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Oct. 15, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:26
DIVIDE AND CONQUER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep197
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If a nation is defined by the common values of its citizens, what does identity politics, the idea of division, of driving a wedge, do to the very idea of an American nation?
How the Biden administration is using the Patriot Act for a very unpatriotic purpose, namely to go after political dissenters.
A January 6th defendant has had his civil rights violated.
That's not my view. That's according to a judge, a federal judge.
I'll give you the details on the implications.
Victor Davis Hanson is joining me.
He's going to talk about his new book, The Dying Citizen.
And finally, I'm going to continue with my discussion of John Adams, how he thought, not just why virtue is indispensable, but how it can be cultivated from generation to generation.
This is the Dimestious Wizard Podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
It's becoming increasingly apparent to me how identity politics and all its associate ideologies, critical race theory, the queer theory, so-called, the radical feminism that goes along with this, the 1619 Project, all of this is really inconsistent with and radically opposed to the notion of a nation.
Think about it. Any nation is based upon citizens that have something in common.
A nation is not the same thing as a crowd.
A group of people come together.
It's just a crowd. They have nothing in common.
They just happen to be in a particular place.
And even then, they're usually there for a particular reason.
We're here to see a play, or we're here to celebrate something.
So we have that in common.
Now, a nation is a bigger idea.
It's an idea of people who are kind of in it together, who share benefits that come from being part of that nation, but they also take on the burdens of being part of that nation.
They're willing to fight, if necessary, to protect the country and to protect each other.
And this is strewn throughout not just American history, but the documents of American history.
The concept, for example, of the common good.
Who's good? The good that American citizens have in common.
The notion of a common defense.
I'm gonna fight for you as long as I know that you're gonna be willing to fight for me.
The idea of the general welfare.
That phrase comes right out of the U.S. Constitution.
It implies that there is a general welfare that applies to everybody.
So, now for many years, the multiculturalists, so-called, would say things like, well, you know, we're a country defined by diversity.
What we have in common is our diversity.
Now, first of all, that's a senseless statement.
What we have in common is our diversity is another way of saying we have nothing in common.
And you have to ask, is it even possible to have a nation on that basis?
But we're a long way from that even.
We're so much worse than that.
Why? Because we now have a concrete strategy.
of division, of not just bifurcation, but trifurcation, essentially multiple wedges of division, and these wedges are not accidental.
It's not as if someone's pursuing a common good, but Luther is pursuing the view, this is what's right about Christianity, and the Catholics say, no, this is what's right, and so division comes accidentally.
Neither is trying to cause it, but it's caused because they radically disagree.
No! With identity politics, we have a plan to have division.
It's built on the Marxist plan, which was to create division among classes, but this is a multifarious division strategy to divide America based on race, based on class, based on gender, based on sexual orientation, based on multiple other categories.
So division is, in fact, An inherent part of the strategy.
And I'm very much reminded of that by a couple of recent episodes in the news.
Let me talk first briefly about the Dave Chappelle controversy.
And I don't want to rehearse the controversy.
I really want more to point to a facet of it that hasn't really been noticed.
Because some conservatives are championing Chappelle.
Oh, he's fighting against censorship.
And oh, he won't be cancelled.
And there is an element to all that.
But let's remember that if you listen carefully to Chappelle, what he's really saying...
I, Chappelle, am a kind of black rights guy.
I want blacks to be at the top of the totem pole.
The black issue is paramount for me.
And what I'm annoyed by, Chappelle is saying, is that the black issue appears to be trumped, overshadowed, Transcended by the kind of gay and trans issue.
And that's what he's annoyed about.
He's annoyed that he's not occupying the top spot on the victim pole.
That somebody else has sort of usurped his place.
And that's why, for example, he gives the example of the rapper DaBaby, I think the guy's name is.
He said, you know, this guy killed the black guy.
He wasn't canceled for that.
But then he runs the foul of the gays and the trans people, and he gets canceled.
What does that tell you?
To quote Dave Chappelle, this is the disparity that I want to discuss.
So, for Dave Chappelle, he actually wants to transpose those two things.
He wants the black issue, as I say, to be paramount.
Now, but think about the wedge strategy being employed here.
What we're seeing here is not just identity politics driving a wedge against the kind of fabled white male heterosexual oppressor.
What we see here is a division within identity politics.
That's the part about the Chappelle controversy that's missed.
Chappelle is on one track and he's objecting to the success of the other track.
Now, Let's turn to Katie Couric, who, as it turns out, interviewed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was sort of this supposed, you know, icon of liberal equality, a champion of equality for women and so on.
And in fact, Katie Couric says, I'm a big RBG fan.
Now, on the interview, the subject of Colin Kaepernick came up, and Ginsburg said this, She goes on to say that for many of these persons of color who have come from countries, I mean, she's thinking here probably of people like Ilhan Omar, Which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from.
And so what she's getting at is they're enjoying freedoms here.
And so I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg was saying it is outright ungrateful to be dissing, if you will, a country that has given you these blessings unavailable to other people.
So what does Katie Couric do?
She censors it.
She essentially edits those very timely and interesting remarks.
Why? She says she's doing it to, quote, protect Ginsburg.
But protect Ginsburg from whom?
Well, to protect Ginsburg from the woke mob.
Because after all, Katie Couric realizes, I mean, she's not exactly the brightest, but she's sly and cunning in a way.
And so she realizes instinctively that, hey, if I hugged Ruth Bader Ginsburg, kind of, You know, criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and Kaepernick.
They're going to write her right out of.
They're going to basically treat her as if she's the bad guy.
They're going to write off her cause.
No, she's no longer a champion of a man.
So, Katie Couric wants to protect Ginsburg's reputation, and she does so basically by concealing Ginsburg's true opinion.
So, what we see here is that these groups are now set against each other.
They're fighting. The radical feminists, aka J.K. Rowling, is now fighting with the trans people.
Chappelle brought this up.
In fact, he goes, I'm a TERF. TERF is, by the way, the insulting term being applied to radical feminists by the trans activists.
So what you see here is these guys started out as a common coalition.
They're going to go after this sort of right-wing oppressor.
They're going to go after, you know, the...
The haters out there.
And now it turns out they can't stand each other.
They're trying to wipe out each other.
I mean, think of all the people in Hollywood.
You're canceled for this. You're canceled for that.
And so there's just no limit to it.
And what I'm getting at is not only that all of us, everyone's on eggshells, not just the conservatives anymore.
But more importantly, this just fractures the concept of a common people with a common identity.
We are no longer friends.
We're basically all enemies.
And even in the left, you've got all these people who are jostling with each other, and it's very easy to become an enemy, even unacceptable within the woke camp.
So is there a way out of this?
I can't see one other than to repudiate wokeness itself.
And essentially restore at least some concept of the idea.
See, as Americans, we're not united by blood.
We're not united by the fact that we're all born in the same country.
We're not united by skin color.
We need to be united by at least some attachment to common ideals and common purposes.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESHDINESH. The English writer Samuel Johnson famously said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Now, Johnson was himself a British patriot.
He was also kind of a London patriot.
In fact, he said he who is tired of London is tired of life.
But he loved his home country.
In fact, part of his patriotism was to turn against the American Revolution, because he saw the American Revolution, obviously, as a rebellion against Great Britain.
He referred to the American Revolutionaries as, quote, a race of convicts.
So here's Johnson, politically incorrect to the core.
And even then, you can see how sensitive he was and how clever in touching upon some of the The seeming anomalies or contradictions of the founding.
He goes, why do we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of slaves?
So Johnson, right there.
This couldn't have been more timely.
It could be said today. Now, what did Johnson mean by patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel?
Well, what he meant was not that patriotism is bad.
No. What he meant, rather, is that patriotism can become a big excuse For selfish people who want to do very bad things to do it in the name of patriotism.
So the point being, it gives their low motives a camouflage.
We're acting for the higher good, for the common good of society.
So patriotism is invoked by cunning people who use it as a pretext for corruption and for the abuse of power.
Now all of this came to my mind when I read really a very...
A trenchant article in the Wall Street Journal.
It's by James Sensenbrenner, who you might remember is a former congressman.
He served from Wisconsin from 1979 to 2021.
This guy's been spent, I'd say, half his life, if not more, in Congress.
He was the primary drafter of the Patriot Act.
And he says, listen, as the principal author of the Patriot Act and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that put that act into play, He goes, quote, the Biden administration's unparalleled effort to transform federal laws and agencies into instruments of domestic political repression.
So Sensenbrenner is saying they are abusing the Patriot Act.
They are abusing the law that I helped to pass.
And he goes, listen, let's remember the Patriot Act was passed.
Immediately following 9-11, he says the goal was really simple, to prevent additional foreign terrorist attacks on American soil, as well as foreign terrorists operating within America.
And you do that by sharing and collecting intelligence information, restricting terrorist financing, and enhancing border security with regard to terrorism.
That's the purpose.
That's why the law was written.
He says terrorism was clearly defined to mean, quote, Mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.
It would specify what terrorism is.
And he goes, our laws and jurisprudence draw a clear distinction between acts of terrorism calculated to decimate a civilian population and the robust expression of views that sustain democratic self-government.
I think what Sensenbrenner's outraged here is that, is the way in which Merrick Garland, this attorney general, He intends to use the Patriot Act against who?
Parents who are opposed to schools, school boards, parents who are protesting, making their voices heard.
He goes, quote,"...when debating the Patriot Act and other federal anti-terrorism laws, nobody in either chamber of Congress could have imagined these laws would be turned against concerned parents at local school board meetings." Now, this can be taken a couple of ways, but one way for me is to say, listen, this is the way in which when you give the government power, they always abuse it.
They always extend it.
They contort it to purposes for which it was not intended.
And so, in retrospect, if it were me, I would not vote for the Patriot Act now.
Why? In the anticipation of the myriad ways in which these laws can be abused.
And Sensenbrenner goes on to say, listen, these federal agencies have no authority, no jurisdiction to invoke federal anti-terrorism laws to chill protected speech and expressive conduct.
He says this violates both the letter and the spirit of laws that were approved by bipartisan majorities.
And he calls finally for this to be immediately withdrawn.
So here's a guy, you know, now I think in the later part of his life, issuing a kind of warning.
And by the way, this is a common feature when societies are pushing in a more tyrannical direction.
There are people who sort of sound the alarm.
They go, listen, this is not the America that we had in mind.
This is not the purpose for which we pass these laws.
And so even though you can say that the Patriot Act itself bears some responsibility, The main responsibility is obviously with the abusive people that are abusing the act.
It's kind of like a domestic abuser who takes advantage of, let's say, his domestic authority.
The problem isn't with the domestic authority, it's with the abusive authority by a guy who obviously has no regard for any norms of common decency.
And I think we have to say, of Merrick Garland and of Biden and the whole gang, they're a very indecent group of people.
There are people who are unscrupulous in the pure meaning of the word.
They have no scruples.
They have no qualms.
These aren't inept people.
They are extremely bad, vicious people.
We've got to keep that in mind.
And this is the kind of thing that, remember, pendulums of power do swing.
These things should not go unpunished when Republicans have their own turn at power.
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Feel the difference. A handful of us, and I mean a handful, the journalists Julie Kelly, me, a few others, we have been talking about the gross abuses of January 6th, and even the majority of the Republican Party has been dead silent.
You know, you've got January 6th defendants being abused, and they all come from districts.
They have congressmen very often representing them who are Republicans.
Not a word for many of those guys.
It's just pathetic. Now, a federal judge...
Royce Lamberth has confirmed what many of us suspected, and that is that the D.C. correctional authorities are violating the civil rights of January 6th defendants.
Royce Lambert was looking at a specific case involving Christopher Worrell.
First of all, Christopher Worrell has cancer.
It's non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
And since this guy has been incarcerated, it's since March.
He was arrested in March. He's been confined since then.
He's not getting proper cancer treatment.
Even more telling, he had a bad fall and apparently broke his hand.
And now, when you sustain that kind of injury, you can get medical treatment.
But to get medical treatment, the D.C. Correctional Facility has to deliver the doctor's notes to the U.S. Marshals, who can then take you to the hospital, have you get the necessary treatment, and so on.
Well, the DC correctional officials, and this is, by the way, Corrections Director Quincy Booth and Warden Wanda Patton, two thoroughly rotten individuals, they basically decided, let's deny this guy treatment.
Let's not turn in the notes.
And so, Worrell's lawyers told the judge, judge, they're not delivering the notes.
So the judge basically said to these guys, I want to see those doctors' notes.
And the corrections director and the warden have not provided them.
So the judge goes, okay, fine.
You're in contempt of court.
I'm going to make a finding that you have violated the civil rights of this defendant, and I'm going to refer the matter to the attorney general for investigation and prosecution.
So these guys could actually...
Now, could they? We're talking about, once again, Merrick Garland.
We're talking about some local thugs...
Hey, we're going to report this to Don Corleone himself.
Let's see what he's going to do.
Right. What's he going to do?
I don't know. It is significant.
They have to do something. I don't think they can ignore it.
This is a judicial finding by a D.C. federal court judge.
And he has recourses if they don't do anything.
So right now, they're being very cagey about it.
They realize the significance of it.
And so they're sort of, no comment, no comment, no comment, no comment.
But this is the first confirmation from a judge in the form of a ruling that civil rights of these defendants are being trampled upon.
Now, I don't want to be too excited about this judge.
Let's remember that he's the judge who ordered Christopher Worrell to be incarcerated and locked up in the first place.
Worrell, by the way, his trial is coming up, but he hasn't been found guilty of anything.
It's not clear he needs to be incarcerated.
He's obviously in need of medical treatment.
Why not let the guy be at home, get his medical treatment?
Confine him to house arrest if you have to.
But no, these guys love this idea that they have the power to keep some guy locked up in a 10x10 cell.
So he bears, the judge himself bears, he doesn't bear any responsibility for the denial of medical treatment, of course.
But he bears some responsibility for locking this guy up in the first place where he's at the mercy of of thugs with badges like Quincy Booth, like Wanda Patton, and the ultimate thug with a badge, one attorney general named Merrick Garland.
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Guys, I'm very happy to welcome to the podcast someone I admire very much, Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow in Military History at the Hoover Institution.
Previously, well, Professor Emeritus of Classics at Cal State University, Fresno.
Author of this book, New, The Dying Citizen.
I've been reading it.
It's very provocative, very, very good stuff.
And Victor, welcome to the podcast.
You were just saying to me a minute ago that your book came out this month.
It was right at the top of the charts on Amazon.
And then what happened?
Yeah, it came out, Dinesh, about ten days ago.
It came out two to three.
And I did ten media events.
And then the next day it was, again, ranging between three and two on the Amazon charts.
And then suddenly, a little banner came on and said, out of stock.
And the publisher said, this is impossible that they have 30,000 copies.
No book can sell, you know, 30,000 copies.
Maybe the Bible can.
And then that persisted for about 11 days, 12 days.
And then suddenly, maybe three days ago, after all the media was done and everything, then it suddenly said ships in six or seven days, one day, or two or three days.
So no one can figure out why that one book, if it were supply problems that we hear about in the media, was the only book in the top 20.
To be essentially rendered inert for about 10 days.
Well, I mean, I should mention to you, Victor, we released the movie Trump Card late last year and just the weeks leading up to the election and the identical thing happened.
Amazon declared that they were out of stock, even though they had plenty of stock.
As far as we knew, there were plenty of orders.
So if this were just a single case by itself, it might be an anomaly.
But I smell a rat and I detect a pattern here.
It's just the day. I think I didn't know this because I'm kind of, even though I've written a lot of books, I've never had this happen.
And apparently you do not get credit for a book.
Even though it's purchased in order until it's actually shipped.
And so when you stop the shipment, then you stop ratings.
And I think it's a way of suppressing momentum.
So your ratings go way down and it looks like nobody's buying it or people go to the website and they can't get it.
So they said, I don't want to wait 10 days or whatever, or it's out of stock.
And then even the people who do buy it, the author's not given credit for it until it actually ships out.
I mean, we both know as authors that two to three weeks when a book is out, that's when you establish the momentum for the book.
And if you don't do it then, it's really hard to do it later.
So it's a window of opportunity.
Yeah, I'm planning to play catch-up because it was just put back in stock, I think, two days ago.
Yeah, let's talk about the book.
You call it The Dying Citizen.
And the core concept here, I want people to get a feel for the macro argument of the book.
It's rooted on this concept of citizenship.
So maybe start by telling us, what's the distinction between a citizen and someone who just lives someplace?
What makes you a citizen?
Yes. Well, historically and both contemporarily, we're not subjects, we're not slaves, we're not serfs, we're citizens, we're not residents, we're not tribal members, and that means that we have the power in a In a constitutional sense or legal sense to elect our own representatives, to run for office, to audit and censor and make them accountable, our government officials, to determine revenues and income and expenditures, when to go to war, when not to.
So we have the reins of government in our own hands.
But that depends on us being self-sufficient, independent.
We're not going to be dependent like the poor and look toward government in a quid pro quo fashion that we get subsidies and then we pledge fealty.
Nor are we going to be the rich that inevitably use their vast wealth or influence to sort of leverage government in their own interests.
The middle class was seen in classical times as the origins of the constitutional system and kind of the watchdog of the rich and poor.
And of course, we don't talk like that because the poor romanticize and The rich are demonized, but you cannot have a consensual system unless the middle class is the largest of the three classes and the most empowered.
You said something very interesting, which is that if somebody is a member of the, let's call it the entitled class, the persons who receive benefits from the government and subsist off of those benefits, I think what you're saying is that they're not full citizens in a sense because they are obliged in the same way that the feudal serf was obliged to the Lord to look after him.
And so he had to go to the Lord to get permission for everything he did.
How can one be independent in the full sense of the term if your livelihood is coming and your health care and your food is all coming from a source that you become beholden to?
And you can really see that in California, Nash, where I'm speaking from today.
And we have all of these liberal and conservative writers, and they use the word medieval or feudal or clerisy to talk about the wealthy, because we have about eight to nine million people, the middle class, who left.
We had about 8 to 10 million people who were very poor, who came often through illegal auspices across our southern border the last 30 years.
And then we had the largest concentration of wealth in civilizational history, four or five trillion dollars of market capitalization in Apple.
You know, Google and Facebook and Twitter, et cetera, in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley corridor.
And so we don't have a middle class.
We have a one-party system in California, and it's run by a coastal elite and then a dependent peasant class where I am in the Central Valley or maybe the Sierra foothills or the far north.
And you can really see that the quality of life, crime, infrastructure, it's all declining because there's no one who says, don't build high-speed rail, that's for elite people.
I want the 99 Freeway, or I need some water in that reservoir.
I don't really care about a new law that says if you loot a store and it's less than $900, we're not going to prosecute it.
The legislation is sort of the fixation of the rich intended to, I don't know, romanticize the distant poor, but it's not concerned with the middle class.
Is one of the things you're saying that California is the left's model for all of America?
Yeah, no, that's absolutely true.
Remember Michael Bloomberg in his...
A boarded campaign said just that.
California is where we want to go.
We admired it. And Gavin Newsom said during the quarantine, this is the place where we're going to have a chance for a new progressive capitalism during the quarantine.
So it would never waste a crisis.
And everybody looks at this on the left is where we want to go.
Whereas most people in the country say this is a unique tragedy where they have the highest basket of gasoline, income, sales, taxes, and then they have the worst services, almost as if the more you feed this government animal, the less concerned it is about people.
It exists for itself.
It's a very strange disconnect.
It's a dysfunctional state, and yet the left knows that it's dysfunctional because half of the people in California, and especially the Bay Area, have polled that they want to leave.
And yet they continue down that path ideologically.
When we come back, I want to look at the various threats to the idea of citizenship that have come from three or four key different directions.
I'll be back with Victor Davis Hanson.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, the author of terrific book, The Dying Citizen, now available on Amazon and elsewhere.
Victor, let's talk about the fact that citizenship, as you lay out in the book, is sort of assaulted from different directions.
One of the threats comes from, the phrase you use is, tribalism.
And you say of tribes that they are They are deeply reactionary.
You call them pre-citizens.
It's almost as if this was the state of mankind before citizenship, and yet, ironically, it is the state that the left wants to go back to.
Yeah, I think everybody realizes that it is pre-civilizational, and it was seen so by the creators of citizenship in Greece and Rome.
It's the Latin word tribus for three tribes that controlled Rome without full inclusion of citizens.
And it really boils down to that your superficial appearance is not going to be incidental to who you are.
As an American, but it's going to be the essential determinant of how you look at the world, how you're treated, how you treat other people.
Well, it's a very backward idea.
And in the first part of the book, I said there are these pre-civilizational forces.
One is the destruction of the middle class.
Another one is residents versus citizens and the equality among them.
They're almost synonymous now, even though That wasn't always the case in the United States, and that's because of no borders.
But I think you're right to focus on tribalism because I can't think of a model, maybe you can, Dinesh, where it has ever worked in a constitutional system.
Yugoslavia never worked.
Rwanda, it led to bloodshed.
The Soviets, maybe, or the late Roman Empire, the Ottomans, but they required a degree of coercion to force people to give up their tribal identities, which we can't do.
So we were the only one You know in India that it doesn't quite work as well as here, a multiracial democracy, and it doesn't work as well as in Brazil.
And so we were really unique, and why at this late date in our history, 233 years?
Constitutional success. And after so much effort, after slavery and Jim Crow and the civil rights, we would revert back to that tribalism.
I don't know. And people will start to self-identify as tribalists once they figure that everybody else goes tribal for their own protection.
That's what happens in history.
Why do you think it got started?
I mean, we're living at a time when, let's just say, a black kid or a Latino kid on a campus is not only very unlikely to experience bad treatment, but is going to find an entire campus that defers almost sycophantically to their wishes and wants, that bends over backwards, to put it mildly.
So what would be the, is it that precisely because of that reason?
Yes, I think it is. Yeah, that they realize that this is the source of my power and therefore I should italicize this aspect of me that's different because that's how I cash in on all these benefits.
Absolutely. I think what happened, the Democratic Party had been traditionally identified, even whether nobly or demagogically, with class.
So they were the white working class or the lunch bucket people.
And then that was supposed to be synonymous with minorities that were coming up as new immigrants or African-Americans coming into full citizenship after the civil rights.
But what's happened...
Partly because of the growth in government, partly because Barack Obama redefined the persecuted as diverse rather than African American, and said, all you have to claim is not being white, and you're now part of what was Jesse Jackson's old rainbow coach.
Now you're not 12% of a victim class, you're 30%.
And you have claims against the majority culture.
And in that process, then it evolved with, you know, Professor Kendi and now with the Biden people.
We're at a point where race is...
Substitute for class very conveniently, as you say, because we're at this absurdity where the Mamas venture out of Martha's Vineyard and talk about their daughters being endangered or Meghan Markle and her $14 million mansion winds to open her $90 million mansion a few miles away at Montecito, on and on. And you saw it with the BLM co-founder, Phyllis Queller.
She's immediately bought four homes, the Panda Canyon, Professor Kendi, $20,000 per Zoom.
Our penance for corporatists.
So I think the Democratic Party said, well, you know, this is an upward mobile society and Marxism has never worked here and now with the white working class Uh, is not the only, uh, is not just privilege.
The African Americans and non-white are doing very well, so we've got to replace the middle class idea of populism with race.
And that way you have a permanent stamp as a victim or an oppressed, no matter what's your economic status.
So we can have Don Lamone, we can have anybody On television, LeBron James, $1 billion in net assets, Colin Kaepernick worth $80 billion.
They are victims forever, and they have not moved out of the lower to the middle to the upper classes, and therefore, under traditional terms, is no longer an oppressed.
They're always going to be oppressed.
So that gives them a permanent class to start with.
And I can tell you, you mentioned very quickly the university, and you can be An aristocrat from Argentina with blue eyes and blonde hair, you're a victim.
You can go from Oaxaca State as an indigenous person and be persecuted by the Mexican government, put one foot in the United States and you become an instant victim of American oppression for terms of hiring and admissions.
It was a brilliant idea.
We, on the conservative side, said it'll never work because Jesse Jackson was never able to pull it off.
You know, to unite all these diverse groups.
But these people were far more sophisticated than he was.
And they did pull it off. You have a very poignant section in the book where you talk about how you started a program to expose all these minority kids and others to the classics.
And so here you had Latino kids and black kids reading Aristotle and reading Plato and reading about the Greeks and the Romans and feeling a sense of intellectual community And also feeling a sense that this knowledge will empower them to better their lot in life, to become more educated, get better jobs.
Talk about how that kind of ideal, which I think was the American ideal for accommodating diversity within a framework of unity, that seems to be all gone now.
It does. And I think part of it is that it was predicated on the idea that immigration would be diverse, measured, and people would come with the idea they wanted to assimilate and the host would want to assimilate them.
But when you start getting 2 million people this year in the fiscal year scheduled to come under illegal auspices, And their culture will be untouchable as far as criticism comes.
Then it's very hard to buck that trend and tell them, give up your tribal identity because you've already given it up when you left.
You made that choice. And we will give you the tools that you can beat the people at Andover or you can, as Teddy Roosevelt said, you can be as much American as the sixth generation if you master their system, which you apparently wanted.
And so... And then the other thing was that, as you know, from Larry Elder's experience in California and others, that minorities who are conservative are especially despised by the affluent white left because they feel that in a very patronizing fashion that they didn't repay their rights.
There are benefits for the minority class with political loyalty or political subservience.
And so when you see an African American or somebody who's quote unquote not white, and he's conservative or traditional or likes America, then the whites say, well, wait a minute.
I didn't champion your cause for you to go off on these tangents when I did this for you.
So I'm just, that's a windy way of saying when I was at Cal State Fresno, the biggest hurdle was not white professors in the business school.
It was always the La Raza Studies Department.
Or the African-American studies.
And they would say to my students or to me, you're culturally appropriating.
You should be studying and emphasized.
And a lot of it was out of inferiority complex in the sense that I was having students, especially in their senior level, that were no more history and language and more languages than their professors in the ethnic studies.
And they thought that they were uppity or they were...
One person said, I remember, said, I had one of your students He's a Mexican-American fellow, and he said, he challenges me, and he thinks he's better than I am.
And so I think they don't want people to be empowered and be treated as individuals rather than a horde or a tribe.
Victor, guys, this is the kind of stuff you're going to find in this book.
It's riveting. It's fascinating.
It puts our current moment into a wider context.
Victor Davis Hanson, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Well, thank you for having me, Dinesh.
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I'm continuing here my discussion of the American founders, and specifically John Adams.
I've already discussed Jefferson.
I've discussed Hamilton and Madison.
And by the way, if you haven't watched my videos, please do it.
It's on PragerU.com, five five-minute videos.
But here's a little clip from those videos of my segment on atoms.
Listen. Adams practiced what he preached.
In this way, he became a public figure, both incorruptible and unfailingly honest.
He became the best version of himself.
This takes us back to the founders' conception of happiness.
They subscribe to the Aristotelian belief that genuine happiness is achieved when the activity of the soul is in perfect harmony with virtue.
None of the founders reflected on this idea more than John Adams.
Yes, Adams was a sort of apostle, you might say, of civic virtue.
When we think of the American founding, think of the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now, John Locke had spoken about life, liberty, and property as being basic rights.
Very interestingly here, the founders, and this was penned by Jefferson, come up with a broader phrase than property.
It's the pursuit of happiness.
But how do you pursue happiness, you may ask?
Well, some people say, well, you know, I pursue it in my own way.
Everybody pursues happiness kind of the way they...
But this relativist conception of happiness was not shared by the American founders.
For them, happiness wasn't like whatever you choose, whatever floats your boat, that kind of thing.
No. Happiness had content.
Happiness was shaped by, was in fact defined, by a specific mode of character that we can call American.
So then the question becomes, what is this character?
Now, interestingly here, I think we can look at America's first two presidents, not just Adams, but George Washington.
Washington was number one, Adams was number two, and both of them saw character not as something private, but as something that you exhibit in public.
Character involves reputation, how you are seen by others.
Washington and Adams both knew that human beings want to be praised, they want to be admired, they want to be liked by others.
We value the esteem of others, and we especially value the esteem of those that we esteem.
But Adams and Washington also thought we should value the esteem of posterity, of people who come after us.
Now, their idea of character, if you want to understand what it is, think of a character in a play.
What does a character do?
A character puts on a role, and that role is not identical with themselves, the way they are.
That character is a posture that they assume.
Now, in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius says to Laertes,"...to thine own self be true." In other words, you know, be yourself.
But for Washington and for Adams, this was really bad advice.
Why? Because human beings are very imperfect.
Human beings are a kind of mixture of good and bad, of admirable and abominable qualities.
So, be yourself simply means accentuate that.
But no, their goal was accentuate the good and minimize the bad.
In other words, you've got to learn to make yourself a better person than you are already.
Don't be yourself.
Be the best version of what you can be.
Now, how do you do that? Well, you do that by taking on, quote, character, almost like in a play.
And so this is basically what Washington would do, and Washington writes about this.
It's very, very sort of poignant.
Essentially, Washington thought there is a public figure...
George Washington, that I want to be.
That figure is stoic, is admirable, is brave, never shows weakness.
And Washington, in a sense, carved himself, took on that character.
It wasn't natural to him.
Very often, character as the best version of ourselves is not natural to us.
We have to unnaturally assume it.
We have to put on the garb, if you will.
So what would Washington do?
He would try to walk like that guy.
That character, the best version of himself.
He tried to think like him.
He tried to feel like him.
He tried to act like him. And the idea was through continual effort, through habit.
Remember, habit is sometimes called second nature.
So habit can remake your existing nature by making it actually better.
You want to be an honest person?
Be truthful in everything you do, and after you do it time after time after time, it will become a habit, and then it will come naturally to you, although for most people, honesty doesn't always come naturally.
So, this is how Washington became this figure of sort of almost supernatural, you know, rectitude and strength.
But Adams, too.
Adams, as I said in the clip, was incorruptible, unfailingly honest.
Now, I quoted in the clip Aristotle who says, happiness is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.
And no founder was more obsessed with virtue.
Not just his own virtue, but the virtue of the society that he was helping to make.
How do we inculcate that virtue in society?
I mentioned, I think, last time...
That for Adams, virtue was the masculine virtues, the civic virtues, the virtues of classical antiquity.
These are political or public virtues.
They include prudence.
They include temperance.
They include courage, magnanimity.
So these are the virtues that Adams wanted to see in the New Republic.
I'm going to quote him here. The preservation of liberty depends on the intellectual and moral character of the people.
As long as knowledge and virtue So you see at the end here what Adams is getting at.
His idea isn't just virtue to prepare you for the next life, virtue so that your friends can trust you.
All of that's true, because Adams was a devout Christian.
But at the same time, Adams is saying, no, what virtue here is the creation of free, independent, and responsible citizens who Who are going to be difficult for tyrannical people to subdue and to enslave.
I'll close with this point.
Adams says that in a monarchy, the people don't need to be all that virtuous.
Kind of an odd statement. But why?
Well, simply because the king tells you what to do.
Just do it. You don't have to think for yourself.
You don't have to cultivate good qualities.
Just obey. But in a self-governing republic, says Adams, the people are the government.
And so the responsibility that would ordinarily attach only to the king now attaches to you and to me and to every other citizen.
So we need to cultivate the virtues appropriate to self-government if we are, in fact, to save the republic.
I hope, guys, you're enjoying the podcast.
And if you are, whether on Apple or YouTube, make sure you subscribe.
And if you're on YouTube, also hit the notifications button so you're notified when podcasts go up.
Tell other people about it because I'd like to get the word out, like to see if we can get some more people to come on board.
We're going to do a question today.
Let's go to today's mailbox.
Listen. Hey Dinesh, I got two questions for you.
What does a day in the life of Dinesh D'Souza look like?
How much time do you dedicate to the podcast, personal reading, or writing do you do?
And the second question is, what book have you re-read that on the second time have you walked away with a different conclusion or perspective than your first?
Love your podcast and keep up the good work.
Thank you. Wow.
I told Debbie, I go, these are two very different, and the second one, kind of a very intriguing question, and I want to kind of do justice to both, so I'm actually extending a little bit of extra time to try to answer both your questions.
I'll start with the first one.
Our daily life. I think many people may be surprised to realize our daily life is actually very simple.
It's very mundane.
Debbie's kind of chuckling because it's not, you know, this is not celebrity life.
I'm not like at the Met Gala with my, you know, here's my outfit, you know, sulk the pour.
No, no, no. My ordinary life, you know, interrupted by speaking, which I do periodically.
Not as much now under the kind of COVID era than I used to before.
I used to be on the road a fair amount.
Now the podcast has given me a kind of an anchor.
So, my day.
Well, I'll start kind of at the end of the day because what I do typically in the evening or the late afternoon when I get home from the podcast is I'll kind of sketch out my ideas for what's coming up tomorrow.
And I make little folders.
Sometimes I'll see articles that interest me.
I'll just sort of drop them into each folder and And I'm very old school, so I use physical, you know, manila folders.
None of this computer folders.
Physical folders, but then I don't really work on it because new things can develop and there can be...
I try to keep the podcast really timely.
So I wake up early in the morning.
In fact, we both do. We get up at 4.45.
I know, ridiculously early.
And Debbie actually hits the workout.
I can't believe that she's basically on the bike.
No result. She goes, where are the results?
Yeah, where are the results is a good question.
Well, I typically will do my workout after the podcast in the early afternoon.
But what I do is I'll spend about an hour of reading in the morning before breakfast to prepare for the podcast.
That way I feel like, okay, I kind of know what's going on and I sort of know where I'm going to go.
You know, I wing these segments.
I don't write them out. I don't have a teleprompter or I just make it up as I go along.
But I do it based upon topics and articles and things happening in the news.
So I'm very often reacting to those.
Then I get home. I have lunch.
We basically have kind of a small...
Modest lunch. Debbie makes this great tuna salad.
We use the uprising bread, which I've actually talked about and has advertised on the podcast.
We have our lunch with a smoothie, and then I do my workout in the afternoon.
Then I'll often do some reading.
I also like to play chess, and these days I play chess on the computer, so I play against opponents all over the world.
And I'm kind of at the upper end of the intermediate level.
I'm a good player. I'm not great.
I can't be the... I'm not contender for the world championship or anything.
But nevertheless, it's fun to play people at my own level.
And these games are five minutes apiece.
So the whole game is over in ten minutes.
Five minutes for you, five minutes for me.
We have dinner typically...
What would you say, honey? 5, 5.30.
Pretty early. We like to eat early.
And then we have to sign out early, because after all, we're like up at 4.45.
So none of this sleeping, this staying awake till midnight, we basically sign out early to be able to get started.
So we've become, I wouldn't say we're naturally morning people, but we kind of are.
Now let me turn to your second question, which is, what book...
This caused me to think a little bit, because I think the book that I read differently...
In later years than I did initially, is John Locke's essay concerning human understanding and his two treatises.
What's interesting about Locke is when you first read him, he's a bit of a plotter.
He has a very conventional sort of surface, a superficial conventionality, I would call it.
But when you begin to probe deeper, and I only did this as I got older and re-read Locke, I began to realize that he's actually more radical.
He's less Christian.
He's more of a skeptic.
He's actually a hedonist.
What's a hedonist? A hedonist is somebody who believes that pain and pleasure are the only two forces in the world.
He doesn't even believe in any other goods that transcend pain or pleasure.
In fact, he interprets Christianity in hedonistic terms.
He basically says that an important reason to worship God is because look what God can do to you if you don't.
In other words, God can inflict terrible pain on you for eternal life.
You'll be in hell forever.
So we, in other words, it's almost like he's giving a reason to, you know, fear and hate God, but nevertheless to obey him out of craven submission and in the way that a slave may obey a master.
So when I read this in my later readings of Locke, I was a little shocked by it because the kind of notion of Locke as this kind of country gentleman essentially articulating vaguely Christian premises all the way through, I realized this is not the case.
And then later I also came across the work of Leo Strauss, the philosopher who's influenced me a lot.
I'll talk about him, probably do a series on him at some point in the podcast.
But Strauss talks about the fact that philosophers throughout the centuries...
have engaged in what he calls exoteric and esoteric readings.
Exoteric readings are the sort of surface reading, the outer reading, the first glance reading, and the esoteric reading is sort of the hidden reading, the reading between the lines, so to speak, the reading intended not for the general public, but for fellow philosophers.
So a philosopher can be saying something general, but he could also be addressing his own fellow philosophers in another kind of language hidden within the general.
And Strauss reads Plato that way.
He reads some of the other philosophers that way.
And Strauss's point is the reason philosophers do this is because there are certain truths that they want to discuss among philosophers, but are not safe to push into the public square, partly because they may suffer persecution, political persecution, religious persecution.
Part of it is that the general public may not even be interested in these broader issues.
They want to address their fellow philosophers about specific issues.
So, I won't go too far down that road.
I'll simply say that Locke is my Exhibit A, but there are other exhibits of philosophers who say one thing on the surface, but when you probe beneath the surface, deeper currents, if you will, a second sort of squeezed lemon juice on the text reading begins to then excitingly, but also in some ways very controversially emerge.
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