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March 15, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:19:59
20210315_victor-davis-hanson-on-the-crisis-at-the-border-th
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Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show.
I've been waiting for today's interview.
I've wanted this from the beginning, from the launch, and we finally got him.
It's Victor Davis Hansen.
Good luck finding a bigger brain.
He is brilliant, and all you need to do is tee it up and sit back and listen, right?
Made my job very easy, I have to tell you.
Victor, he's at the Hoover Institution.
He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow out there.
And he's this great combination of citizen farmer and professor and Overall, teacher, you know, of us all.
He's the fifth successive generation in the same house, just to give you a feel for how his life has been.
He grew up on a raisin farm.
He's an almond farmer now.
He's a professor of the classics.
Got a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz back in 75.
Went on to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
Then a PhD in classics from Stanford in 1980.
Registered independent, though certainly he sounds conservative.
And he's still in California doing his thing and prolific in his writing of books and his.
Podcast is amazing.
You can download it.
I listen to his podcast all the time.
And even if you're a liberal, if you're looking for a smart conservative view and somebody who's married to facts, you should listen to him, right?
He's a very smart guy to learn from.
Got all sorts of expertise in warfare, in the classics, and so on.
So you should check out his podcast, but you should listen to this one because this is an overview of America 2021.
And you're welcome.
Stand by.
Victor Davis Hansen, what a pleasure to have you here.
Thank you for doing this.
Thank you for having me, Megan.
I'm thrilled.
So I read everything that you write.
I listen to your podcast.
I've listened to both of them.
And I just love what you have to say because you have such a unique view on the world.
And I think it's because you're really a farmer at heart who's super smart, super well-educated, but never lost touch.
With the common man.
And so, in a lot of ways, you're the most sage man alive at this moment because you can understand what's happening in the world in a way a lot of our elites cannot.
That's my impression of you.
So, let's just start with this.
No, it's truth.
Let's start with Biden.
So, I feel like we are watching his cognitive decline.
What do you think?
Oh, I agree.
And unfortunately, I think it's occurring at a geometric rather than just arithmetic rate.
You can see by clips just three years ago, he was a different person than when he first announced his candidacy.
And I really blame journalists for that.
I think there were clear indications throughout the primary debates, and I think it was pointed out by Cory Booker and others that Joe Biden had cognitive issues.
It was ignored because he was considered the Savior of the Democratic Party from an unwinnable left wing surge that wouldn't beat Donald Trump.
And then more importantly, in the general campaign, he just campaigned, he outsourced his campaign to the media, essentially, and Democratic operatives and Silicon money and big Wall Street money and stayed ensconced in his basement.
That was not an exaggeration.
To the degree that we had an interview, he had an interview like you and I are having, I would have had, if I was Joe Biden, I would have demanded that you give me all the questions.
Beforehand, and I would have people outside the camera, you know, helping me answer those questions.
So it sort of reminds me of Woodrow Wilson's last year or two, actually, last 15 months when Edith Wilson didn't tell us how ill he was and he was basically comatose for much of the time.
Or FDR, when he ran for his fourth term, he didn't tell us about his high blood pressure, maybe melanoma, a variety of illnesses besides his.
Paralysis.
And he died as everybody expected he would early in April of his fourth term.
And I just don't think we've ever elected a president that this was known from the outset rather than during his tenure.
Where do you see this going?
I mean, what do you expect is going to happen with, you know, because that kind of thing only gets worse.
It doesn't get better.
And we have a young, vibrant vice president who couldn't get the nomination herself.
She wasn't even wanted by the Democratic Party.
But where do you see this going?
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head.
We all know, I think, where it's going.
And that is when we get little indications that the media at some critical point will say investing in the lie or the legend that Joe Biden is completely attentive and capable of handling the job is a greater downside than telling the truth.
And they're starting to say, to talk about things.
And sometimes these issues are that he missed a prompt.
I think Politico ran a question.
A story about that.
And then we also had the Democratic congressional leadership whispering and finally acting about nuclear codes in his possession.
And it doesn't look good for the media that have to play by these rules that are humiliating to them.
And yet they created this Frankenstein monster.
I don't mean that in a deprecatory way, but this absurd situation.
So where's it going?
I think at some critical point in six to 12 months, people are going to step in.
And Kamala Harris will be the source of a lot of the rumors and the need for action.
She doesn't have necessarily a good relationship before she was named vice president, as you know, with Biden.
Do you think that's why so far he has gone pretty radical left that he's trying to stave off his own party, pushing him out and replacing him with his number two?
Yeah, I've said that a couple of times, and I think it's kind of contrary to conventional wisdom that he was an.
Some kind of vessel that carried the socialist agenda across the finish line, unwillingly, maybe, and it was a devil's bargain between the two.
He got to be president.
They supported him.
He got elements of his agenda.
I don't think that's quite right.
I think he feels liberated to the degree that he is aware of it, that he's going to be a one term president.
He's not going to run for re election.
He doesn't really care, I think, too much about the midterm elections.
He feels that through executive orders and Very thin margin in Congress, he can get this agenda through.
And the agenda that he's going to get through is, I think, evident from his executive orders on the border, on energy development, on foreign policy, on appointments.
And I think he resents the idea that he was the understudy of Barack Obama for eight years.
When he was a senior statesman.
And now he's going to go down in history as the one progressive that really did get the Obama agenda through in a way that the more heralded and charismatic Obama never did.
And then there's an element also, in addition to that, that I don't think he's up to the fight with what the left brings to any type of fight.
I don't think he's able to withstand that media, Silicon Valley, entertainment, celebrity nexus.
Now, I know that you've said you think his executive order so far has.
Appointments so far are the most radical and polarizing of any recent president.
What specifically, what jumps out at you?
Well, if we just came from Mars and we looked at the border, Joe Biden has essentially ordered ICE not to enforce federal immigration law, even though he's sworn under the constitutional oath to enforce the laws as written and passed and authorized.
He hasn't done that.
And he's given a message to people.
South of the border, that if they break US law and they come across the border in a way that was not true the last four years, they will be given de facto amnesty.
He's told people that it's very dangerous not to wear a mask, almost unpatriotic, Neanderthal like.
He's threatened the governor of Florida with imposing a travel ban should he not comply with federal orders.
And yet, we know some of the people coming across the border have COVID, and there's no testing, there's no background checks, there's nothing.
That's pretty radical.
He stopped a pipeline right after years of acrimony and years of debate when it was in progress, when even the administration of Barack Obama's EPA could not find a deleterious effect of that.
In fact, most disinterested observers think it will save energy and it will decrease the likelihood of an oil spill, yet he just canceled it.
And he's talked about going back into the Iran deal when He's been given on a plate the chance of a lifetime in the Middle East with all of these Arab countries sort of making an enemy of my enemy as my friend alliance with Israel.
And the more we know about Iran, it's not doing well.
Its economy is in shambles.
It's got a lot of enemies and its terrorist appendages.
We're starving for cash.
And he wants to revive that because of this ideological zeal on the left for a Persian Shia tilt that we saw under Obama.
I can't even get into things like Title IX or the transgendered issues.
Or what we're seeing with abortion, but the social and cultural issues are going to be, I think, more radical than Barack Obama.
Remember, Barack Obama ran in 2008, deep skepticism of things like gay marriage.
And he promised not to, what he said at least, was very centrist compared to Biden.
And so I think, and then when you see the appointment at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, Or even General Austin, who's a renowned soldier.
I have nothing but praise for him.
But what he's doing right now is basically applying an ideological litmus test and going through the ranks of officer corps to see if any of them don't pass an ideological litmus test.
I'm really worried.
I'm worried that there's no check on this.
When you have a conservative or reactionary president, you always have the media there to 24 7 shout.
But when you have a leftist who's one of their own, whether it's Barack Obama and surveilling, you remember the AP reporters.
I remember you were, you talked about James Rosen from Fox having his communications somewhat.
Known to the administration.
There was no outcry.
Same thing with the IRS.
But when the left is doing this and there's no outcry, it only emboldens them because they grow contempt for the media.
And you saw that with the Iran deal when we were told by Ben Rose that the media knows nothing.
They were just an echo chamber.
And I think they have contempt for this media and they think they have a past to do whatever they want.
But where are the Republicans, especially when you mentioned like the Equity Act, you know, that's going to make sure trans girls, you know, boys, It's confusing language, but designated boys at birth can compete against girls in track and so on.
When I was at Fox, these issues would have been dominating our news cycle every day, and there would have been very prominent Republicans speaking out about it nonstop.
It seems like a lot of this stuff is just getting slipped through without too much objection.
No, I agree with that.
And I don't know why that is.
I think some of it has to do with the Trump factor that.
I'll just take an example of a natural leader that we would thank the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, now the Minority Leader, but we would have thought that he would have been out in front on those issues.
But I think his animus for Trump or his unwillingness to be seen as a quote right wing person.
I think there's also this temptation a lot of Republicans that if they seem moderate or they seem centrist on social and cultural issues and something like The Hill or Political will write a puff piece on them and that's a temptation.
They're kind of weary after the Trump years.
They just don't want to go out and fight those cultural wars like they used to.
And so the left knows that.
And it's funny, though, because all of these left wing movements that we've seen in history the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins, and the French Revolution they never have 50% support.
We know that there's not 51% support for having biological males and girls' sports or denying First Amendment and Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights to students accused of sexual assault.
We know that from polls, same thing on the border.
But the Democratic Party feels that it can create a new consensus by authorizing and then institutionalizing something as fact.
It's over now, it's fact.
Get used to it.
And that's their attitude.
And people are afraid of them.
I guess they're afraid because of the cancel culture or the sheer power of these cultural levers.
I mean, there's Wall Street, there's celebrity culture, there's Hollywood, there's professional sports.
Silicon Valley, the traditional media, the new media, foundations, academia.
You put all of those things together, and even though they're small number-wise, they have enormous amounts of capital and influence to the public.
The Border Reality Shifts 00:12:09
Because it doesn't seem like Democrats, other than people like AOC, really want things like what we saw in New York City last week, which is you're not allowed to refer to parents as mom and dad anymore.
You're not allowed to refer to the kids as boys and girls at all.
To the point where you have to substitute in new language if a book refers to a girl as a girl or a boy as a boy.
I just don't think that most Democrats want that, but they don't speak out.
No.
And I think part of it is the leadership to be sort of ageist, Nancy Pelosi or Clyburn or Hoyer, they're in their 70s and 80s.
And this movement you're talking about, the hard left or the neo socialist, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, is a youthful movement.
And they're acquainted and adept with social media, and they have a whole different culture than the leadership itself.
And that leadership is in.
Emblematic of mainstream Democrats, middle aged Democrats in general.
I think how that works out is they think, I don't want to get into these issues with these young guys.
All I know is they're motivated and they communicate well and they've got large future audiences.
We're a different country demographically.
They appeal to this group and I'll put up with whatever they do to keep me in power.
And I think that that's pretty much what explains it.
I think I have members of my family.
Siblings that are pretty hard left.
And I know that they were raised by my parents in a way that, in the environment in which we live out here in the farm, that these would be antithetical, but they're just straight party people.
So whatever the party says is tolerable because it's going to prevent Donald Trump from coming back or a right wing Republican or whatever bogeyman they have.
I want to talk to you about what you've referred to as the woke pandemic in a minute, but I don't want to leave immigration.
Yet, because I know this is one of your issues, and I think you can help us understand it.
So, what I see is obviously the surge happening at the southern border.
Biden's reversed Trump's zero tolerance policies.
And now you have Texas Governor Abbott, who just came out and said last year the Border Patrol apprehended 90,000 people in the entire year in the Rio Grande Valley.
This year already, we're at the beginning of March, they've had already over 100,000 apprehended in that area alone.
It's very clear that, I guess there are a number of factors, very clear that folks feel emboldened by Biden's more relaxed policies.
And I don't know where this is going to go or what is the big game plan here by the Democrats?
The game plan is that electorally and demographically, they feel that once somebody comes illegally without a high school diploma, and the vast majority don't have high school diploma, Diplomas and they come in mass and without diversity, so they're all coming from south of the border, and for the most part, they're from Central America and Mexico.
Then they're going to be permanent loyal constituents when they get amnesty and their children are born in the United States for the Democratic Party.
And they look at what's happened in California, it's flipped from a state of Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, George Dick Major, and Arnold Schwarzenegger of governor to a super majority in the House.
The state legislatures, we don't have one.
Major won't have any, I shouldn't say, statewide office holder who's Republican.
And they see that model and they think Nevada has now adopted it, New Mexico has, Arizona is just about there, if not there already, Colorado is there, Texas is the next big prize, Georgia.
And they feel that it's a winning strategy.
They don't feel that their message, the issues that we've talked about already, whether it's transgenderism or the open borders or the stimulus package or all of these things are necessarily winning issues, but a change.
Demography is because things people will say, well, even people who come here illegally know that they tax social services and they don't know English and they burden the schools.
And yes, but has anybody ever been to Oaxaca, Mexico?
Whatever the United States is and whatever crisis it's in, it's heaven compared to southern Mexico.
And so when people tell me well, i'm leaving California because it's unlivable, because we don't have money for roads and highways and you can't use social services And the public schools have so many second language programs, there's not enough advanced placement.
Many of these people are Hispanic themselves.
I always say to them, and so it's worse than Oaxaca.
And the answer is no, it's not.
And so where's it going?
I think this is one of these issues that everybody's been complacent in, four or five interests.
We know that the Democratic Party wants a changed demography.
We know that a Latino elite believes in this La Raza mythology that they can be, and even though they're quite assimilated and they love consumer capitalism, they can be an opposition group that demands repertory action from larger society as victims.
And we know that the American Southwest, if you're upper middle class, you can live like a 19th century English lord with cheap help doing your laundry, doing your lawn, caring for your mother, cooking your food, taking care of your children.
I grew up with none of that.
And yet when I go to Palo Alto where I work at Stanford, I see all of these colleagues that have all this help in a way they probably wouldn't if they had to hire someone else other than someone who's just arrived here.
From south of the border.
And then you have the employers, the largest, it's not farming.
When I was growing up, it was farming, but it only constitutes about 20% of the jobs that are taken by illegals or meatpacking, but especially hospitality, hotels, restaurants, landscaping, meatpacking.
So the Republican conservative constituency is in on it too.
And then finally, the main tesseract in the mosaic is the government of Mexico.
The government of Mexico gets about $30 billion.
South American governments get another $30 billion, $60 billion.
Comes in to Mexico from remittances.
And it's very cynical, Megan, because their attitude is I just sent you the poorest people that we don't want.
And they're indigenous people.
They're not the Mexican elite that always boasts the degree of their pure Spanish ancestry in a very racist fashion.
But once they get up here, living on the minimum wage is very difficult.
And yet the Mexican government expects them to send two, $300 a week back to their families.
Because the Mexican government either can't or won't provide social services, and we, the taxpayer, provide the social services for the Mexican illegal immigrant.
So then he's freed up with cash to send back to Mexico.
I once talked to a Mexican professor, a very brilliant woman who really despised the United States, and she said to me, Victor, it's a wonderful system for us.
We, all of our dissidents, and all the people are unhappy and social justice, they leave.
They don't march on Mexico City.
and you have them, and then they bring us remittances and we don't have to spend social services on it, and then we can call you racist because they don't have parity with the average American.
I mean, we say it's because of their skin color, and when they do have parity, they have a romantic view of Mexico and they're firm supporters and stalwart post-expatriates that support better relations with Mexico the longer they're not there.
She spelled it out pretty clearly for me.
I once wrote about it in Mexiforni, a book about it, but it's insidious.
And I don't know how we're ever going to stop it until second and third generation Mexican American people and Hispanics say, you know what?
I live in Merced, California, or I live in Stockton, or I live in a suburb of LA.
And when we bring so many people in that are non diverse in mass and they don't know English and they don't have education, my child's public school experience is.
Is altered, and it's not safe for my son to be in this neighborhood when we have gang and cartel people coming in from Mexico.
When that happens, and it's starting to, I think you'll, according to the polls at least, it's already happened, then you'll see some changes.
Coming up in one second, here in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the view on immigration is, you know, we're in favor.
We're all immigrants.
More is better than less.
Well, Victor's been living a very different life out there in California for a long time and has a different experience of how it might not be the greatest thing.
Certainly illegal immigration into the country really might not be the greatest thing and might have real life consequences for our friends on the southern border.
So we'll get into how he has seen that manifest where he is.
We'll get back to that in just one second, but first this.
The numbers are stunning.
I mean, this is from the New York Times that border agents encountered a migrant at the border about 78,000 times in January.
That's more than double the rate of the same time a year ago, higher than in any January in a decade.
The number of migrant children in custody has tripled in just the past two weeks.
Like they're running across the southern border.
And Biden, who ran on a more humane policy and being the anti Trump, is he's in a pickle because he knows.
I don't know that he thinks we can accommodate all these people here in the United States through an asylum seeking process or any other process, but he's supposed to be the anti Trump, the welcomer, the kinder, gentler president.
So he's got to let them across, and a lot of them are coming in.
Absolutely.
And we know now that that 11 million figure of permanent.
Residents who are not here legally.
That's been there for 20 years.
And finally, MIT and Yale did two consecutive studies, and the number is somewhere between 19 and 20 million already here who are not of legal status.
Joe Biden, along with especially Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, if you go back and Bill Clinton and you look at their speeches in the 1996 Democratic Convention, 2000, even Barack Obama in 2008, it was all strong borders and we don't support illegal migration.
And the reason was.
Twofold.
One, they were afraid of their union support and the unions felt that that drove down wages, especially the SEIU.
And then second, that they felt that the numbers weren't that large to make an effect at the polls.
That's not true anymore.
They've lost the union working class, lower middle class white voter.
They feel they've lost them or he's irrelevant or he's doomed demographically or whatever the reason, they don't appeal to him anymore.
And then the numbers are so large, as you point out, that they feel that this is a constituency that's going to be the backbone of gaining and retaining power.
And so I don't know how the only hope that we have is you have to have faith in American institutions that even in extremists when they violated laws and there's so many numbers that there's enough people who realize that without the melting pot and without legality, then we're nothing more than the Balkans.
Local Service and Sheriff Rules 00:05:58
We're just going to descend into tribal warfare where there is no rule of law.
And that's already happened.
In places here in rural California, it already has happened.
How so?
Well, if I get up in the morning, like this morning, and I walk out along Mountain View Avenue and DeWolf Avenue in my rural neighborhood on my farm, this morning there was a sofa and a dishwasher thrown on the side of the road.
If I were to call the California sheriff, Fresno County Sheriff, or APA, because I see a Hispanic name with the garbage that's with it, they will not come out.
There is no rule.
If I did that and somebody saw me or I left my phone bill or power bill with the garbage and Say a sofa or other, I would be in jail.
If I walk through, if I go into town and I want to use social services in the way that I used to, and that means go into a Department of Motor Vehicles office, it's not practicable.
You cannot walk into a local Central Valley DMV office and get service.
You have to make an appointment now, weeks and weeks ahead.
If I want a basic service, I have to assume that I won't.
It'll be in Spanish.
If I go into the dry cleaners, all the stores around it will be in Spanish.
The owner of the dry cleaner will not speak English very well.
And so that's a reality.
And if I'm walking through my almond orchard and I see somebody that doesn't speak English and he has an AR 15 and he's sitting on the side of his car, I have no idea whether he's a cartel member or he's just a nice guy that's getting paid a bounty to shoot coyotes illegally.
But that's the reality.
And I know that the people that I work with at Stanford, And this is what is very disturbing.
If I were to tell them that, then I would be a racist, an old white, bitter person, and they're so woke.
But then when you look at what woke means, it means that the entire Bay Area, whether it's Harker School or Castilea or Sacred Heart or the Menlo School, whatever it is, they're growing because all of these Silicon Valley elite that are so wealthy do not dare put their Children in the Redwood City schools or the Eastern Woodside School District.
They want their kids in lily white, Asian, and white prep schools.
They want to use people to clean their home and they want to sound very virtuous in doing so by, in the abstract, damning a mythical alt right white racist who's against illegal immigration.
But they don't want to live next to the people.
I'm speaking as somebody whose two brothers have Mexican, one had a Mexican American wife, the other has Mexican American children.
And I grew up with.
I think there were seven of us that were not Mexican American in my first grade, all the way through seventh grade.
And when I get up in the morning, I choose to live here, but I don't see anybody who's not Mexican American.
All my friends are Mexican American.
So it's not these people, and I think that's very important, Megan, that a lot of this elite left is some kind of strange psychological mechanism where they construct an abstract caring or empathy as sort of a medieval exemption, so then they don't have to live with the other that they champion.
Because they do not want to put their kids in the same school.
They do not want to live next to them.
They do not want to entertain with them.
They don't want to be friends with people.
That's so interesting because I can tell you here in New York, of course, the opposite of extreme geographically and just so far removed from the border that people don't understand it.
You'll hear a lot from the liberals up here I'm an immigrant.
I come from a family of immigrants.
And they skip over the part where it was done legally.
And they think that people who are along the southern border who are complaining about this are just all a bunch of.
xenophobes and racists without understanding that not only is there some real danger there, but there are genuine economic and societal consequences to having what is effectively an open border.
Yeah, there is.
I mean, when my daughter was in high school, a person hit us, rammed, T-boned us, and then took off running.
And we weren't hurt that badly, just shaken up.
I went and tackled him, and he was arrested.
And the next, the officer, Told me to leave, and the next day, when I filed insurance, there was no record of that arrest.
They let him off because I guess they knew him or he was related to the local police department.
And I've had since 1980 now six incidents.
I count them where people have run off the road intoxicated and torn out either vineyard or almond trees.
Had one just two months ago.
And the car is there in the vineyard or the orchard.
And it's destroyed usually.
And the person is either intoxicated in the car or they've left.
And when I ask an officer to come out, I'm told that under no circumstances will you be able to impound that car.
And they come out and impound it.
And that's the last I ever hear it.
There's no compensation.
There's no insurance coverage.
And that's something that happens all the time.
Why won't they do it?
Well, one of two reasons they give me.
One is it's so ubiquitous and frequent that it would be futile to do so.
And two, they don't want to be a high profile officer who goes after the quote unquote undocumented because that would stigmatize them within their department or deny their promotion or maybe even come to the attention of the local paper.
Well, so what happens now?
Because I, I just can't get over the fact that Biden's pushing for amnesty, you know, for those 19 to 20 million people.
Meghan Markle and Royal Victims 00:13:42
Yeah.
That's a huge number who are in this country.
You don't hear boo about it in the press.
Nothing.
I mean, 10 years ago, remember when Bush tried to actually create a plan where he worked for the, for amnesty with the other side?
And it was, it was the lead story on Fox News every day.
Now you've got Biden pushing this and he says it wants it to happen within eight years.
No one's talking about it.
So do you think it's likely to happen or does it all come down to Joe Manchin?
Like what's going to happen with that?
Oh, I think the numbers are so large that they're going to do something like say, we're going to give an amnesty for 11 million.
And then they're going to wink and nod and say, that's only half.
We only gave it for half as a first step.
And once they do that, that's going to, of course, entice more people and more people and more people across the border.
And the people who are doing this are people of the upper, upper middle class or where I live.
And I work, it's the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Google people who have the ability to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own ideology.
And so they don't care.
They feel pretty good about it.
And they think, I'm always going to have a wall around my estate as I dam walls on the border.
I'm always going to have private schools for my own children as I champion the teachers' union and dam charter schools for the lower middle classes.
So, and you can see how it works, at least the short term thinking of the people who.
Enable this to happen long term, it'll finally catch up to them as it does with every disastrous decision.
I think, also, just briefly, I think we have to be cognizant or candid about the role of race.
Race has changed in this country.
We used to believe that class was the determinant of victimization and oppression.
We looked at the poor, didn't have a good break, whether it was self inflicted pathologies or bad luck or exploitation by employers or whatever culture.
We accepted that we wanted to help the poor of all different.
There's more people who are poor that are non minority than all minorities put together.
I think it's about 27 million versus 22 million or something.
So that was sort of the Marxist idea.
And it didn't really work in the United States to say that we're going to have a class struggle because we're all fluid, we're upwardly mobile.
Yesterday's poor person is tomorrow's wealthy person, tomorrow's wealthy person was yesterday, et cetera, et cetera.
But something happened with that formula.
Where we created this new thing called diversity.
And that was in the Obama administration, really, that it came into the fore.
Before it was a black white binary, and everybody else was working around it.
But because of the legacy of Slavery and the poverty of the African American, the levels of poverty in the African American community.
We were working on that specifically.
Suddenly, all of a sudden, we dropped all class considerations.
I remember 2009 10, all of a sudden, Sikhs in this area, Punjabis, third generation optometrists who were Asian, anybody who was non white was now a new group called diversity.
And all of a sudden at Stanford where I worked, if somebody came from India and he was a grandee with a lot of money and he was a doctor or professor and you had him in your department, you were considered diverse.
And what that did was it just divorced all ideas of oppression and victimization from class considerations.
And it upped in a practical sense the exploited poor from, you know, 15% of the population that were non-white.
Poor 10%, all of a sudden 30% of all classes.
And what that did is you could be very, very wealthy.
And we saw that in that interview with Oprah.
Oprah's a victim.
She said that a $38,000 crocodile purse was not instantly presented out of its case to her, therefore, they were racist.
And she suffered from it.
Michelle Obama said she was a victim when somebody at a target asked her to take a package down from a shelf.
The royal, these royals that we saw are victims.
Everybody can be a victim.
Based on the idea that they're non white, they have some claim to be non white in some ways.
Even they can be wealthy, they can be privileged, they can have far more privilege than somebody in Southern Ohio or Appalachia or Bakersfield, California.
That's a new idea that I think we haven't discussed as a society.
Why don't we make these things income based rather than racially based?
It's funny you should bring this up because I was saying when I was teasing you, I said, I don't know if I have it in me to ask Victor about Meghan Markle and the Royals just because I see you on such a high pedestal.
I'm glad you brought it up because I do have strong feelings about it, and they're right along the lines that you just mentioned.
We're supposed to look at the millionaires talking to this billionaire on set in this television setting that's watched by tens of millions around the globe and feel sorry for this prince and his wife, the Duchess, because they're really worried that their son might not get the title to which they feel he is entitled.
Yeah, you know, I didn't.
I saw clips of it, and I didn't understand the incoherence.
It was.
I don't think Prince Anne's children, I mean, there's a lot of grandchildren of Queen Elizabeth, they're not all titled.
It doesn't mean just because you're a grandchild, you're automatically titled.
Correct, it doesn't happen.
It doesn't happen.
The only reason we know about either Miss Markle, Meghan Markle, or Prince Andrew is because of the Queen.
And he was born lucky, I suppose, with all this privilege.
Listening to him, he feels like he's suffered because his wife has suffered, who even before she met him, she was well off and an actress.
She had a little company.
She was doing fine.
There was no sign that she'd been oppressed.
And then, you know, what did she think the royal family of Britain is like?
I mean, the Windsor family goes way back.
It has Germanic roots.
It has proper English roots.
If you or I married into that family, believe me, they would be joking behind our backs that we are American yokels.
Whatever race we were.
And it wouldn't be necessarily malicious.
It's just part of that, the baggage that one accepts when they want to become a royal by marriage.
And then you have these two neighbors, a $90 million estate where Opa lives.
$15 million estate, Montecito, where the royal couple lives.
And they're aghast at all this oppression that they've suffered.
And I thought, wow, we're in a pandemic.
People are dying.
We've got all these national crises, and we have to listen to these psychodramas.
And then there was no evidence.
It was all he said, she said, or an unnamed person said this, and we won't name this person, I guess, until next episode.
Right, right.
Oh, but they want their privacy.
Yeah.
You just wrote a piece about this called the Progressive Imaginarium, which nailed it.
Can you explain what that term means?
Well, I think we have this sort of funhouse where all these imaginary characters live and the press allows them to live there, whether it's these two supposedly alt white hoodlums that confronted Josie Smollett in Chicago at 2 30 in the morning, yelling MAGA slogans, and they didn't like empires if they even knew what empire was.
And then they threw out bleach, of course, the freezing point of bleach, I think it was eight below that.
It would have frozen in midair, but nevertheless, it scattered as if they were going to bleach him and make him white.
And then somehow he fought them off while he was holding a sandwich in one hand and the cell phone in the other, and they managed to put a noose on them.
But Dominitive Juicy beat these people, and people accepted this.
And they accepted Elizabeth Warren.
If you go back to a catalog, at Harvard Law School.
She was their first Native American.
She's in this fantasy house.
These two people are in this fantasy house.
Joe Biden, we just talked about this idea that he's a vigorous, engaged president.
Good old Joe Biden from Scranton, this middle class, centrist president that's on top of things.
It's a complete mythology.
And these are media fed mythologies.
And I was a big critic.
I took a lot of heat from the right of the Capitol assault.
and mob.
But if you look at that Capitol's January 6th assault, what you see is there was no leader.
It was a bunch of buffoonish, angry, just, you know, enraged people who committed a felony and should face the consequences.
But all of a sudden, we had this fantasy that it was an armed insurrection pre-planned and that they were trying to take ties in with them to kidnap government officials and they were armed.
There was never one person who was arrested.
That ever had in their possession, much less used a firearm.
The ties came from the Capitol Police that some idiot stole.
And the tragic death of Officer Sickneck can be attributed to a lot of hypotheticals.
We don't know the ant, but one of them is not the New York Times narrative that an enraged Trump supporter approached him with a fire extinguisher and bashed his head in and killed him.
That's not true.
And so that's an iconic date.
And why that's important.
Is that justified the largest militarization of Washington since the Civil War?
30,000 people at one point.
Yet we didn't hear a peep, Megan, from the 280 retired generals and admirals and national security officials who said that if Donald Trump called in the troops after the partial burning of the St. John Episcopal Church and that, I think it was June 6th riot and demonstration that got close to the White House ground, that would be an insurrection, that would be a coup.
We're going to have more with Victor Davis Hansen in one second.
We're going to talk about the upcoming George Floyd trial and the pressure on the jurors there and how the media is likely to cover this one.
But before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we call Sound Up here at the Megyn Kelly Show.
This is where we bring you some sound, like a sound bite that we feel you must hear.
And for me, this one was a no brainer.
Everyone seems to be weighing in on Oprah Winfrey's bombshell interview of Harry and Meghan because we really were dying to hear from her.
Hillary Clinton, who's got some strong opinions.
Listen to this.
Was just outrageous.
And the fact she did not get more support, that the reaction was, you know, let's just paper it over and pretend that it didn't happen or it will go away.
Just keep your head down.
Well, you know, this young woman was not about to keep her head down.
You know, this is 2021.
And she wanted to live her life.
She wanted to, you know, be fully engaged.
And she had every right to hope for that.
Okay.
So, Could you please spare us the lectures on cruelty to young women in 2021?
Miss, let's create a war room to attack Bill Clinton's accusers when he was running for office with the help of George Stephanopoulos, by the way, right?
She didn't care.
She didn't care whether it was true.
She just wanted to tear him down.
That's it.
That's Hillary Clinton, folks.
Feminist icon who now is speaking out about the cruelty against poor Meghan Markle.
Can you, like, who does she think?
And by the way, cruelty from a woman?
who allegedly issued the stand down order in Benghazi, Libya, right?
Who let our troops hang out to dry while they were under attack at the consulate.
I'm just saying, maybe she shouldn't be lecturing people on how to behave well, right?
Not to mention all of her alleged illegal acts when she was hiding her server, having a server, and then deleting the hard drive and all the stuff she did.
She should just not be moralizing to anyone about anything.
Like the nerve of her to go out there and play this, Hillary's going to stand up for Meghan.
You're not helping.
You're not helping Meghan Markle's cause, not even a little.
And by the way, let's not forget about her associations with Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.
And don't forget, Ronan Farrell reported that it was her publicist who tried to kill the story at first about Harvey Weinstein, outing him as a sexual predator.
Now that the guy denied that, but she also reportedly had a conversation with Lena Dunham about the same thing.
So you tell me whether Hillary Clinton is some protector of women or she just wanted to weigh in on the side of the princess because she thought it would be fashionable.
She should spend more time working on her hair and less time working on her.
Fake statements about female empowerment.
And that is what we call Sound Up.
Back to Victor in one minute.
Jury Verdicts and Sentences 00:15:52
Coming up with the George Floyd trial because that's a taboo subject, but I think one can have a balanced view that had Officer Chalvin not put his knee on the neck of George Floyd for eight minutes, it would have been a different outcome without also.
Denying the fact that had George Floyd not been in the process of committing a felony of counterfeiting, and had he not had apparently near toxic levels or toxic levels of drugs, there would have been a different outcome.
But that balanced view is not going to be on, it's not going to be what the trial's about.
It's going to be about utter fear of a huge multi million dollar damage, death, riot, mayhem if that verdict is anything other than second degree murder.
I was just thinking about this because we're going to cover that trial and we're going to need to be fearless about it because the facts are the facts.
And if the facts turn out to be in any way helpful to the officer, people are going to lose their minds at media who report that.
So, it's going to require some intestinal fortitude to follow the evidence wherever it goes in that courtroom.
We're going to do that.
But that case in particular is just so controversial.
And yet, as you know, Victor, you point out that already I read one of your pieces where you were saying some of these polls are kind of showing that perhaps we're at the end of this woke pandemic.
Perhaps we're getting near the end.
One that shows people are seeing that the so called armed insurrection really wasn't.
Exactly that, and that the media has had a very different standard toward that than they have toward the Antifa violence we've seen.
And the second one was about people's attitudes toward BLM, Black Lives Matter, and police.
It's been radical.
And as you know, the Harvard Harris poll is not conservative, it's not a Rasmussen poll.
And they found that 73% of the public now considers Antifa a terrorist organization.
And by about a 12 point margin, they feel that it was given too much leniency.
And whereas BLM had about 55% of public support, it's down, I think, in the high 30s now, and the police have just risen.
It's no longer people feel you should defund the police or that they're culpable, that they're the aggrieved party.
And that changed, that radical change in view is a result of 90 days, as you said, of unchecked looting and arson that followed sometimes peaceful demonstrations, but they didn't all end peacefully.
And people thought there had to be consequences, and there was none.
And then, as you say, And as I've written, it was asymmetrical the way that we reacted to the Capitol assault.
And the other problem with George Floyd is that May 25th is now an iconic date among our cultural elites.
I know that after May 25th, my life, everybody's life at Stanford University changed.
Everybody in academia's life changed.
All of a sudden, we were presented with a narrative that we had no control over that said, George Floyd's death.
Revealed that we are a racist, inherently evil society going back to 1619, and there's nothing you can do other than make preparatory efforts.
And that means changing standards, going to workshops, being reeducated, confessing that your privilege is unearned, all of that.
And for that date to be suspect of anything less than that, if that jury finds out that Officer Shalvin was derelict and committed, Involuntary manslaughter, inadvertently putting his knee too long, or maybe even if they acquit him, much less, I should say, much less if they acquit him.
That whole date then is questioned.
And that narrative that we now have institutionalized for a year is over with.
And I don't think people can afford on the left to let that happen.
It's like, how can that jury, how are they going to be able to offer an unvarnished assessment of the case?
They're going to be terrified.
Everyone in the country knows that if that jury, who, unlike the rest of us, gets to sit, steps away from the witnesses and evaluate their credibility and look at the evidence firsthand and touch things and feel things and deliberate amongst themselves, if they don't come to, quote, the right conclusion, if they find anything other than murder in this case, and the odds on murder are pretty long, according to legal experts.
I mean, really, they're pretty long.
They know as well as you and I do that there are going to be riots unlike we've ever seen in this.
Just think of what happened when the Ferguson DA didn't, right?
When they didn't bring the charges there.
This is going to make that look like nothing.
No, it is.
I think everybody knows that.
And I think that we saw that.
30 years ago, with the OJ trial, that jury was terrified, and that had a role we know later in acquitting OJ because people were just they didn't want to face the consequences.
I think their attitude is really cynical.
It's sort of they, I mean, the larger society, it's well, if he was derelict, it's his own fault, Officer Shalvin.
And if he has to be a sacrificial lamb for the greater good, then so be it.
And that's that.
That's what's really disturbing.
There's an I use that word asymmetrical maybe too much, but when you look at what happened, George Floyd had a degree of culpability because he was in he was engaged in a crime apparently.
That from all our witnesses passing a 20 counterfeit bill, and he didn't actively hit the officer but he passively resisted arrest, and that's a felony.
So, the officer after his death, the officer's name was released right away.
I mean, I was a matter of a A few hours.
But the Capitol officer who shot Ms. Babbitt, I think her name was, who illegally entered and should not have been inside the Capitol and was trying to break through, probably to commit damage, but nevertheless, she too was unarmed, but she was shot and killed.
To this day, we have no idea who that officer was.
And so I get it's little things like that when the public, and I'm trying to reflect now why these polls are showing this radical change in views.
And I think a lot of it is the public just feels that.
The administrative state or the bureaucracy or elected officials or the media does not look at things empirically.
They have ideological agendas or they're scared.
That's also a motive.
They feel that if they were empirical and they're thinking, if there's going to be damage or there's going to be fallout from my decision, it's going to go on you and not me.
And so I see that in academic life a lot where you see college presidents, anytime there's something like the Smith case where an African American Young woman claimed that she was harassed by being black at a luncheon counter, or I should say, at buying lunch.
And she blamed all of these poor working class people the janitor, the security guard, some of the kitchen help who actually hadn't done anything.
She wasn't not supposed to be in that area, and they were just worried for the other people who were going to come in.
And yet, if you read what the academics said, it was all this virtual signaling that we're shocked, we're not going to let this happen.
And the subtext was, We're going to destroy four people's lives.
Because they really don't matter.
They're just poor working class white people and they're not anointed academics like we are.
Yeah, it was back to lived experience.
Her lived experience made her perceive something in a way that wasn't factual.
And so the destruction of those lives must be tolerated because of the respective colors of their skins.
Yeah.
And then every once in a while, you read in the paper where there's an outstanding liberal academic, and for the situation, he falls through the cracks or she does, and then they are victimized.
And suddenly, They are outraged.
We saw that Mr. McNeil at the New York Times or Barry Weiss.
When that starts happening, then people think, wow, I'm one of you.
Why is this happening to me?
Don't I get exemption?
I hate Donald Trump just as much as you do.
And yet they don't, because once these forces are unleashed, there's no logic about where they're going to fall or lead to.
But why did you write that, and I quote, peak wokeness is nearing?
And the end of your sentence was because if it continued in its present incarnation, then the United States as we know it would cease to exist.
So that's a good news, bad news sentence.
Yeah, well, I don't think you could explain that.
Yeah, so there were situations in the ancient world during the Peloponnesian War on an island called Corsairo.
It's a famous incident where this started, where they started all of this hysteria.
Factions started fighting, and it was total chaos.
And the historian Thucydides chronicled it and said, when human nature being what it is, this is going to happen.
It's not a sustainable situation.
The reign of terror was not a sustainable situation.
when the Jacobins hijacked the French Revolution in 1790.
The Saddam witch trials were not sustainable.
You couldn't just go say, she's a witch, he's a witch.
And while there were communists in the State Department, you couldn't have a guy like Joe McCarthy say, I am holding a list of 200 names and crimes of these communists because it was an act.
You couldn't allow that to happen in the sense that the system then wouldn't work.
So if we really do believe that we're systematically racist, and we always were, And whether it was $11 trillion in reparatory Great Society programs or 700,000 dead during the Civil War, that we've done nothing to remedy that and that we're inherently evil, then there's no reason for us to continue.
History comes in and says, oh, by the way, if you don't think you're better than the alternative, then you're not going to last.
And you can't have these universities on the one hand say, you students are $1.7 trillion in debt and we're going to charge you full tuition for a third-rate Zoom experience while all our professors just sit home in quarantine.
But we're going to make higher millions of dollars of diversity and equity and inclusion coordinators and administrators and provosts.
And you're all going to have from one hour to three hours and mandatory diversity training and re-educate that.
And we're going to create a climate of fear throughout the country where if you make one wrong statement.
You and I are on this right now.
You know Megan better than I do, and I know in academia that if I say one thing wrong, or you do, you could end up spending thousands of dollars in legal fees just to preserve your livelihood.
And it's happened to me at Stanford University.
It was written about with Scott Atlas, the advisor, who's a colleague of mine, and Neil Ferguson, the historian.
All of a sudden, during this woke period, people that were very radical in the Stanford faculty thought, hmm, it's about time to go after that right wing.
Hoover Institution.
I saw this.
Yeah, and they were not right wing.
The majority of Hoover Fellows voted Democratic in the last two elections or three elections.
But nonetheless, they couldn't tolerate the idea there were some conservative on campus.
And so they made these wild charges that Dr. Atlas was responsible for 400,000 deaths, that because I had questioned the ability to check the authenticity of 100 mail in ballots, 100 million, even though I had said, you know, that.
It wasn't wise to press that objection to the elections beyond the initial suits that failed.
Nonetheless, I'm responsible for five dead in the Capitol.
So I just want to say I listen, as I pointed out earlier, I listen to you.
I listen to you throughout the election.
And when Hoover, when Stanford turned on you, these key professors at Stanford tried to turn on you to say somehow you caused what happened on January 6th, I thought it was outrageous too because I heard you.
Raising questions about mail in ballots.
And you said something like Trump lost the election when that was allowed, prior to the election, when that just was allowed in a sweeping method in places like Pennsylvania.
Because you had questions about the integrity of those ballots.
That's nowhere near the same as saying the Kraken, the Sydney, you know, like they were trying to attack you like you were saying Trump is still the legitimate president and he's not going to leave office.
No, I know it.
I got in an argument with Lou Dobbs on Fox News one afternoon, whom I like.
I like him very much.
I respect him a great deal, but I didn't believe that there was a problem with the voting machines along the Sydney Powell lines.
And I said so.
I think it was November.
On Laura Ingram's show, I said, if you can't establish, you can't win in court, not because it's wrong or right, but if you don't get a hearing in court, you're never going to overturn this election.
You might as well work on the Georgia Senate races.
So that was ironic.
But the thing about it was, these professors, at least one of them, I don't want to mention all four, lump them together, but that professor had started an anti fascist, and you know what that means, it's short for anti network on campus.
Earlier, a few years earlier, he told Stanford students he celebrated the fact that they were shut down a bridge, endangered lives, caused car crashes at peak hour in the San Mateo Bridge, 70 of whom were arrested.
And he had posted on his website, this all took about five seconds to find this out.
All he had to do was go to his website, and he was recommending one of the most anti Semitic tracks you could see if America knew all about the terrible Jews and terrible Israelis.
Oh my God.
And there was no, all.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that this would have continued and continued.
I wrote a letter to the Daily.
It didn't stop them.
Neil and Scott objected until finally we just said, you know what?
This is not a matter of they get to lie and we get to lie.
That's what they were saying.
Some people at Stanford said, well, everybody has liars.
Let's just call it quits.
We said, we have not lied.
We haven't said anything wrong.
Don't conflate us with these people.
And we respect, we're not the ones trying to censor them, even though they're not telling the truth.
We didn't really get help until we helped ourselves.
It really, I think it's a good lesson for all of us that when you get targeted by the mob, you're not going to have a lot of people come to your defense.
The only defense is yourself.
And the left in these matters are bullies, and they will not stop until they feel in a cost benefit analysis they have more to lose and to gain.
Letters and media appearances that we had done nothing wrong.
Pushing Back Against the Mob 00:05:00
We were just scholars that they objected to on ideological grounds.
And that if you really wanted to examine culpability for insurrectionary activity, you should look at our accusers.
As soon as that happened, it dropped.
It was dropped.
Oh, wow.
So just to back up, because I know you're short on time, but how will it fall apart?
How will wokeism leave us?
I wasn't around for the McCarthy era, and I don't know how the Salem witch trials wound up.
Dying out?
The first thing that happens is it cannibalizes the sacrosanct.
So when McCarthy went after the US Army and George Marshall, hero of World War II, and then that forced Dwight Eisenhower to say, you know what, he may be in my party and that's my base, but I got to speak out.
And that happened.
And once the Republicans said, you know what, he's not going to get exemption from us.
So in this case, if they continue to go after Democrats and leftists, In academia, and they will because each victory makes them gorged and more conceited, that will begin to slow it down.
And then the other thing is the sheer amount of capital and labor and time that's invested in it.
I can tell you that in our particular minor little isolated case, I don't think that the people who run a multi billion operation like Stanford University want that type of publicity and they want that type of time exhausted and they want all of those legal questions adjudicated by their staff when there was nothing there.
And I think it's a drag on the economy and our own collective time that if everybody is a racist, then nobody is a racist.
That's what I'm getting to.
And we get a saturation point where You know, if everybody's a say them witch, then there's no longer anything called a witch.
If everybody is an aristocratic Catholic oppressor in 1793 France, then nobody is.
And that's what's happening right now.
Everybody is systematically racist.
They say that openly.
You're all racist.
You all, it's all up to you people to confess.
Well, that's not viable because, you know, there's still 70% of the population, whatever ideological bent they are, is not going to say, I'm awful and culpable.
And you can do whatever you want.
Tell me what I have to do.
There will be some who feel that they can dodge the bullet and make a deal, but most won't when it gets to that extreme.
And we're getting close to that extreme.
So I think we're already seeing in polls that people are starting to push back.
And what killed me?
Yeah, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
What killed, I think, what killed the Me Too movement, which I thought had a lot of justifiable causes in the beginning, but what really did it in was when they went after Brett Kavanaugh.
And you could make the argument that what you did at 17 years old when there were no collaborating witnesses and what evidence did exist kind of exonerated him.
But nevertheless, they persisted.
And then they started going after luminaries on the left.
I mean, Tara Reid going after Joe Biden.
And she had far more credible charges than did Ms. Ford against Kavanaugh.
And then you look at Cuomo and the leftist mind, it was fine that he may have been.
Indirectly responsible or indeed directly responsible for 15,000 deaths in long term facilities in New York.
But what was not tolerable was that he had touched or been acted inappropriately toward women.
And so at that point, everybody said, well, if there is a Me Too credo and a culture, then let's follow it.
Let's apply it to Joe Biden.
Let's apply it to Andrew Cuomo.
Let's apply it to other people and not just Brett Kavanaugh.
And it sort of Petered out.
I mean, some of it was institutionalized, a good part, but it doesn't have the same force that it did two years ago.
Well, I certainly hope that.
I mean, the one good thing about this nonsense infiltrating our schools is that I do believe, whereas you might not stand up for yourself, parents will stand up for their children.
Parents don't want their kids showing up at the third grade to be told they're white supremacists.
And I think we're starting to see real pushback on that more and more, which gives me some hope.
All right, last two questions.
The first is, what is the thing that's most concerning you right now about our country?
I think it's actually the debt.
We're getting $29 trillion in debt, and we just passed $2 trillion we printed, and we had a trillion dollars that we haven't even used.
And the ideology behind it that we can just print money and we can have zero interest rates and we can transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from middle class and lower middle class people who get no interest on their meager savings.
Greek Classics and Ancient History 00:04:58
And use that zero interest to keep borrowing money and not paying interest on it because that's not sustainable either.
At some point, we're going to have a stagflation, inflation, recession.
And so the When I look at history, everybody always says to classicists, why did the classical city state fail or why did Rome do so well and suddenly it collapsed in the fifth century?
Well, it's never suddenly, it's the destruction of the currency and its increased debt and the ideology that debt creates, that everybody's entitled to some free money.
That's what I'm most worried about.
All right, I'm squeezing in one question before my last one, which is speaking of the classics, because this is your department and this is truly what you're expert in.
For somebody like me who doesn't really understand it, like I don't, I'm got to, I have a confession for you.
Last night I Googled classics.
Like, what does it mean?
You know, ancient Greece.
Okay, ancient Rome.
And then what after that?
I would like to learn more.
As somebody who is just a Syracuse University graduate and then went on to law school where they didn't talk about this at all, what would be a good place for me to start to learn more about the classics?
Well, I would, to be frank, I would not read anything after 2000.
Because it's ideological.
What we're talking about today infected classics.
So there's a good book, a classic book by Edith Hamilton called The Greek Way.
It was a classic in the 1940s.
There's H.D. Kiddo, The Greeks.
I co authored a book called Who Killed Homer?
What Were Classics and What Happened to It?
There's a good book called Greek Ways by Bruce Thornton.
All of these start, the theme of all of these books is that there are certain works of literature.
art, architecture that everybody recognizes by their innate beauty and power and wisdom.
And it has nothing to do with being white or male or anything.
And over time, that's the test of it.
So the Doric Order or the Parthenon or a Greek vase painting or the Iliad or the Odyssey or Thucydides' history or Aristotle's politics, they are so focused on the great issues of life, you know, the human experience, what happens to us when we die.
Why do good people do bad things?
Why do you forgive somebody or does that only empower them?
All of these things every day that we want to know about, these pieces of literature, these poems and forensic speeches or histories deal with in a way that most literature today doesn't.
And then the same thing with art.
They capture what the eye sees, not what you think it sees.
But then if it exaggerates beauty, it does so in a way that's realistic, it's classical.
And that's the term.
Or why is our Supreme Court or buildings in Washington or Paris, why do they all go back eventually to this classical mode of columns or architraves or pediments?
Why not just make square boxes like the Bauhaus movement?
And so classics means that throw anything you want in the human experience out there, but there are certain archetypes of literature.
And it's not just in Greece and Rome, it's in Florentine Italy and the.
You know, 15th and 16th century.
It can be American novels in the 1930s Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, that were not, they're not here today.
So there are these pockets of brilliance that explode and they become immortalized.
And so that was what classics are.
And then very quickly, you study it in a variety of ways.
The keystone is learning Latin and Greek.
Most people don't want to do that.
If you do Latin and Greek, then you can read it in the original, you can see what they said about it.
But you can study ancient history.
You can study it through archaeology, numismatics, ancient coinage, ancient architecture, ancient vase paintings.
You can go, and I spent a year at the American School of Classical.
Studies in Athens as an archaeologist.
That's exciting too.
You dig and you find things, and it's quite spectacular to see a grave come to life all of a sudden.
And so it's a multidisciplinary experience.
And I wish it was there because I created a classic spartan at Cal State Fresno for 21 years for minority kids.
I think 90% of my kids were from Southeast Asia or Mexico.
And I found that if they learn Latin and some learn Greek, They learned vocabulary and etymology and how to speak like Demosthenes or Cicero, no notes, just using hand gestures and memories.
I could really ensure them a quality education that was better than what you could get at Stanford.
Navy SEALs and Spartan Education 00:05:25
And all of them, race became incidental to who they were.
It was no longer essential.
They were so merocratic and they were so skilled and adept.
And these are people who came from Mexico without even speaking English in some cases.
But I just, Wish we would get back to that merocratic system.
And then I think, because I don't believe that people's natural aptitude has anything to do with race or anything at all.
And so I'm not worried about immigration from a racial point of view.
I'm worried from a cultural, legal point of view.
If we said we're going to take 100,000 people from Mexico legally and we're going to select people who are going to have the best chance of succeeding quickly based on their education level in Mexico.
I think they would be just as successful as anybody else.
My worry is because we're undermining the sanctity of the law mostly.
Yeah.
And then you're told you can't talk about it.
So, first of all, that was inspirational.
I love listening to you talk about it.
I love your own enthusiasm for it, which is contagious and makes me want to go.
I'm going to go get those books today.
Abby, would you please go get me those books today?
I have my assistance here.
So, that's exciting because you made the case very persuasively.
All right.
Here's my last question.
Which is, I asked to some guests, but you in particular need to answer this.
What do you love about America?
You know, I like the American can do, I don't give a damn attitude.
And that was with us from the very beginning, as we know from the founders.
And we were right on the border sometime of chaos, but I like the idea that I see a guy that's built his own Winnebago out of wood on the freeway.
Or I like an idea when I go up to the lake and There's a boat ramp, and everybody's in line for hours to unload their boat.
And some weird guy on the other side found a natural dirt slope and says, Come over here, look what I've done.
And they don't do that in Europe, you know.
And so there's this spontaneous, innovative, highly individual streak that's inherent in America.
And that's why once we get going, we're always screwing things up.
But once we get going, like in World War II, at the end of World War II, we had a larger GDP coming out of the Depression than all the other countries.
Major belligerents in the world.
The US Navy was larger than every single Navy in the world by 1945.
And yet it wasn't.
We had the 19th largest army behind Portugal when World War II started.
And when it ended, we had 12.5 million.
For whatever people say about vaccinations, this country was the one that gave us four vaccinations.
And we are going to be eventually the largest country with the most vaccination once we gear up to it.
And once we just let Get the government out and say, you know what, Walgreens, you do this, CBS, you do that.
The purpose is as many arms get jabbed as possible as quickly.
And once you unleash this American individualism and imagination, it's quite scary, but in a positive way.
So that's what I like best about the United States.
And what I like worst is when people try to artificially repress it or Stigmatize it or demonize it.
But there's a natural exuberance about this country that's ecumenical, too.
And Americans are the most charitable people in the world.
When somebody goes on a fund me thing or somebody has a natural content, there's nowhere else in the world where anybody just starts giving and spending like Americans do.
I've lived all over the world and traveled all over, and I've never seen anybody quite like an American as far as their generosity and their lack of pretense.
Or, you know, you go up in Europe and you'll just see an American come up to you and say, Hey, where are you from?
Oh, yeah, I was there.
Hey, yeah, yeah, you want to go have coffee?
Other people don't do that to the same degree that we do.
And it's something that we need to really, really appreciate because it is exceptional.
The one and only Victor Davis Hansen.
Now people know why I love you.
I'm really glad you were here.
Thank you.
Please come back, too.
Please come back.
I will.
I will.
So, up next on Wednesday, don't forget to subscribe.
You've got to listen to this interview.
Jocko Willink is here.
This is not just a Navy SEAL.
This is the Navy SEAL.
This is the Navy SEAL commander that all the SEALs want to work under.
And this guy not only served our country honorably with repeated tours of duty in the Middle East and in Iraq, but I mean, he knew some of the best and greatest Navy SEALs that have ever served our nation.
And he's got leadership advice.
He's got thoughts about where we are in our country.
He's got thoughts on how you get yourself out of bed every day and deal with some of the craziness that's weighing on all of us so much, right?
Like, how do you put that out of your head?
How do you deal with bullies in this woke culture?
How do you even think about your bullies?
I found him really useful with some practical tips on how I could do better in my life.
And he's on another level.
He's not like anybody we've had on before.
He just comes at everything from a different level.
And he's the one who got me thinking about how we need more military people in office, right?
We need somebody like Jocko to run for office.
Unfortunately, he's probably too evolved to do it.
But I know you're going to love the interview.
So don't forget, go ahead and subscribe now.
Jocko and Military Leadership 00:01:52
Download the show.
Give me a five-star rating if you feel inclined, and I'd love to get a review from you.
I do read them all, and I always appreciate hearing your feedback.
Talk to you then.
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