Charlie sits down with Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University's Hoover Institute, and visiting professor at Hillsdale College, Victor Davis Hanson. Charlie and VDH have an in-depth and important conversation about the meaning of American citizenship, and it's erosion over time, which amounts to a true existential threat to the future of the country. The two also discuss the rise of modern ideologues and elites, and how they've constructed a world in which they are immune from empiricism and facts, insulated by their systems of power guarded with a cultish fervor. But, as VDH explains, as the elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own decisions, they assuage their guilt by "feeling terrible" and forcing that gloominess upon the rest of society. But where does this road end, and what does history warn us about our current trajectory? Can we pull out of this cycle of corrosion and corruption? Will there be a period of regeneration? VDH has the insights you need in this absolutely can't miss episode with one of Charlie's mentors and teachers in his first time on the show. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Citizenship and National Fracture00:11:23
Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Victor Davis Hansen.
I really don't need to say much more than that.
One of the men I admire the most when it comes to commentary and the wisdom that he has.
It's absolutely incredible.
We talk about citizenship.
We talk about our country.
Is America going to fracture out a civil war?
Super interesting.
You should take notes during this conversation.
I do a lot of listening, and he's just, he's special.
He really is.
It was an honor to be able to spend time with him.
He spoke at a Turning Point USA event and came on our show.
If you want to get involved at Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.
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Victor Davis Hanson is here.
Buckle up here.
We go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
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Everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With me, I feel like is a teacher of mine, someone who had consumed hundreds of hours of his commentary and content, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson.
Thank you for having me.
We were just talking how I finished your World War II course, and I was blown away by that, and your citizenship course for Hillsdale College.
And I suppose let's just start there.
Tell us about your book, The Dying Citizen.
Well, it's not a lamentation or a eulogy for the dead citizen because I would have called it the dead citizen.
It's the process of dying, and it's an erosion in the traditional prerogatives of a citizen.
I think it applies to the Western world in general, not just the United States in particular, but it's the suggestion that there's no sharp difference between a resident, legal or illegal, and a citizen, whether that means voting today or engaging in a campaign.
You can be a resident.
You can be here illegally and do that.
Or military service.
The only distinction that's left really is the ability to hold office.
Only citizens can do that.
But if you're not a citizen, you're a resident.
You can come and go as you please, apparently.
We're seeing the southern border.
You can join the military.
You can vote in certain places.
I think soon you'll be able to hold office.
So I tried to explain the history of citizenship.
It was very rare, peculiar, late in history, in the eighth century in Greece, fragile.
Today, there's only two or three places that can pull off a multiracial constitutional system, Brazil, maybe India, and they don't do it very well.
I was trying to remind people that unless you invest in citizenship and constantly audit it, it's the aberration in history and it will disappear.
I think it is disappearing unless we stand at attention and try to do something to save it.
What is necessary to revive citizenship?
Well, I try to say we have to reverse the organic pressures on it.
And one of them is, of course, the erosion of the middle class.
If you don't have a middle class, then you have a subsidized poor and a very small, powerful, influential, rich elite.
That's kind of California is the model of that.
And then you need definable, secure borders.
You can't be citizens of the world.
You have to be citizens of a unique place.
And we don't have a secure southern border.
Two million people came in in the fiscal year.
You have to gain control like we do of the northern border.
And you can't revert to a pre-civilizational tribalism where you start, where your identity is, your race, let's put it this way, your race or your ethnic background or pedigree is essential to who you are, not incidental.
And then the elites on the other side, this administrative state of legislative, executive, and judicial powers within an unelected bureaucrat, a James Comey, a Lois Lerner, it's very dangerous, as we've seen, especially.
It's growing, especially the media, big government, permanent employee fusion, whether that's defined by MSNBC, CNN, James Clapper, John Brennan type of fusion.
And there's a tendency now to be very bold about changing the Constitution, whether that's packing Indian Electoral College or the state's superiority or prerogative of making national voting laws or even the customs and traditions of, say, a nine-person court or 50-state union.
These have been there for decades, 60 years for the states, all for short-term political expediency.
So in larger historical terms, it's more the Athenian model we're grabbing to, that everybody gets to vote on any given day on anything, and that has the force of law without constitutional guide rail.
And then finally, we're becoming citizens of the world where our elites on the East Coast feel they're more, have more affinities with the culture and values of the EU, and people on the West Coast feel that economically, financially, they're more tied to Asia than they are the United States.
You can really see it.
If you ask somebody at Stanford or Berkeley or Caltech, what's a restaurant like in Bakersfield or Fresno, they have no idea, even though it's 200 miles away.
You ask them about where to eat in Shanghai or, you know, Taipei or Tokyo, they can tell you.
So the people who have real power in this country look outward rather than inward.
I'm going to ask you about motivations.
We get a lot of emails about this.
Like what motivates the current regime, if you can call it that, to try to crush citizenship or citizens?
What do you think that's going to be?
I think it's the most dangerous people feel that they're doing it for others.
In other words, they don't see themselves as self-interested.
If you talk to Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab or Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg, why did you put $419 million into selected precincts to warp or absorb the duties of the registrar in key precincts?
They say, I'm doing it to preserve democracy.
And by that is they feel that they, being this globalized elite, that they are morally superior, they're better educated, even though a lot of them are not.
But they have a sense of their guardians, and they just need enough power.
If they just give them enough power, they can create heaven on earth.
And we know from the Jacobins in France or the Bolsheviks that these people, for all of their Brotherhood of Man talk, are absolute cutthroats as far as the acquisition and maintenance of power.
They really want it.
And you can really see it with the Bidens.
I mean, They were so worried that their agenda wasn't palatable to people that they put Joe Biden in as a thin veneer of a very radical agenda that they know had no support.
And they thought, you know, it's good old Joe Biden from Scranton.
We know he's cognitively impaired.
He'll get us across the finish line.
He'll be presentable.
And then we can open the border or we can have critical race theory, critical legal theory, or defund all of that agenda, which they know has no public support, but they feel it's good for us.
So they're delighted that gas is $7 a gallon.
They can't quite say that like Stephen Chu was saying that.
But you get the impression that they're not entirely angry, except for the optics of long gas lines in a midterm election year.
So even then, though, I think, you know, the Germans have kind of renounced their green insanity, but Biden couldn't.
We still shut down Anwar and no new federal leases and Keystone, even though that would give us two to three million barrels.
In addition, so they've convinced themselves they're doing the right thing, their ideology, the path of progress, regardless of what's happening around them.
They're not empirical.
If you say to Joe Biden and the people around him, the world is short of oil, and the people who are making money off that shortage are illiberal regimes in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin, the Venezuelans, and the Iranians.
So why don't you just enrich the Alaskans and the North Dakotans and the Texans?
Why don't you do that?
Rather than fill the coffers of Putin or the theocracy in Iran.
And they would say, well, we're not going to do that because their power is based on the money from the green base and their ideologues.
So ideologues are immune from empiricism.
No matter what you say, it's not going to halt, subvert, impair, change, modify, adapt.
The mission, the mission is to get all of us onto green power, renewable energy, live in high-rises, have mass transit, and have a few platonic guardians who are exempt from the ramifications of their own ideology.
So, you know, Barack Obama can lecture us on greed.
He can lecture us that we've got to treat each other.
And then he can build three mansions: Martha's Vineyard, Colorama, and Hawaii.
Sees no inconsistency because he needs, John Kerry needs that private jet and that huge carbon footprint so he can help us.
Al Gore just has to sell that failed cable station to Al Jazeera.
Yeah, carbon-spewing gutter.
Just needs that $50 million and to beat the capital gains increase so that he can do more for us.
That's how they think.
Just give them enough power and they will create heaven on earth.
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Faith, Mystery, and Hyper-Reason00:05:18
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So that's really interesting to me, and I want to unpack that for some of our listeners that might not be as familiar with some of the academic arguments there, where you said ideologues are immune to empiricism or empirical interpretation.
Where does that come from?
That's really interesting to me.
Well, it's it comes in part from the Enlightenment, and that's defined from the Greek fifth century.
Socrates, you know, he'd said, I'm a citizen of the world, and you know, it's a good thing a lot to explain.
If you see an eclipse, you don't say Zeus did it or Apollo did it.
You try to scientific method.
The problem with it is that when you take it to an extreme, you can't explain.
I can't explain why you may go to the airport today and be fine, and I go to the airport and get in an accident.
There's God, there's faith, there's an element within our experience.
It's a mystery, sure.
It's mystery, and that requires faith.
So they don't believe in that.
In their arrogance, they think they can explain everything.
And so, but there's a natural imprint in our soul to want to believe in something that's transcended.
So, what they do, since they've ruled out God or religion, they have that religious natural zeal and they worship reason.
I mean, in the French Revolution, they had a God, you know, the God Reason, Ratio, and they had a statue of him.
They renamed the days of the week, they renamed the 10-day calendar, yeah.
Yeah, everything.
So, that's what the green woke movement is.
These people are zealots.
They feel we are so rational that we can tell you that if you listen to us, and we will get racial relations so they're perfect if you just allow us to tell you how to drive and where to live.
But, caveat: for us to do all that and sacrifice on your behalf, we need certain exemptions.
That's really interesting, and I would think somewhat confusing to our audience because they say, okay, if they believe they're rooted in hyper-reason, then how do they explain that men can become pregnant?
And I can't define what a woman is.
Does that make sense?
It just seems so inconsistent if that's.
Well, the distinction is to remember that they say they believe in reason.
That's like all humans, they have religious propensities.
The only problem is the irony is that, say, a devout Christian realizes that brain surgery will remove the tumor, not necessarily faith healing.
And they go to a but if they're a Christian brain surgeon, they cannot tell the person, well, when you get in the ambulance, I don't know why it ran out of gas and you die.
They leave that element of mystery, but not these people.
Their religion is this enlightened, this sense of enlightenment.
They can explain everything.
And when they can't explain everything, it doesn't matter to them.
So, you have the nominee to the Supreme Court, and she says that there are three genders.
Well, that's a faith-based analysis.
There's something, an ancient idea of gender dysphoria, where a person is in the wrong biological body, and we've had names for it, transsexuals, transvestism, the idea you want to wear clothes of the opposite.
And that's been dealt with with medicine for 2,500 years.
But this new idea that you can construct your gender and be what any gender you wish to be or you think you must be, that's not biologically proven.
So, we have this Supreme Court nominee and says, Well, I'm not a biologist, as if she can't explain it because it's inexplicable.
It's a faith-based statement.
She needs to say, what she needed to say if she was intellectually honest is, I'm not a biologist who could explain it, because a disinterested biologist would say that there is a biological male and female, and there's a small category that have neurological incompatibility, but that's very small.
But what she's really saying is, I need a minister of transgendered faith, and they could come in here and tell you why you must believe this to save your soul.
It's a lot about saving souls, because it reminds me so often, I've used that metaphor before of the medieval penance.
That if you were a sinner, say, in 1500 or 1400, before the Reformation, sure.
Yeah, when the Catholic Church, well, the church, and you wanted to go to heaven, and you would go to the minister and you'd say, you know, I've committed celibacy, I'm an ursurer.
And they'd say, okay.
And they would write out a contract, an indulgence, and they'd say, five blocks on the dome of St. Peter.
Medieval Penance and Revolution Cycles00:03:27
If you can promise to pay for that, or this church or this, give me 10 acres, then we will write you an exemption and you can go to purgatory for a while.
And that's what the left does in their way of thinking.
If you, all these people who are so wealthy in the Democratic Party now is really the poor and the very wealthy.
The very wealthy have taken exemptions and they've made a deal with their psyches, and that is, I get to live in Atherton or Woodside or the Upper West Side, and I'm going to be completely immune from the consequences of my ideology.
I hate charter schools when my kids go to prep school.
I want high kilowattage rates in California, but I live in 70-degree weather year-round.
I like $10 gas, but I don't drive much, and I have so many I don't care.
I think everybody should live in 1,500 square feet.
It's ecologically sound, but I have seven homes.
And they feel bad about that.
And one of the ways they square that circle of not living by what they force down other people's throats is to feel terrible.
And that means they, you know, they act very left-wing, they attack people, they cancel people, they deplatform people, they ostracize people, they dox people.
Hollywood, these multi-millionaires in private, come out and try to destroy people's lives.
And then they say to the poor and the middle class, see, I'm on your side.
I'm really more militant than you.
I will, you know, I'll fight the culture wars for you.
And then after five o'clock, they retreat back.
It's very typical of history when you see that.
So using an analysis of history, I'm curious, you mentioned the French Revolution.
Has there been times ever in history where a very wealthy society decides to embrace this kind of woke ideology, something similar to wokeism?
Does that make sense?
I mean, there was a legitimate reason to get rid of the Bourbons.
And there were a lot of moderate people, and they looked at the British system, and they said you can have a monarchy compatible with a constitutional republic.
And that was eminently possible in 1787, 8.
And then you had these cycles of revolution where today's revolutionary would be tomorrow's sellout.
It just got more and possible.
Rogespear was killed by the very people who used to support him, right?
The Carmadors woke in and basically got liquidated him and his brother in about 1400.
And they applauded for 10 minutes, the legend goes.
They did.
And then those cycles kept going, and then they always are ending.
So what does that mean for us then?
Well, it always ends because chaos is unsustainable.
So Napoleon ended it in a very brilliant fashion.
He just said, I am the revolution.
I'm going to make all the officers go to a city.
Yeah, I'm going to create a military academy that's going to be merit-based.
I'm going to have a Napoleon.
It's just like Stalin stopped it.
And so if we continue this chaos, we'll have some authoritarian.
Yeah, so does chaos ever end in self-government, at least immediately?
When you get into a cycle of nihilism, it's very hard to arrest it because it just feeds on itself.
And you can see this woke movement, how it's grown.
And do you think we're in that cycle of?
Napoleon's Merit-Based Academy00:02:41
Yeah, I do.
And so either we're going to have to slow it down, or there's going to be some reaction to it, or there's going to be some hardcore leptus that says, you know what?
There's so much resistance, we're just going to have to put this in by fiat.
There's going to be some non-democratic rendezvous, and it's going to be, it's why it's very important that people speak out about it now, because it's fascistic and it's totalitarian, and it's not based on anything.
I mean, think about how madness, this descent into madness where we don't want to pump oil here, but as I said, we beg Putin or the Saudis to do it, or we make fun of the Border Patrol agents that say they whip innocent people, but suddenly now we're paranoid that people are going to come across in the midterm.
So we're going to ask for Border Patrol volunteers.
That's what they're doing now.
Gavin Newsom's got seventh largest reserves of gas and oil in the United States in California.
And we're the second largest consumer of gasoline.
And he won't tap it, but he's going to now give every Californian $400 to put in a rebate.
Yes.
$11 billion.
So basically, it's saying, we hate your dirty fuel.
We don't like it.
We don't want it.
We won't pump it.
We won't have anything to do.
But you stupid idiots vote still, and you need your gas.
So we're going to give you some money to buy your stupid, dirty, filthy fuel that we don't want.
So we can stay in political power.
Yes, that's what it is.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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And so I'm going to ask a provocative question.
Countries have a tendency to fall apart and fracture.
Protecting Your Home Title00:15:27
They usually don't all fall as one whole, especially big countries.
They usually get smaller.
Is that in the cards for America?
Because a wide-ranging republic was a very ambitious idea.
It was.
I mean, there's periods of regeneration.
If we had this conversation in Rome, oh, 68 AD, and we looked at what, Nero, and then the year of the, we would say it's over with.
And then all of a sudden the Flavians come, just Vespasian, and we get a great pay.
And then it starts to get a little weird with Domitian.
And then we think, oh, it's back.
And then all of a sudden we have what Gibbon called the finest period in human history.
100 years of the five year.
And then it goes.
Aurelius and then Commodus.
And then we get these cycles and they keep coming back.
And it gets, you go down a notch, but there's periods of regeneration.
So I'm confident.
The problem with the United States is that whenever you have a geographical multiplier of ideology.
What do you mean by that?
Well, okay, you have a slave issue in 1820 to 1860.
But the slave issue is not here's a problem with slavery in Michigan.
Here's a problem in the East Coast.
It's right down the mesa.
Mason 6 and London.
60s, you have culture, you got guys wearing beads, you know, saying blank, blank the establishment all over the United States.
This time, because of the, I think, these major existential issues, globalization has changed the economy, this weird worship of a BA degree, the hollowing out of the interior, this cosmopolitan worship of Europe, whatever we term it, it's starting to be geographical.
That's really interesting.
You're right.
I can go along San Jose or Palo Alto, Berkeley, I can go from La Jolla to Seattle, and I do a lot.
And the coffee shops are the same, the peoples are the same.
Their attitudes are the same.
I can drive 20 miles into 50 miles into the interior in Oregon or go to Fresno or Bakersfield, Inland Empire.
Same thing with the East Coast.
I can go to upstate New York, and it's like a different world.
And so people are starting to self-select.
And these red states and red state areas within blue states, they work.
I mean, the taxes are moderate.
The government is transparent.
People don't stand for the sex education.
We see it, this revolt in Florida.
It works.
It's the United States.
People are not racist.
There's integration.
There's intermarriage.
There's assimilation.
There's not identity politics.
And it's starting to be enclaves of resistance.
And it's half the country.
And the other half, the blue half, they despise those places.
They say, well, they work, but they don't have our cuisine.
They don't have our taste.
They don't have our magazine.
There's no architectural digestion.
Do they really talk that way?
I don't spend a lot of time around.
Yeah, they do.
I mean, you're in Palo Alto all the time.
I've had a schizophrenic existence my whole life because I went to school on the California coast and I live on a farm.
And I never moved to Stanford when I went there as a professor or fellow at the Hoover Institution.
So I see it, I hear it all day, and then I see the antithesis 180 miles away.
So is the contempt mutual?
Yes.
To be fair, I would say.
No, I mean, I want the honor.
I mean, yeah.
I would say that I'll give you an example.
I won't mention any names, but I had a guy that's working on a project, a painter, and he's a really great guy.
And he goes to Stanford Medical School.
He just asked me the other day why they're so strange up there.
Or, you know, I mean, if you have a Mexican-American landscaper guy that cuts people's lawn, he has a little bit of smoke in his truck, people feel bad for him.
I mean, it's really bad.
Maybe somebody will say something.
But I was behind a guy that came into the Stanford campus, and I just started laughing when I saw that because it was just a clue.
By the time I got to my office, a person who works at Stanford said they were so outraged they had called to stop that guy, but they were the 11th caller, that Karen mentality.
So it's just very different.
That if you screw with heaven on earth, these people as angels will attack you.
And so I think they're most, you know, I think they're most afraid that their system doesn't mean anything anymore.
A guy with a bachelor's degree from Harvard or Stanford, there's no evidence that they know anymore.
There's evidence they took test scores.
But that's leaving.
Yeah, it doesn't have the currency it used to at all.
No, they don't have the, but they don't have the.
I teach at Hillsdale, and I'm on the Stanford campus, and I was a visiting professor there as in classical languages in the 90s.
And I can tell you that a Hillsdale student is better educated.
And until recently, maybe a Stanford student could take the test better, but I don't think that's true.
So my point is that all of their blue chip criteria that says, listen to us, we're powerful.
Look at the Biden administration.
Every time a guy opens his mouth, you look at the resume, Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs and the State Department, Kennedy School.
It doesn't mean anything when you ask Russia to be an interlocutor in the Iran deal.
Anybody in his right mind knows that you wouldn't do that.
Or when you leave, you know, $80 billion of equipment in Afghanistan, $300 million of remodeling the Baglam Air Force Base.
Anybody knows that.
You talk to anybody where I live who's a cook or a plumber or an electrician, they'd say, do not leave a billion-dollar embassy in Afghanistan.
Or as one person said to me, hey, Victor, I've got to ask you a question.
I was in Home Depot the other day and he said, now, we're going to give the Ukrainians $12 billion in military aid.
I said, yes, that's the idea.
Well, why don't we just call them Taliban up and say, we gave you 85.
Could you give us 40?
Let us.
I might just have 100 emails that say exactly that.
Why don't they give it to them?
And you think, wow, this guy is Albert Einstein, but apparently there's no Albert Einsteins in the Biden administration or General Milley or the rest of them.
So I think the limitations of our elite are pretty transparent.
We owe $30 trillion in debt.
We're running a $2 trillion annual deficits.
We have zero interest rates with about an 8% to 9% annual inflation rate.
And somebody did that.
And they weren't.
Joe Mendoza, you know, who pumps out cesspools in Fesno County, he doesn't do that.
He does a good job for what his task is.
And these guys screwed up.
And yet they all have the best credentials.
They have the most blue-chip degrees.
So that was kind of what the Trump thing was all about.
I mean, he had degrees, but he basically said, I build stuff.
You guys have never built anything.
You can't build anything.
And that caught on to people.
And they said, well, you don't have the right protocol.
You're not situated in the right landscape or you don't have the right parlance.
And he didn't.
So that kind of was like that commercial of the Apple, you're too young probably, but 2004, a woman ran in and she threw a hammer through a screen right during the Super Bowl.
I remember hearing that.
And all of a sudden, it was George Orwell, kind of big brother, and that was supposed to liberate you to Apple.
But it was a really great commercial.
And that's what Trump sort of did.
He threw this ball and it shattered the glass.
And all of a sudden, people said, this podcast, why do we have to wait and wait and see if PBS has us on?
David Brooks will talk to us.
Who cares if your book is reviewed or not in the National Review when you get a podcast that Joe Rogan has got 10 times more influence?
Or who cares if you got an engineering degree from MIT when you can be a brilliant coder and get hired anyway?
So everything, that is good, that all of the criteria and the cattle brands are up for discussion.
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Well, it's good.
It's so interesting that the credentialocracy is kind of less relevant than ever.
But I suppose what you're articulating, though, is that that's a source of a lot of the kind of resentment and antagonism in these centers.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, they have a, they're trying to say that there's a hierarchy and we paid our dues.
We went to the right schools.
We live in the right zip code.
We made the right marriages.
We're right enlightened.
We go to the right restaurants.
And you just can't come in here and think you can run things.
Joe Biden may be senile, but he is good old Joe Biden.
He was a senator.
He was a vice president.
Look at the resume.
Yeah, look at the resume.
And so that's what a lot of it.
You can see why they fixate on certain people that become iconic objects of hatred.
Why did they hate Donald Trump?
But if you look at his record, I know he was very different on immigration and optional military in China, but a lot of it was doctrinaire republicanism.
But the Never Trumpers just had a passionate hatred of him.
It was his hair.
It was his accent.
It was his mannerism.
Why did people hate Sarah Palin?
She wasn't a vindictive person.
When you compare Sarah Palin with Camilla Harris, she had actually run something.
She ran a state.
But they hated her.
They just could not stand the very sight of her.
And Dan Quayle's another person.
And you think, well, it's because he done.
No, he they compared to their people they put up there, but they represent to them somebody who doesn't fit their criterion of credentials or sober and judicious repartee or whatever it is.
And so they remind me of people in the French court, you know, at Versailles, the same way, wigs and powder and everything.
And they're sort of in hollow people that are empty.
And when somebody says the emperor has no clothes, they get very angry.
So in closing, here, I want to ask you, Victor, though, I mean, it doesn't sound like this is sustainable.
No, it's not.
What does that look like, though?
I mean, we have these specifically as possible.
We were sold after World War II.
It was a good idea.
We were going to have the GI Bill of Rights and the Great Books Program.
They were all good ideas.
We're going to educate and amass everybody before.
Very few people went to college.
And it was great.
And it really led to a lot of the economic ascendance of the United States.
But we, as everything in a radical democracy, we took it too far.
So we just said, okay, Bob, you're going to be a lawyer.
Jill, you're going to be a doctor.
That's what parents did.
And they pushed him and they did all.
And they never really asked, Are you getting a liberal education?
Are you ethical?
Are you religious?
None of that.
And it was phony finally.
And so we got to the point where where you work, where you lived, that was falsely equated with knowledge, with morality, with competence.
And it can't be.
And so we started.
You can see Barack Obama was one of the best examples.
I mean, he was a mediocre president.
I thought he was a poor president, but I'll grant people thought he was mediocre, not poor.
And he had what?
Ivy League law degree, and he went to Columbia.
But when they leak everything, why didn't they leak his Occidental transcript or his Columbia transplant or he was a constitutional law professor?
What does that mean?
I was hired at the University of Chicago.
Well, what did you do?
Let's see the classes you taught.
Let's see the books you wrote.
But it was just, no, that doesn't matter.
He's got this stamp on him.
Same thing with Hillary Clinton.
So all these miscreants all have the right brand on them.
And I think that is ending now.
And what's ending now is we're going to a third wave.
It's not going to be kind of like in the 40s or 30s, which is agrarian society.
But it's just mixed up now.
Everybody's got, it's going to be, I think if we can survive this turmoil, it's going to be more achievement and facts-based and what you actually do.
Because the market will kind of, there's still a lot of good things about a free market economy.
It's better than the alternative, and it's going to start rewarding people for, you know, I see it.
I'm very strongly against illegal immigration, but I am very supportive of Mexican-American legal citizens, new immigrants who start businesses.
And that is very encouraging because they don't care about these things, these credentials.
They just want to go out and they want to work like crazy and be successful.
And when they see a car, if you were to drive a Bentley onto the Stanford campus, people would make fun of it.
If you drove it in Fresno, some guy would come up and say to you, where did you get it?
How do I get one?
That's a neat car.
Don't worry, I'll get one one day.
It's a different idea.
It's this can-do.
I like that idea that can-do it.
My dad was a World War II veteran, and he was a farmer, and he was a college administrator, did a lot of stuff, but he always had that attitude, like he was flying a mission on a B-29.
You know, he'd say, I said, I don't think I can go to graduate school.
I've only, these guys have had Latin and Greek for 20 years.
I was only hanging for it.
Well, what do you have to do?
Let's go do it.
Come on, don't chicken out on it.
You got it.
Your scholarship.
You can go do it.
You got to be the best.
Who can't?
And you'd cry and you'd say, not cry, but you'd whine.
You said, well, you want to fly 16 hours to Tenyon and drop 20,000 bombs of.
They would always play that card.
They always do.
And he said, we didn't even wear a parachute.
What's the use of bailing out over Tokyo and getting beheaded?
So that was a reminder to me that that's a good spirit.
Consensus vs. Cancel Culture00:02:12
That's a frontier spirit we have.
I hope we don't lose it.
But immigrants are very good for the United States if they come legally and in a diverse fashion and in measured numbers.
Measured, diverse, with some skills, and they will assimilate, integrate quickly.
En masse, not diverse, illegally, you got a big problem.
So for the country, really quickly, what does that mean, like civil war fracturing?
I know you get this question a lot.
And then finally, tell us about VictorHanson.com.
I don't think we're going to fracture because the divisions are within families.
They were in the Civil War, but we still have more in common than we do for a while longer.
And I think the left, it used to be we're all fighting and let's just calm down and be friends.
But I think people are starting to see that one side is doxing, as I said, deplatforming and canceling and boycotting and doesn't have, and they're doing that because they do not have majority opinion.
So every single issue that Joe Biden is advancing has zero public, I mean, not zero, but it's less than 40%, 50%.
So there's a consensus what we want.
Trump, people can say that he was unpopular, but his agenda was popular.
So that's what people want.
And the left knows that.
And they are getting shriller and more hysterical.
And they're creating a greater and greater backlash.
And once the middle completes that transformation to reject that agenda, we'll have, I think, better times ahead.
VictorHanson.com.
Everyone, become a subscriber or an ultra supporter.
Bell an ultra supporter.
Check it out.
And also the Victor Davis Hansen podcast.
Subscribe.
Well, thank you.
And it's a competitor of ours.
Not really a competitor.
But it's a complimenting.
I listen to all the episodes.
They're terrific.
So thank you for mentioning that.
Thank you, Victor.
Thanks for theCUBE.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and support our show at charliekirk.com slash support.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
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