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Feb. 10, 2021 - Epoch Times
01:04:07
Victor Davis Hanson on Impeachment and the ‘Cancer’ of Woke Ideology | American Thought Leaders
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So this is part of the insidious, nightmarish phenomenon of wokeism that creates a pressure upon all of us.
We have a little devil on our shoulder, an angel on one side, and the devil says, hey, hey, hey, you're getting older, you're tired.
Why don't you just kind of do a public confessional?
You know, maybe write something for the Never Trump group, or say that you understand it, or, you know, just condemn Trump a couple of times more.
In this episode we sit down with classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson.
We discuss the rise of critical social justice and woke ideology, growing limits on freedom of speech, and his take on the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.
It's like a public shaming, like the Communist Party used to make people wear dunce caps.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
You might be aware that YouTube actually demonetized this channel.
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It's in the description below.
Thank you for having me.
This is an unprecedented situation.
Two impeachments of a president or attempted impeachments of a president.
Through your lens of a historian or looking at American politics, tell me what's happening here.
Is there a historical precedent for this?
No, we've never impeached a president twice.
Actually, this is the third time that were formal impeachment proceedings were initiated.
The first one in 2017 failed.
The second one in 2019, of course, succeeded.
But we've never done it three times.
We've never done it two times.
We've never done it against a president who's no longer in office.
We've never done it without a chief justice sitting as the Constitution provides.
So that's new.
The way to look at it is, one, It's sort of a mercenary effort to make sure Donald Trump can't run again for office because the Constitution says that a person is successfully impeached, that he's ineligible for higher office.
That's one.
Two is to discredit his supporters, the MAGA agenda, and say that he's synonymous with violence, sedition, insurrection, the Capitol rally of January 6.
Three is to get our mind off what's going on.
We have We have a just record number of executive orders of the most radical kind.
We have radical appointments at the DOJ, the State Department, the National Security Agency, National Security Council.
So that's another thing, this distraction.
And most importantly, from a bipartisan point of view, think of all the time that we're spending on this Trump Obsession trying to destroy Donald Trump's political corpse.
We're $28 trillion in debt right now.
We're going to be $30 trillion.
No one's talking about balancing the budget.
Nobody's talking about reducing the debt.
So we're on the horizon eventually after the boom of the lockdown ending.
And I think Biden will get credit for the Trump and economic reforms.
But we are going to see either inflation stagflation or a loss of Economic productivity.
That's coming.
We're not talking about that.
California just lost $10 billion in overpayments or fraudulent payments to COVID recipients.
Nobody knows why or how that happened.
Nobody's talking about that.
But most seriously is the drag on the economy, on the culture, on the society of this woke mandate.
And by that I mean One of the reasons the United States outpaced the Islamic world, or the communist world, or the fascist world, was that we had a creativity and a spontaneity of expression and ideas.
But when you burden that, you can do heart research, but only in a way to glorify Allah.
Or you can't go there, you can't make a lighthouse in Istanbul in the 19th century if it's too powerful because it will take away Respect for the Supreme Deity.
Or in the Soviet Union, you can talk about land tenure in the ancient world when you're doing research, but only in the context of the class struggle in the modern world.
Or when I read a book about the Mycenaeans or Sparta in the 1930s in Germany, from 1933 to 1939, even the most brilliant scholarship is worthless because it always has something like—and of course, The Spartans understood early on the value of racial categorization and hierarchy and what was inferior and what wasn't.
And so what we're doing with these workshops, these indoctrinations, these qualifiers, these paranoid deterrents that we're using is that we're slowing down everything.
And this generation is going to be looked back in retrospect as a failed generation that contributed nothing because it was burdened with this ideological bridle.
And so I'm really worried about, we're right in the middle of it, but the time and resources that we spend on wokeness from K-12 or universities or corporations or sports.
I was watching the Super Bowl commercials yesterday and I mean they all have an ideological intent and they're trying to put particular classes of races of people deliberately to protect them in a way that It doesn't represent the demography necessarily of the United States.
Maybe it's noble in purpose, but that's what we're doing everywhere.
It's ironic because what hurt America for much of its history was that we didn't allow African Americans to contribute their talents.
And now what we're doing is that we're going back to that idea of racial categorization.
So if you've got a brilliant future neurophysicist who happens to be Asian and he needs to get to Harvard or MIT, he's not going to get in.
Things like that are very worrisome.
So, Victor, there's so many things you just mentioned that I want to build upon a little further.
Before we do that, I want to talk a bit about just the nomenclature of impeachment, I guess you'd call it.
People have heard that former President Trump has been impeached twice.
However, he has not been convicted.
And so what's the distinction here?
Yeah, it's important that the terms are so loosely conflated that I think it confuses people.
Impeachment is the indictment process, like a federal prosecutor or a state local district attorney.
So when you impeach a president, you only need 51% of the vote of the House.
And it's much easier to do than to convict a president.
So once those impeachment indictments are established, The Speaker takes them over and hands them to the Senate, and then that becomes the trial, like a modern trial.
That requires a two-thirds majority, 66 senators, to convict a president, something we've never done.
We didn't do it in January of 2020, and we're not going to do it in February of 2021, and that's known in advance.
That tells you that This is performance art.
It's not a serious attempt to either remove Donald Trump during his tenure or to ban him from office in his retirement.
It's like a public shaming, like the Communist Party used to make people wear dunce caps.
That's what it's intended for.
Well, so this is actually a very interesting point.
You know, a number of, you know, one of the founders of the Epoch Times, actually, I was having a discussion about this.
She actually lived through as a child through the Cultural Revolution, was relocated to the countryside to basically do work and saw live a lot of these shamings.
And what year does she remembers that time?
And she's It is, and so are the public confessionals.
Somebody is fired from the New York Times For a thought crime 30 years ago are indiscreet expressions, and they have to have this effusive apology.
I didn't know what I'm doing.
I was ignorant.
I wasn't properly advised.
I didn't have the training that I have now.
I want to apologize to marginalized people.
The vocabulary is even reminiscent of the Soviet or Chinese system.
We say these same words, privilege.
Now we have a new one, unearned privilege.
We come up with a sloganeering.
One of the most dangerous that appeared in the last six weeks, From the left and the left-wing media is, it's not about free speech, it's about free reach.
And they said, we're not trying to cancel people's First Amendment rights by barring them from Facebook or Twitter or from universities.
We're just saying that you don't have an inherent constitutional right to use a platform that you don't own.
But that's entirely antithetical to the whole civil rights movement.
I can remember in 1964 in California, there was something called the Fair Housing movement.
And what it said was, if you own an apartment building or a house, or you're the head of a community or residential homeowners association, you can't tell an African American or an Armenian American or an Asian American, sorry, You can buy a house anywhere you want.
The fact that we control 99% of the houses in town is your problem, not ours.
You just go out and find a house, but you're not going to have a house with us.
That was rejected by the Supreme Court, that idea.
The idea that you can bar somebody from a private but a public quasi-shared entity and then expect them to go out and Twitter or social media when you block that alternative.
And that's the argument that the left is using, which was once a racist reactionary trope.
So Victor, we recently saw this coordinated, what some people have described as a takedown, I think that's a fair assertion, of The Parler social network across multiple big tech companies and so forth.
And again, so we're talking about a time of unprecedented moments.
This was apparently an unprecedented exercise of power, ostensibly to limit freedom of speech.
What's your take on this?
Well, remember the context in which the cancellation of Parler, the ostracism of it, so it wouldn't have access to apps and platforms to be disseminated.
It came in the Jacobin taking care of business after the election.
During the election cycle, but after the election, that decision was formulated and then reified.
So it was in part and parcel of saying to Donald Trump, you're not going to be on Facebook or Twitter anymore, and we're going to make sure that you're not going to have access to an alternative like.
So it was a night of the long nights in the sense that it was Facebook and Google and Twitter, all of them in various ways, They conspired to rob Donald Trump as public enemy number one of an avenue to disseminate his ideas, but what was unprecedented, they made sure that he would not have another means of refuge in their genre.
In other words, they controlled not just 90% of our internet searches are done by Google, and Twitter and Facebook have about 65 to 70% of the international market.
But they said, we don't want you to participate in what we can't control, so we're going to control that too.
The irony is that at some point, they understand that half the country is not on board with them, roughly, and there's a lot of them And they have competitors, but there's very little competitors for Parler.
So if it were to get back up, and there's indications I guess it's going to be back up this week, it would have for a while what Fox News used to have, a monopoly on the right, and it grew spectacularly.
And so I would imagine that they don't really understand what they're seeding.
They're seeding half the country to one entity.
And that entity is determined to take advantage of that.
And I could foresee a situation in which you might have not just the 20 million, it's grown from 1 million, probably to 20 million in this week, to 40 million to 80 million.
And I don't think they have any idea of what they're doing.
They're creating two systems of information access, a conservative and a liberal one.
And they've done that with cable television.
They've Cable television, remember, in part was a reaction to the monopoly they had on the network news and public television.
When they try to control all of these levers, there are reactions.
People don't watch the NBA. Their audience is 43% the size that it used to be.
Super Bowl viewership is down.
Hollywood movies are down.
So people make the necessary adjustments.
So Victor, what do you think about this apparent obsession with controlling the information?
I mean, that's really what you're describing here.
You know, Atlas Huxley and Brave New World, George Orwell, there is a common theme and Orwell explicitly summed it up as he who controls the past controls the future and you control the past to the present.
By maintaining that monopoly on informational dissemination, they can warp people along with academia and K-12.
And by that I mean, if you and I had this conversation two years ago, we wouldn't know what 1619 was.
Our children are going to be coming home from school and lecturing us that we're racist for not acknowledging that 1619 was a more important date than 1776.
That was absurd.
But these things are geometric, they're not arithmetic.
So we're going to see changes that are snowballing that are going to make 1619 look pretty minor in comparison.
Remember, we were told that they just wanted to go after Confederate generals, They did not want to go after Frederick Douglass or Abe Lincoln.
They just wanted to change the name at Stanford University of Father Sarah.
They did not want to go into San Francisco and rename 44 schools and use Wikipedia as their basis of information.
That's where we are, and that happens.
The Bolsheviks did that, Mao did that, the Jacobins, and then they reached a critical mass And there's a pushback.
And that's very critical to watch how the pushback formulates and what's the reaction to it, because I wish I could tell you that the pushback is successful.
Obviously, it was not in 1917 to 1922.
It was not from 1946 to 1949 in China.
It wasn't successful for 18 months during the reign of terror.
But often it is, and there is a pushback.
And if we can have a pushback and people, according to their station, can speak out against it, we can stop it because it has no intellectual foundation to it.
There's no rational, logical exegesis that explains why a school should not be named after Abe Lincoln, or why you would tear down a statue of Miguel Cervantes.
And this is Orwellian what's happening, so we have to push back, all of us.
We can't ask people that are high school teachers without tenure or part-time workers or people who are in a police force to be outspoken, but those of us in the media or in academia that have some institutional protection, at least for now, I think have a duty to exercise their First Amendment rights.
Victor, so speaking of Orwellian, you just recently published this op-ed, basically titled Our Animal Farm, probably my favourite book as a kid.
And there's this whole kind of process in the book, of course, for those that have read it, but just hopefully a lot of people, is...
There is this progression from the sort of initial ideological beginnings of a movement to what's ostensibly raw power.
And you actually kind of show this beginning to happen here, and I found this very disturbing.
Yeah, Animal Farm, remember, was an allegory written in 1945 by George Orwell that made animals on a farm talk as if they were human.
And they rebel against a so-called capitalist, exploitive Farmer Jones.
They take it over and have a commune.
And it starts out really well.
Then you start to see the Trotskyite divisions with Lenin, and then Stalin comes in.
And at the end of the novel, the pigs are walking on two feet, they're drinking, they're playing cards, and the farm is a bigger mess than it was under Farmer Jones.
And Orwell's point is that these totalitarian revolutions on the part of the left are not really consistent with equality of opportunity or helping the poor, their means to obtain power, and therefore they're full of contradictions.
And what happens is that people who question them along the way or feel that the purity of the revolution is in danger, they get extinguished as counter-revolutionaries.
So today on a campus, If you were a wishy-washy liberal and you say, wait a minute, the 60s were about the free speech movement and Mario Salvio.
It wasn't about calling somebody a hate speaker.
That person will be destroyed, and destroyed more often and more severely even than a conservative.
We saw Barry Weiss at the New York Times or editors fired at the Washington Post.
Or Hollywood actors who used to be liberal who were deplatformed.
And so you have to weed out all counter-revolutionaries, as they call them.
And then ultimately, it's almost there at its apex today, because if you ask yourself some 60s questions, do you support the First Amendment?
Obviously, if you have microaggressions, safe spaces, deplatforming speakers, no.
Second institution.
Are you skeptical the powers of the surveillance state, the FBI, the CIA, the whole Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ersberg cause?
No, we love John Brennan.
We love what they did with the Steele dossier.
We love the surveillance of Carter Page.
We think Russian hoax still exists.
So you don't believe that the right—you told us in the 60s that they were conspiracy theorists.
They believed in precious bodily fluids or who lost China, and these were all conspiracies with the John Birch Society.
But now you like conspiracies that Trump colluded with the Russians or that he somehow planned the capital takeover.
So the left engages in conspiracy theories.
So all of the idealism that they told us that we had to embrace in the 60s have gone by the wayside, and now they are what they used to protest against.
With the one qualifier, they're much cruder and more venomous than the opponents that they took on in the 60s.
There was a coarseness of society, and so now it's not just You engage in hate speech, and therefore you don't have First Amendment rights, but you are a blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank.
So they picked up that 60s coarseness and crudity, and they've embedded or glued it onto this new intolerance.
Victor, you're saying that people should stand up and speak out.
And I think there's probably no other way to respond to these things.
But perhaps because of exactly what you just described, this kind of very, I guess, crude attack on anybody who does, right?
Basically, this strong incentive structure or disincentive structure to make sure people don't.
And I'm sure a lot of people out there don't want to say anything.
I find myself not wanting to say certain things often, because I just want to keep the peace.
Absolutely.
I think it was in November, the Stanford Daily and the Faculty Senate did a series of attacks on me, and they said that I was engaging in conspiracy theories.
And therefore, I was responsible for the type of things that were happening, violence supposedly.
So in my response, I said, could you please quantify that?
Tell me exactly what I said, because I got a lot of criticism for the right that suggested that they should not go beyond the lawsuits that failed and they should accept the electors, not because I necessarily didn't think there were Improprieties and 100 million mail-in early voting ballots, but I didn't see the practicality when you had two Senate seats in Georgia.
But that's irrelevant.
What my point was, they go after you, and then they make you want to think, I better move weight a little bit to the left or to moderate.
But if you start to do that, it's never enough.
And they interpret that weakness Not as magnanimity, and they won't reciprocate, but as weakness to be exploited, and then they'll push, push, push.
That's how the mind of the leftist works.
They understand that, and there's no consequences.
Notice how the news cycle has changed slightly.
We heard now for three weeks that Donald Trump was this ogre, that he was an insurrectionist, he was a seditionist, he used words like fight on, and he caused people From a position of power to do violent acts, and all the pleading in the world didn't help.
Liz Cheney's effort to condemn Trump more so than she would ever condemn AOC or any of these other people.
What finally got their attention when they announced that they're going to play a series of videos where Maxine Waters or Kamala Harris Or Chuck Schumer engages in the very type of insurrectionary or what they call incendiary speech that Donald Trump does.
And what will get their attention when they go across the aisle and say, this Republican cannot be on this minority community.
From the first time in the history of the House, we're not going to allow you to pick your own committee assignments.
The only thing that will stop that, I hate to say it, human nature being what it is, is for the Republicans to say to them, we're going to take power in 24 months.
The first thing we're going to do is strip AOC and Representative Omar of their committee assignments because they have a long history of anti-Semitism.
And if they do that, they will be left alone.
If they don't do that, Then they're going to be like the Kerensky movement or something, or they're going to be like Danton in the French Revolution.
They think these people will listen to logic, but they're in a period of hysteria and frenzy.
None of them like to say them witch trials, and they're not coherent.
And the only thing they understand is reciprocity.
And if you do that, I think if the Republicans would say tomorrow, We're going to take the House.
That's our goal.
And when we're in the House, we're going to select a special prosecutor.
We're going to demand one, at least from the Congress.
And we're going to look into the whole Biden family's We're going to look at the tax returns of Joe Biden to see if there was any truth into the email that he was the big guy in 10% and got money that he did not report.
And we're going to have this special prosecutor.
And we want to warn you in advance.
That we're going to file articles of impeachment if we find something against it.
I think it would be a very different world.
We would have all the liberal commentators say, oh my God, look what's happened.
We're a third world.
We're back and forth.
Can't we have unity?
But they would listen.
What we have now is Joe Biden saying, the election's over.
We have to come together.
We have to have unity.
Oh, but by the way, Ted Cruz and Joss Hawley are like Goebbels, and they're Nazis.
Or by the way, Maxine Waters said, Donald Trump should be charged with murder.
Or by the way, Antifa is only an idea, according to Joe Biden.
Or we're going to watch a touchy-feely, fuzzy commercial from Bruce Springsteen the other day on this Super Bowl.
And it's all about him driving in this New Jersey urban creature who's a multi-multi-millionaire.
It's good old Bruce, wringing his ear, T-shirt, riding the Jeep, bringing the interior of America back, the White Alps, let's bring it back.
Okay, fine.
But this is the same guy who said he was going to move to Australia because he was ashamed to be an American.
Donald Trump was a nightmare and did all he could, according to his huge megaphone, to create disunity.
That's how the left works.
Tacitus had it right.
When he has a British tribal chieftain who says of the Romans' effort to bring peace, he says, you create a desert and you call it peace.
Well, they create chaos and hatred and they call it unity.
And I don't think people should accept that.
Victor, what you're making me think of here as you're discussing this is there's been this kind of increasing talk of enacting some kind of domestic terror laws to deal with, I guess, ostensibly what was revealed after January 6th with white supremacy, with these sorts of things.
But There's a lot of concern.
I've had a number of people speak to me that these kinds of rules could be applied very broadly and could, frankly, include anybody who was a Trump supporter that would be included in this designation.
I mean, it's unclear.
It's unknown.
And everything you've been describing to me right now makes me wonder.
Well, that was the intent.
The intent was, as we saw from engaging the help of Bank of America to go through without the knowledge of its own clients, customers, to go through and examine their charge card, visa cards, to see who was in Washington at what time, where were they, what did they buy?
So we're not just going after the rioters in the Capitol, we're going after people who also attended the rally, and by extension, Trump supporters in general.
The LA Times published a very interesting op-ed a few days ago, and it's from a woman who says, I had to leave New York, very liberal, and I went to a conservative rural community, i.e.
de facto, insidiously, and maybe in...
She's directly admitting that a red state area is more conducive to her safety than would be New York right now, kind of an escape from New York admission.
But then she says, in this big snowstorm, my neighbor came in and he, without even asking, in very gracious fashion, he cleaned my driveway.
But he's a Trumper.
So I'm not going to thank him, and I'm under no obligation—and either or any of you who read this—that think you have to be nice, because Trump people owe you something.
So when these people are obviously trying to win our thanks, our gratitude, or they're trying so hard to be normalized, or what the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson said, deprogrammed, we're not going to accept it.
It's going to be eternal war against these people.
They have to pay penance in the medieval fashion.
Again, you can't reason with these people.
You have to stop them and remind them that the Democratic Party was a liberal party and it had certain norms.
That's why I wrote this article about animal form.
Remember what they just told us.
They told us that when the St.
John's Episcopal Church was burned this summer, Not entirely, but set on fire.
And the Antifa and BLM mobs were yelling that they wanted to break the fence and get into the White House ground.
And Donald Trump was evacuated, I guess, to a basement.
And Donald Trump then came out later and said, if the left-wing mayor of Washington will not keep the order, I might have to use federal troops.
The retired military came out.
It was amazing.
They said he was Nazi-like.
He was Mussolini.
The former Joint Chiefs, four of them, came out and said, we're not going to do this.
I guess they have power.
And Joe Biden said, that's great.
These guys can help me remove Trump from office one day when I beat him.
Where did that transformation end?
Now the military is wonderful.
Joe Biden is president.
30,000 troops are in Washington.
20,000 are still there.
There's Bob Weyer, the person who's responsible for law and order In Washington, de facto is a U.S. Army general.
There's more people in camouflage today than U.S. troops and war zones anywhere in the world combined.
And yet, what does the left say?
Well, this is wonderful.
This isn't the military of George Patton, Curtis LeMay, and all those right-wingers we made fun of in Seven Days in May.
This is a People's Liberation Army.
Just by the snap of the fingers, we can get transgenderism in the military, we can get women in combat, gays.
It's wonderful.
They are at the point of the sphere of social change because they can do it by fiat.
We love them now that they're woke.
And what do the retired generals do?
And the military in general, they say, you know, I'm thinking about this very carefully.
Why fight it?
All the left did was try to defund the Pentagon and call us warmongers.
But you know what?
Now that we're part of them, It's kind of like Orwell.
You wake up and you're part of this, or a science fiction movie where you say it feels good to be part of the Borg, or I'm a pod person now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
They think, you know what, if I want to be a Northrup, or I want to be a Lockheed, and I'm left-wing general, I retire, and I go right into the revolving door, Elizabeth Warren's not going to go after me anymore.
This is wonderful.
So this is part of the insidious Nightmarish phenomenon of wokeism, that all of these people are coming out of the woodwork, and they're telling us that they're woke now, and therefore they're able to make a lot of money because they bought career woke insurance.
If another general comes out and says, I am shocked that there's a Confederate general on my base, or I feel so terrible that I was stationed at Fort Hood and never mentioned that John Bell Hood was a racist.
It's going to blow my head.
I'm thinking, well, as a historian, I wrote stuff like that, and I'm not the one that's at John Bell Hood base, and I didn't walk by Wade Hampton's statue.
That's your problem.
And so don't go indict all of America for allowing you to be indifferent to a Confederate general.
But that's where we are.
They do it for career.
And why do they do it?
Because we're talking about an elite that's heavily invested in American capitalism, And the perks of what an elite education or elite billet or elite career can provide.
And now in very cynical fashion, and I think it is cynical, they're talking about ideological wokeness and that they're on the ramparts along with BLM and Antifa in spirit.
For a lot of people that are watching this full-on emergence of woke or what's also called critical social justice culture, they look at it—so many people have said this to me—and they see a double standard.
It's also been described as an asymmetry in approach, and you've described some of these earlier.
Tell me a bit about this.
When we say that words matter or hate speech can ruin people or one word, like we just witnessed a New York successful writer who is now being punished because of something he said 30 years ago.
Okay, that is a standard and we're going to live by it, but it's not a standard.
Again, if you buy insurance, you can protect yourself From wokeness.
And what do I mean?
I mean, if you're Alec Baldwin, and you call somebody a f-blank-blank-blank homosexual slur, or you're Miley Cyrus's, I think her name's Noah Cyrus's little sister, and you use the n-word, and you're horribly racist, you're not going to lose your career.
You're just not going to do it.
If you were Joe Behar and you wear blackface, you're okay.
If you're the governor of Virginia, you're okay.
Okay in the sense, not that morally right, but you're going to be protected in a cocoon of progressive thought and appearance and persona that means that that word, that act, was not a window into their soul that revealed This racist or homophobe or xenophobe or whatever.
But if you don't have that insurance, you don't have that protective armor, then one's word will destroy you.
And you can see it with Donald Trump.
So we're applying a standard to Donald Trump that if he says fight on or go over to the Capitol peacefully and patriotically—I don't think he should have said that—then that is one thing But if you go to the Supreme Court while it's in session, and you address two justices by name,
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and you say to them, you won't know what hits you, and you're going to reap the whirlwind, and you say that to an enraged mob of pro-abortion protesters, that in the past during the Kavanaugh people actually got in to the Capitol and also tried to get in and beat on the doors, that's okay, because Chuck Schumer, that's just good old Chuck, he doesn't really mean it.
He actually explained it.
He said, you know, I grew up in a tough area of Queens, I think Brooklyn, that's how we talk.
If Donald Trump said, I grew up in Queens, that's how we talk, that's not going to fly.
And we all deal with that.
We all understand that.
So what does that do?
That creates a pressure upon all of us.
We have a little devil on our shoulder and it says an angel on one side and the devil says, hey, hey, hey, You're getting older, you're tired.
Why don't you just kind of do a public confessional?
Maybe write something for the Never Trump group, or say that you understand it, or just condemn Trump a couple of times more.
I won't mention names, but you can see that a lot of moderate or conservatives are fixated on Donald Trump, so they look at him, him, him, and they score some points, but they never look at the left that used to be their traditional opponent.
And the reason they don't is that they're worried and they're scared.
And they want a left-wing person to say, well, you know, writer Z or Professor X actually is kind of a reasonable person.
They acted pretty normal.
So let's just bypass them.
It's kind of like the theory.
I live in a pretty rough neighborhood out here in rural California.
And so I had a swimming pool and the inspector said, you can't have a swimming pool without a wall.
So I built a big wall around it.
But a sheriff came by when I was building it myself and he stopped by.
He didn't see the pool on the other side.
I was finishing the top.
He said, this is a really smart idea.
I said, why?
He said, you've created deterrents.
So when the thief or the robber comes by and they see that they can't just walk into your front door, they'd have to actually climb over a six, they're going to go on to the next person and attack the more vulnerable.
Good idea.
And so that's what woke insurance is.
It says to the person, I want to admit that Donald Trump is an ogre and I did vote for him.
I'll never do that again.
And these people are starting to drive me crazy.
And I was thinking the other day that we all live in a systemic or systematic, whatever term they use, racist society.
Then the idea is when the woke people come, they say, you know, He's already protected himself now.
He's okay.
We're going to go on to the other person.
And then the odd thing is, there's also another type of insurance or deterrence, and that's the extreme person who says, don't screw with me.
If you go after me, I'm never going to apologize, and I'm going to be your worst nightmare.
I've noticed there's been a few on the right that have basically taken that position.
And I kind of admire him.
They don't go after Rush Limbaugh very much.
His attitude is, I've got my audience, I'm independently, and I'm going to speak the truth and go ahead and go after me.
But you're going to regret it because I have a platform.
So the result is that the conservative American has a choice between if he has the resources or he's in a position to be that way is defiance.
Come and get me.
I don't care.
And you're going to regret it.
Or they can acquiesce and say, I'm sorry.
I'm guilty of thought crimes.
I'll behave and officially apologize.
But that's not the majority of people.
The majority of people are both vulnerable and they have pride that they believe in their convictions.
And those are who are mostly going to suffer from this period of our version of the Save Them Witch Trial.
Well, so this is just the thing.
I think most people out there, at least again from the people that I've been speaking with, they see some big problems looming or existing as we speak, but they're not ready to take the first position you just described.
And they're certainly not ready to take the second position you described.
So they basically stay quiet.
But then I've seen this argued in multiple pieces I've read recently that that's precisely the problem.
I think one way of looking at it is this woke movement is like a cancer cell and without resistance from chemotherapy or an immune system, it gorges itself and it goes into cells and it takes them over and the tumor gets larger and larger.
And unless it's stopped, there's no logic to cancer that says, okay, you've taken my arm or my lung.
It's enough now.
Just stay there.
I can live with you if you just stay inert.
The tumor is, you know, 150 millimeters in diameter.
Please don't go to 200 and I'll be fine.
No, the tumor says, I like what I'm doing.
You know, it sort of reminds me of the left, woke left reminds me of that Fable, I don't think it's an Aesop, but it's a Russian fable, I think, where the scorpion and the frog, where the frog takes the scorpion across the river who would otherwise drown.
He gets across the side, the scorpion kills him.
And the frog, before he dies, said, why did you sting me?
He said, because I'm a scorpion.
That's what scorpions do.
Well, that's what the hardcore left does.
It destroys people's careers.
So you can't say, please stop.
They're not going to stop.
They get notoriety.
They get power.
They feel that their careers...
How many thousands of diversity coordinators have we hired in the last six months?
Thousands of them.
How many memos have we all had that says your mandatory diversity training will be now extended from two to three or four hours?
How many times have we had memos?
Think of the resources that are invested and the people who are profiting from that.
It's incredible.
And who's losing from it?
How many great scientists engage in cancer research?
Are engineers trying to find a clean, alternate source of energy?
Are worried now what they say, whether their research can be interpreted in such a way?
What is the racial, gender classification of their research staff?
Whether in their past they ever made fun of a transgendered restroom?
That's where we are now, and it's going to take a toll on our productivity and our quality of life.
Victor, a little bit earlier you were describing basically these scenarios where establishment-type people take the position of buying woke insurance and so forth.
And I don't think this is necessarily one-to-one, but this reminded me of this recent Time magazine article that you referenced briefly in that recent Animal Farm op-ed of yours.
I'm just going to read something that I pulled from here, which I, this is the piece that it reminded me of.
Basically, they say, there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.
Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.
Think of the word, think of the title, what the title was.
The Shadow History.
That was what the Left complained about Daniel Ellsberg.
Daniel Ellsberg was an expose of this shadow government in the Pentagon that created falsifications and distractions to justify the Vietnam War.
Then there was a real history that he tried to uncover.
And so they're now embracing what they used to impose.
And notice their egos.
It's not enough that they can just leave it alone and say, you know, I hope nobody finds out about this, because business, social media, the corporate world, the media, the left, we all colluded to preempt a Trump re-election.
And sometimes it manifested itself like Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Pre-selecting, which is illegal for a private entity to give money to a public precinct to get out the vote and do it on an ideological basis and not across the board, but that's what they did.
Or to get a team of lawyers to sue state in court, cherry-pick a liberal judge so that they would unconstitutionally Modify or massage the law that the Constitution says only the state legislature can move unless overridden by the Congress.
And so that's what they did, and they should just shut up about it.
But now they've admitted because they think they've won, there's no repercussions.
They want everybody to think how brilliant they were, sort of like the Steele dossier.
First time I picked up the Steele dossier, I said to myself, I know a little bit.
I know that Michael Cohen's wife is Ukrainian and not Russian.
I know that her father-in-law is not a big real estate developer in Moscow.
I know that there's no Soviet embassy consulate in Miami.
I mean, I wasn't a very smart guy, and you could look at this with the scare capitals and the dossier, but they couldn't just leave it alone.
They were circulating in the State Department, the DOJ, Bruce Ohr.
They had to release it.
They had to let Mother Jones know about it, and then as soon as they do that, then you can examine it.
So now they've kind of shown us that they are conspiracists, and they do collude, and they do break the wall, and they're happy about it.
They're basically saying, what are you going to do about it?
Well, so it's very interesting reading this piece.
There's been all these different reactions, but one way you could read it is, this was an incredible political effort bringing together all sorts of groups from all sorts of walks of life.
I mean, a kind of brilliant political strategy.
Yeah, and it was just what we had talked about earlier that In this long march through our institutions, professional sports woke, Hollywood woke, entertainment woke, late-night comedy woke, publishing woke, media woke, cable news woke, foundations woke.
Where is there an avenue for a conservative to say, I'm the publisher or the editor-in-chief at Scrivener's, or I'm a Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson type of figure in Hollywood.
It's not possible anymore.
And what I took away with it was the defiance, the glee, that's almost as if you're going to, what are you going to do about it?
Remind me, I live in a pretty rough neighborhood.
I went to the public schools.
And I remember, it reminded me of childhood story where there was this kind of thuggish 12 year old, and he stole things from people, and he beat people up.
And one day, I got tired of him, and I went over to him.
He was very big, and he's from a criminal family.
And I said to him, wow, that's Wayne's binder you have.
He said, yeah, it is.
And I said, wow, you knocked over Santin.
You knocked him and kicked him in the head.
I saw you do it.
He said, yeah, I did.
And then you called Mrs.
Smith.
Our teacher's aide, you called her a bitch right to her face.
He said, I'm happy to.
And then he interrupted me and said, and what are you going to do about it?
Just what are you going to do about it?
I said, well, I'm going to go talk to the principal.
He said, oh, you're a little ratter.
I'm going to get you.
I'm going to get your family, your brother.
My family's been improved.
We're going to come after you.
So now what are you going to do about it?
And I ended up getting a fight with him because I thought that was the only way to get out of it.
I thought, wow.
If I don't get in a fight, and so it was a knock-down, drag-out brawl, and it taught me something, that you can't deal with these people.
We kept saying this, and so these people are now telling us, we took all the levers of influence and power in the United States, and we tried to destroy a presidency and a presidential re-election, and we're proud of it.
And we tried to do it in 2016 with a Steele dossier, and we failed, but we learned.
And if you remember in that article, This thing went way back.
There were people who were saying in 2017—and they're always characterized as prescient, brilliant, far-seeing, all-knowing—these people understood where we were going to have to do in 2020.
So it was a long-ago plan, because they didn't want another nightmare where they're crying on cable news as Donald Trump wins Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
So it's very scary.
It's tragic that this country is at this place right now, because it didn't have to be this way.
They could have said Donald Trump represented a lost constituency that bi-coastal, globalized culture had ignored in a very amoral fashion, and that was an understandable pushback.
But the way to beat Donald Trump is to appeal to his voters in the way that the Democratic Party used to do and win them back.
They didn't do that.
They didn't do that because they wanted open borders, and they're tribalists that believe in identity politics, and they don't care about people of the working class anymore, and they feel that their money and their power and their titles and their degrees have allowed them to be an unquestioned elite, sort of platonic guardians that we don't dare question.
You know, this makes me think back to, you know, you mentioned a little bit earlier about these, you know, calls for unity in the country.
And, you know, you mentioned that they may be disingenuous or unity means it's my way or that sort of thing.
But, you know, there's a lot of people out there, I suspect, who want genuine unity and, you know, probably something that's That's required to have a country be successful and prosper in the ways that you've been describing in this interview.
How is this going to happen exactly?
I don't want unity in the sense of joining the hard left.
But I do want civility and tolerance.
I'll give you an example.
Here we are in February.
I think that by August, just to take an arbitrary drain, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm not trying to suggest, but we're going to get up to about 30 million people have had the virus, take this metaphor, probably another three or four times that were asymptomatic or that had the virus and knew it if it didn't get tested.
So let's just take a number of 100 and 125 million have antibodies.
Another 50 or 60 million are below the age of 15, and the vast majority are not going to be symptomatic, or they might even not get the virus.
And then we're up to about 20, 30 million vaccinated.
We're probably going to get to 50, 60, 70.
At some point, we're getting close to 55, 60 percent that have some defense of the virus.
When we get up a few points more, Then I think society is going to return.
When societies return, there's going to be an enormous pent-up demand.
Enormous.
People want to travel, they want to get on an airplane, they want to have a party, they want to buy a steak, they want to buy a new car, they want to buy an apartment, whatever.
And Joe Biden, through nothing of his own achievement, It's going to be the beneficiary of one of the biggest 1945 booms you've ever seen, I think.
I think it'll be short-lived because it's based on funny money and $30 trillion in debt.
Nonetheless, I will write that Donald Trump should be given credit for tax reform, energy development, all the things that made a spectacular economy in 2019 so spectacular that it weathered the COVID lockdowns.
But I'm not going to say, I hope for a recession the way that Bill Maher said, or people on the left said, I want this.
I want this economic.
I want it because I can see people of the lower middle classes.
And I saw what happened to them in 2019.
And for the first time, they were given dignity.
And employers competed for their labor, rather than begging an employer.
I want that to happen again.
So that's unity.
But I don't I don't want to accept with that unity, this leftist dogma.
And by that I mean it's totalitarian, it's anti Bill of Rights, it's intolerant, and it destroys people's lives.
And so that's what I want to reject.
I don't want to hate the people who advocate that agenda, but I want to Professionally, politely, civilly stop them from achieving their agenda.
Because I know what it is.
It's nihilistic.
It always is nihilistic.
And it's not about helping people.
It's about helping a particular elite, ideological, intolerant elite.
The media, Victor, have proven to be an incredibly powerful and potent force.
Let's call it the corporate media, or the legacy media, or what some people call the mainstream media in all of this, as you, I think, just described.
Yeah, it has.
But that wasn't unforeseen.
You remember right when Donald Trump was elected, in a very Shocking matter, reminiscent of the Time article and its hubris.
I'll take two or three examples.
Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times said, this is the age where there is no such thing as a disinterested journalist.
We have to think away what we learned in journalism school.
Donald Trump is such an existential threat, we have to be advocates.
Jorge Ramos at Univision said, I reject the idea that I have to report the facts.
This is about ideological right-wing dangers.
Christian Amanpour said, I'm not going to report the facts because he's a threat to the world.
They were all ignorant, or they were willfully blind, or they were disingenuous.
That argument, of course, has always been the totalitarian argument, that the peril of the minute of the present is such that I can't be fair.
And disinterested.
And so they warned us what was happening.
In the first three months, the Shorenstein Center media watchdog at Harvard, very left wing, said 93% of all coverage was anti-Trump.
So it became an advocacy.
The walls are closing in on Trump.
There's another bombshell disclosure.
Remember what they were?
They're computer pings from the Trump Tower that's communicating with a server with the Russians.
Don Jr.
got in at Trump meeting and he colluded with a Russian.
Christopher Steele's pee urination is accurate.
James Comey is going to spill the beans and blow Trump out of the water.
Michael Cohen is going to confess to such crimes that Donald Trump will be completely That was what it was, and that was all media generated because they feel that they're advocates now.
I guess to sum up, if there is a message, I don't like using what history teaches us, but if there is a message throughout history, it is don't destroy the institutions that protect one In times of crisis when you have power, not because you're a good person, but because you'll be on the other end.
Thucydides says that in connection with a very famous revolutionary incident at the island of Corfu, what was known as Corsaira.
And he says, when people destroy the institutions, they never believe that they're going to be in need of them, and then they get surprised that they're wanting.
So, what I'm getting at is, There will be a day when the Republicans or conservatives will take back power.
And there will be a day when the Democrats, if they get rid of the filibuster, they will regret it.
And if they pack the court, they will regret it.
And if they get rid of the Electoral College, they will regret it.
And if they deny the ability of a party to pick their own committee assignments in the House, they will regret it.
They will regret the promiscuous use of a special prosecutor.
They will regret serial impeachment.
They will regret impeaching people who are no longer in office.
All of those institutions they have destroyed.
And when the opposite party takes back, they will surmise, as we discussed earlier, that you have to teach somebody That when you destroy these institutions, the only way you're going to learn how to restore them is you have to suffer the consequences.
I think that's what we're looking at for the next two or three years.
Because I don't know any way else how to appeal to the better angels of their nature.
I wish I could.
I'm not calling for disunity or acrimony.
I'm trying to appeal to the better angels of their And I don't know how to do it, because the more you write things every week and say, please don't get rid of the filibuster.
Please don't take people off committee assignments.
And yes, the argument against Marjorie Greene can be applied to AOC or Maxine Waters.
Let's have symmetry.
It's not working.
And so people react to I think that's what Republicans are fighting about.
The Liz Cheney controversy wasn't so much ideological or strategic.
People were just trying to say to Liz Cheney, you may have a really good point.
Donald Trump probably shouldn't have had a rally on January 6, but he didn't cause an insurrection.
He didn't cause a sedition.
That was pre-planned.
It was going on.
But what you're doing, Liz, is you are selectively attacking Donald Trump for language that you will not, as a conservative, spot identify and critique on the left.
So you're more hypercritical of your own ideological partners than you are of the left that's destroying them.
So at least make that argument within a larger context.
And that's what this fight's about on the right, the never-Trumpers.
Well, Donald Trump is uncouth.
Okay, he's uncouth.
Now, is the left uncouth more or less?
Or is Donald Trump's position more dangerous to America than the left?
But you have to bring all of these considerations rather than just virtue signal your superior morality for the moment.
And that's what I think the argument is about.
Victor, any final thoughts before we finish up?
Well, I think people realize that there are moments in history where previously sane societies go insane.
And we had this in 1860, when all of a sudden the differences between a slave-owning South and a Union North were adjudicated through the Missouri Compromise earlier, or the Great Compromise.
There were mechanisms to avoid killing 700 There were ideas about buying slaves and then freeing them, and all of that was lost because of radicals who said, you know what, mostly in the South, they made up all these ideas, and so we had this.
There were crazy times in the 1930s during the Depression.
I came of age as a teenager in the 1960s.
Where it was very violent.
And I can remember sitting in UC Santa Cruz when a bunch of people with long hair in 1971 barged into our history class, overturned chairs, said, we're not going to do this.
And three or four of us, kind of rural guys, said, if you touch me and you touch our professor, we're going to get in a fistfight and physically fought them and got them out.
I remember A very distinguished art historian, a wonderful man from Oxford, was lecturing on Gainsborough, and they broke in 1971, UC Santa Cruz, and they said, who are you to say that this is art?
And they had scribblings and all kinds of ugly things.
This is just as valid as yours.
So these periods of lunacy have happened before, and they've always ended because people finally got sick of it.
And so we have to realize that we're now in a period of collective insanity.
And everybody, regardless of our political ideologies, have to step forward and say, we're not going to pick on the weak, the vulnerable.
These are bullies.
People are coming out of the woodwork who have no talent, they're failures in their own career, and they're opportunists.
And this is what happened during the McCarthy period.
The worst Some of the worst actors in Hollywood went after some of the best talent on ideological ground, even though in that case there were communists in Hollywood.
But the point I'm getting at is when you're in a revolutionary situation, certain predictable currents can be identified.
And what I find where I work and where I write and the people I comment is that we're in this situation in which power, influence, career, is masked by ideological purity.
When you want to know who comes after you and who tries to destroy you, it's usually somebody who wants your job or somebody who feels that you're too successful or feels that you're too proud.
It's just the whole logic of the East German Stasi or the Soviet Informer.
If you go back and read the history of the Soviet Union, it was opportunists and mediocrities that took over.
Under the guise of purifying the state from ideological enemies, I think we've got to be very cynical about these people.
And its career, the desire to be known, influence money by previously undistinguished people explains a lot of it.
Not all, but a lot.
Well, Victor Davis Hanson, such a pleasure to have you on.
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