say you're jealous, or they will say, hey, Victor, we've got a great billet

at a university in China. Would you like to write a blog for us? And we will pay you $400,000 a year if you just do that. And so they're insidious. They being the Communist Party and its cadre. I speak as somebody who taught a lot of Chinese students. They're wonderful people. But every 10th one was, you know, pretty much, this is a terrible country and da-da-da-da-da.

And we know that one or two percent of the 380,000 here are engaged in helping the Chinese Communist Party. 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. I mentioned Bill Gates. And you've got Hunter Biden who was getting money from Chinese interests. 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, they believe in a different paradigm than the Communist Party in China. because this is Orwellian what we're facing.

And it's gaining power and cloud, especially after the COVID disaster. That's a very good point. It's an issue we've covered extensively on the show. And I believe we do actually have a locals question for you on this very issue. But for the moment, thank you very much for coming on the show. I can't wait to read your book, which is coming out in October, the dying citizen. Really looking forward to that. And of course, thank you for your time.

And thank you all for watching at home. We will see you very soon with nothing. the brilliant episode like this one or Raw Show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so that you never miss another fantastic episode.

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