April 7, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain. | |
| I'm very pleased to bring to you my conversation with Victor Davis Hanson. | |
| He is the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. | |
| He is a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. | |
| He is a A wonderful writer, a great communicator. | |
| His book, The Case for Trump, I will link to all of his works below, but here is my conversation with Victor Davis Hanson. | |
| So, for those of us who've studied history extensively, it gives us a kind of superpower to peer into the past and understand the future in its... | |
| Real perspective. How do you think the history of, I guess, mostly bacterial, now virological, infestations all the way back to the Peloponnesians, how do you think that gives us a perspective on the modern coronavirus outbreak? | |
| Well, I think because medical traditions are so different, they were captives of the realm of superstition and guesswork. | |
| They were empirical, as we know from Hippocrates and Thucydides' description of the Athenian Plague of 430, but they're more valuable for the psychological reactions to either fear of mass death or mass death in their presence. | |
| I think that holds up pretty well, and that is that people initially in a crisis like this They're very calm and they call for calm and then when they start thinking about the worst case scenarios and they're not disabused of those fears and anxieties, | |
| they start to act in predictable fashion and we've seen it already, hoarding, panicking, stocking up on things they don't need, avoiding people that they know can't have the virus and then imagining, and this is more true of the media and the officials than the public at large, | |
| Looking at models, pseudo-scientific models, in the sense that they don't have all the data, but they, you know, the governor of Ohio says there's already 100,000 cases that we don't know about that are existing, not projected, but existing in Ohio at a time when there were five, I think there's 50 or something now, one or two deaths, three deaths. | |
| That would mean that the people who were listening to him, given the death rate at the time, on the data we had, 2,500 people We're then doomed, and they should be dead, because it's been about 14 days since he said that, and they're not dead. | |
| So I think that's predictable, and that's well chronicled in history. | |
| It's a strange thing because we have these kind of three factors. | |
| We have increased travel, we have increased communication through social media, but we also have increased, of course, medical resources and knowledge, of course, germ theory and so on. | |
| So it's like while we have a capacity to deal with it better, the fears can be very much exacerbated by what's communicated on social media and other places. | |
| Remember, we're a therapeutic, not a tragic society. | |
| We're largely agnostic, if not atheistic. | |
| People don't believe that the other world has something to offer better than this world. | |
| Importantly, they don't see death and destruction around them very often, at least in the Western world of Europe, Westernized Asia and the United States. | |
| People are born into the contemporary society with the idea that they have a birthright to die in their sleep at 90, and that old age It's sort of just like youth, only a little bit slower. | |
| So when they are presented with facts that several hundred people die of a mysterious virus that could infect them, then they feel they've been cheated out of their birthright, and so they react in a way that's not commensurate with the actual threat. | |
| I say that speaking today of 8,200 people in the United States will die today, and about somewhere between 25 and 50 will die of the virus. | |
| And yet, there's Thousands of medical, millions of medical procedures, whether it's stents being placed or exploratory surgeries or chemotherapy. | |
| They're being delayed or abrogated or canceled because of this panic. | |
| Well, there is also, I think, quite a spotlight that's being put onto a wide variety of social and particularly economic problems, outsourcing of obviously essential medicines to a communist dictatorship, the evisceration of manufacturing in the United States, the hyper-regulation of the FDA. All of these are kind of being addressed and may end up being somewhat positive out of this kind of negative passage. | |
| I agree. The virus was a scab that was torn off and there was a putrid wound beneath it. | |
| And the putrid wound was that for some strange reason, the United States had outsourced 80, 85, 90% of its key pharmaceutical industry, its medical supply industry, its strategic technology, its railroad. | |
| All the things which we know we've in the past done were pioneers in those fields and with those resources. | |
| And yet we allowed China to have that strangulation hold over us. | |
| And being a communist dictatorship, it was not going to turn into Carmel, California, or the Upper West Side with more magnanimity than we showed it. | |
| That was termed weakness to be exploited and not to be reciprocated. | |
| So, yeah, I agree there's going to be some good come out of it. | |
| And the problem that I see right now is we have about a two to three week window, a point of no return. | |
| I was for the lockdown for a few days, but with this lockdown and shutdown, And strangulation of the economy. | |
| At some point, it's going to be like a fan wheel. | |
| It's just going to keep going and we're going to get into a recessionary, if not depression, cycle as people with liquid assets wait for the price to always go down and people that don't have liquid assets, businessmen, always want to sell. | |
| And we have too many sellers and not enough buyers. | |
| Then you have the ingredients of a sort of panic. | |
| I've seen it in farming my entire life, and once it starts, it's tragic because it doesn't have any correlation necessarily with real value. | |
| It's perceptions and panic. | |
| What I'm getting at in this windy explanation is at some point our leaders are going to have to say, look, Germany It has less than two people per thousand dying of it. | |
| They have more cases than we do. | |
| It may be a statistical anomaly, but we have to assume there's data. | |
| And we have now about 1.4 people per hundred dying of it, and the rate is going down as the number of cases increases. | |
| And our goal is, in two to three weeks, to have readily accessible medicines that will ameliorate the severity of the illness, push ahead through vaccinations, And we're going to treat this like other outbreaks, whether it's measles or tuberculosis, where we'll do mass testing on the horizon. | |
| We will be able to isolate hotspots in individuals and have investigators trace the contacts, almost like we do to be candid with syphilis. | |
| I'd never say that. | |
| And then we will find the known people and isolate them, as well as protect people over 65 and suggest they not go to public events. | |
| Otherwise, we're going to get back and lower back on the economy because if we don't, more people will die and are dying probably than the virus. | |
| I mean, nobody today said Mr. | |
| Jones shot his wife because they were arguing after three weeks confined or Mr. | |
| Smith did not go get a stint because he was afraid he died or Mr. | |
| So-and-so used crystal meth more than he usually did. | |
| Or Mr. So-and-so drained himself into a stupor and got in a car. | |
| That's all the baggage that happens when you take a $20 trillion economy and you slam on the brakes. | |
| Oh, yeah, no, you can see a lot of people kind of going through the windshield at the moment. | |
| What are the other fault lines that you think have been exposed? | |
| You know, stuff that pops to my mind is, you know, massive corporate debt, this terrible habit of buying back their own shares. | |
| What are the other things do you think that are going to take a lot of blows out of this stress test of a lot of existing beliefs? | |
| Well, foreign and abroad, I think the EU is pretty much discredited because when push came to shove, For all the exalted rhetoric about the Schengen Agreement, no borders, every country had borders, didn't they? | |
| Germany locked down its borders and decided it would not send critical medical supplies to Italy, even though that decision people were going to die, because they were not all part of the EU brotherhood. | |
| They were Germans, and they were Italians, and they were Poles, as everybody always suspected. | |
| And then the idea that because of political correctness, you weren't going to issue travel bans well into... | |
| Late February allowed hundreds of thousands of people to come into the EU in a way that we stopped it on the 31st. | |
| But more at home, I think the political correctness is going to take a big hit because for all those who said that it was racist, homophobic, xenophobic, protectionist to control or secure the southern border, and we have people other than Mexican nationals who come in, | |
| that was wise. For people who made fun of Donald Trump about the earlier travel bans based on countries that couldn't verify their passport control, and he was called an Islamophobe for doing it, that was wise, and that was the precursor of the very necessary travel ban on both Europe and China that had done more to save lives than anything. | |
| And then greenlighting drugs two years ago for those in terminal stages was a precursor of Throning much of the FDA red tape that will help us in this crisis, and his shrill but constant drumbeat that China is asymmetrical, that it's predatory, that it cheats on patents, copyrights, infringements, appropriations, all of that was prescient. | |
| The people who oppose that I think will take a hit. | |
| I think also that The more that we stay in our cocoons, we're thinking what shut down and what didn't and what was necessary and what wasn't. | |
| I don't think the diversities are and anybody's missing the diversities are at Stanford University this last three weeks as opposed to the guy who produces fracking and he gives natural gas to keep people from getting cold in New York City or the truck driver who drives all night With a load of hand sanitizers to get to the supermarket, | |
| or the stock boys that go in at 3 in the morning and work like crazy, or the healthcare professionals, the nurses that are in the ER every day exposing themselves to the virus, or the farmers. | |
| I'm speaking right now with my farm, looking out the window, and not once has any of these farms shut down. | |
| Not once. They've been on tractors, they've been at meat processing plants, they've been at dairies, non-stop here in the San Joaquin Valley of California. | |
| So I think we're going to You know what? | |
| These people are not deplorable. | |
| They're the essential muscles that make this country move. | |
| And a lot of people, corporate lawyers, financial advisors, university administrators, academics, media sensationalists, we did pretty well without seeing or hearing from them. | |
| Well, of course, there is this general pattern in civilization that you move away from the basics towards these esoterical, abstract, particularly financial instruments, and as you say, corporate lawyers and so on. | |
| But I think when people look at the world and recognize all of the delicate dominoes that require getting food from farm to table, there is, I think, a recognition of the essential work that is often invisible to the end consumer. | |
| You know, in the first time in their lives, probably they've gone to the supermarket and found the market's bare or the shelves bare. | |
| I think that there is, as you say, going to be a kind of respect that's going back to not just the flashy people who make money, but the people who actually keep us going. | |
| I hope so. | |
| I think I can sense it a little better. | |
| He's now engaged, as we speak, in a multi-million, excuse me, multi-billion dollar gambit to capitalize Chinese companies on the open financial markets with a hefty cut for himself. | |
| When he says that farmers are just, you know, they just practice road. | |
| He just brought the seed on the ground. | |
| If anybody believes that, then they're absolutely insane. | |
| And the food that he's eating right now is critical. | |
| To him and his family and to all of us and the financial shenanigans that he's crafting to help Chinese state companies get the capitals so they can grab more market share is not of any essential value to Americans other than to himself. | |
| So I hope that people stand up and push back against this idea of political correctness or that this global elite have all the answers because of their assets or their letters behind their name. | |
| It's really long overdue, and I'm glad to see it happen, although it's unfortunate I had to take this to bring that truth out. | |
| Well, it generally is that case. | |
| I was actually in Hong Kong last fall working on a documentary and one of the conversations that I had with some of their legal experts and so on was the idea that people are willing to give up certain basic rights in China in return for economic opportunity and growing I guess absorption into the middle class. | |
| It seems to me that that contract has been cracked if not broken by the fairly egregious attitude of the communist government towards containing this virus which they found out about it seems in November of last year and kind of covered things up and then jailed people who were trying to talk about it. | |
| What do you think is going to change in the relationship between the average Chinese citizen and his state? | |
| It's very hard to calibrate that because history offers so many examples of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes that should have fallen, but by sheer use of terror and more sophisticated tactics, even than that, they perpetuate. | |
| The Soviet Union, everybody thought, wouldn't last through the 20s, and World War II came along and empowered Stalin, etc., etc. | |
| Same with the Iranians. I never thought the Iranian democracy would last 40 years. | |
| So you're right though, we don't, because it's unpredictable, we don't know what's happening but Chi, Premier Chi and the apparatus suffered a terrible blow and part of that ironically is that I think quite unwisely we welcomed in 370,000 Chinese students and at least a percent or two were engaged in technological appropriation but That being said, | |
| they went back with China with not any political liberalization, but a cultural informality that was perhaps incompatible with Stalinism that's practiced in China. | |
| And I think that could make it a little bit more difficult. | |
| And then we live in the age, as you said, of electronic instant communication, social media. | |
| And people have been nursed on that from birth. | |
| And so when that's cut off, it's like cutting food off to them. | |
| And they get very irate. | |
| What do you think is going to go on with the media at the moment? | |
| Because, I mean, it really is split in America to those who believe a lot of what the media says and those who kind of automatically oppose everything the media says, particularly since Mueller and impeachment and the media did seem to downplay the risk. | |
| Now they seem to be really pumping the risk. | |
| Do you think that people are going to start to uncouple from the media as a whole, even those who generally accept its statements? | |
| I think they have already. | |
| I think if we look at the ratings of CNN, for example, they've almost hit rock bottom. | |
| And I don't think many people, they get news from the Washington Post, the New York Times, but usually second or third hand quoted or used for other stories. | |
| Because when you wake up on Monday and it's Trump called the whole hoax, whole virus a hoax. | |
| And on Tuesday, it's Trump called those who said That he said that are a hoax. | |
| It's quite different. Or when you hear that, oh, David Trump comes out and says, oh, wow, we shouldn't, people who use the word Chinese virus are racist because we've stopped using the Spanish virus terminology. | |
| And then somebody points out that you didn't. | |
| You'd use it at least two years ago. | |
| So I guess what I'm saying is that it's a little different now. | |
| Everybody's known this, but again, it's never more apparent that with Seven billion people with access to all sorts of good and bad information, they kind of become a Roman crowd with thumbs up, thumbs down in a gladiatorial contest because they have access to information and verification. | |
| So when all of these elites get on TV or these columnists or pundits or op-ed people and they pontificate, there's almost an instant referendum. | |
| I can tell you that if somebody writes three columns a week. | |
| I pore over the word because I know that if I say one thing that's factually not wrong, I'm going to have hundreds of people email me and trash me on social. | |
| And that serves as a deterrent. | |
| But it doesn't for someone who is in that Washington, New York corridor for some reason. | |
| I think social, cultural, they feel that they're exalted and that they have a certain position of authority that's immune from criticism and it doesn't affect them. | |
| And that means that they also are not sensitive to how unpopular and disliked they are, and unlistened to. | |
| Well, of course, the argument about that is that if they are radical leftists or hard leftists, the purpose is the revolution and truth is expendable, and everything which serves to, I guess, advance that kind of cause is not only forgivable, but praiseworthy. | |
| Yes, absolutely. They feel that their ends are so exalted that they justify any means. | |
| To achieve them, because without any means necessary, they won't give us fairness and mandated equality and whatnot. | |
| And you can really see that point in this China versus Trump struggle, and that is most of the mainstream media. | |
| I was looking at the Atlantic website, formerly the Atlantic magazine, and it's almost unapologetically pro-communist party, and everything the Chinese are doing, winning, It's wonderful. | |
| They're winning public support by helping Italy. | |
| And there's never any sense that this is an Orwellian sort of mirage because they started this whole thing. | |
| They ensured that it would spread. | |
| They did so because, at best, they were worried about their economic future if they told everybody that they were the origins of a virus. | |
| And so, and at worst, you know, conspiracy theories abound. | |
| But nonetheless, how American media could sympathize more with the Chinese when their propaganda is so patently obvious. | |
| I mean, they're basically saying, we're part of the American other. | |
| We're people of color. | |
| You people are all based on white supremacy, and you're all racist, and you're demonizing the other, us. | |
| This is a nation with 1.4 billion people that put a million people in re-education camps, and yet our stupid media Either believes it or they, as you say, they find it useful for ideological purposes. | |
| So let's talk a little bit about the road to November. | |
| I'll link the article below, but you had a great article on, I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, that Joe Biden is back from the dead, you know, like this vampire you can't kill at the end of the trilogy. | |
| So let's talk a little bit about what's going to happen, do you think, over the sort of spring, summer, and early fall leading up to November? | |
| Can I give you two scenarios first? | |
| Very briefly, what I think is the worst case scenario is we continue in the lockdown, the shutdown, even though the data shows that the case per lethality ratio is nearing Germany's, and by that I mean one to two per thousand. | |
| It's pretty much what a swine flu or even a regular flu is. | |
| And yet we persist because of the hysteria. | |
| The economy goes into steep recession in April and May, maybe even depression in the early summer. | |
| It slowly comes back, but every time there's an outburst, a hotspot, the media go crazy and say Donald Trump was lax. | |
| He rushed everything ahead for political advantage. | |
| He's killed 20 people today in Indiana. | |
| Something like that. We know that will happen. | |
| Then Joe Biden gets elected. | |
| Joe Biden is enfeebled. | |
| And he has an array of advisors around him that are even more far left than he is. | |
| And then the economy goes into its natural cycle of rebound. | |
| Everybody takes credit for saving us. | |
| And we have a progressive neo-socialist government. | |
| And that's what I fear. | |
| But the best case scenario is that Trump picks a date based on data in two weeks or three weeks and says, at this point, The suspended animated economy slowly is going to be awakened. | |
| Not too fast, not too slowly, but we're going to each day, each week, add more industries that are free to do what they want with a Marshall Plan to get these proven drugs that can ameliorate the illness and testing stepped up. | |
| And then we grow acclimatized to the case Case expanding as a result of testing as lethality rates go down because of increased testing that includes people who either have no symptoms or got over it or never told anybody about it. | |
| So I'm hoping that latter scenario and then Trump will be adjudicated, judged on his record and we can go back to where we were before where people can say this is his economic record, this is his foreign policy record I'm going to either vote against him or not. | |
| But I don't think the left wants that, because I think that they're terribly afraid in that context. | |
| And we're very rapidly getting to a point where coronavirus takes off when impeachment took off from Mueller, which took off from Emoluments Clause, which took off from 25th Amendment, which took off from the voting machines, which took off from trying to subvert the Electoral College right after the election. | |
| Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, the big challenge in American politics right now is the Democrats, they're kind of married to America, but they have this saucy wench down the road that they're very drawn to that's going to break up the marriage, which is this sort of Bernie Sanders hard left core ideology. | |
| And it's like there's this whirlpool or this undertow that's kind of... | |
| It seems to me almost like it's just going to be a matter of time until they cave into that extremism. | |
| Well... The reason that you fear that is not because of the sensibility of the average American, a pretty smart guy. | |
| History shows that. | |
| But the problem is that the left has now taken control of the major cultural outlets for expression and habit and protocol. | |
| By that I mean professional sports. | |
| You have the NBA kowtowing to China, or you have the Super Bowl extravaganzas at halftime that become lectures on our racism and sexism, or you have 5,000 universities that are daily pounding into students' heads that their country was racist at its founding. | |
| Or we have Hollywood that keeps making the same movie about some evil corporation and some brilliant, good-looking, young person of color or gay who takes it on. | |
| Or the daily sitcoms or the cable and regular news or NPR and PBS. So finally, it's almost like The American citizen wants to get into a field position and cover his eyes and say, I can't take this anymore, I give up. | |
| Sort of like the hero in 1984 at the end, he's just overwhelmed by it all. | |
| And yet it's like the Bolsheviks in Russia or the Jacobins in the French Revolution. | |
| They represent a very small percentage of the actual population. | |
| Bernie Sanders probably doesn't represent more than 20% at most of people. | |
| And yet the people who agree with him have enormous powers of influence at Wall Street, Silicon Valley, federal government, New York media, and Hollywood. | |
| So it's really scary. | |
| Well, and it was my hope that seeing the effects of a crackdown on whatever vestigial free speech rights remain in China, that people would say, oh, so this is what happens when free speech is compromised. | |
| You get a breakout of a worldwide pandemic, and it might kind of shock people back. | |
| Into a more First Amendment position, but it doesn't really seem like the tech companies and other institutions are still calling for, you know, the suppression of wrong think and bad think. | |
| And, man, if there's ever evidence as to why free speech is important, you'd think the coronavirus outbreak would be one of them. | |
| You'd think so, but remember, they're so clever. | |
| Free speech are loud talk radio people, are NRIA spokesmen, and they are individuals who are trying to hurt the common good. | |
| And people who are really hip and they wear, you know, flip-flops and cutoffs and, you know, shades and even though they're billionaires, these people know us very well and they're out to help us. | |
| We have to give them a little bit more power to stop these retrograde reactionary forces. | |
| People who are skeptical of abortion or light guns, things like that. | |
| So they use the social issues and then they captured the popular hipster culture. | |
| And so it's very funny. | |
| It's like medieval penance or exemptions where a person who was a sinner would go, you know, to the church and say, I'll put one block in the new dome at St. | |
| Peter's if I can continue to charge 20% interest. | |
| And they were given a penance for past and then an exemption for future behavior. | |
| And that's how the left seems to operate. | |
| They become very culturally cool and hip and then they can do some things that are pretty authoritarian and scary. | |
| Well, they have this hand puppet of corporations, right? | |
| Because it's something that has always been confusing to me that people are afraid of corporations because, you know, concentrated oligarchical power is really bad, and then the solution is somehow the state. | |
| Now, a corporation generally can't compel you to do anything, but the state sure as hell can. | |
| And the idea that you'd run from a hand puppet corporate demon lord into the arms of the state has always struck me as extremely counterintuitive. | |
| Yeah, it does. Don't forget the military because Don't Ask, Don't Tell went to gays being married in combat. | |
| I'm not going to editorialize on that policy, but just the rapidity in which that happened or suddenly women were in combat units or whatever. | |
| Transsexuals were going to be in combat because the left has always attracted to authoritarian institutions because they can bypass what they call messy democracy of the rubes. | |
| And they want instant results. | |
| So for all their public rhetoric, they've always been very curious to get into the military and the corporations and the bureaucracy in the deep state because that's where they feel they can get instantaneous results. | |
| Well, that, of course, is the big battle that's going on with regards to judges. | |
| As you're right, they don't like to go through Congress. | |
| They don't like to go to the messy Athenian style democracy. | |
| They want to go straight to legislating from the bench and hit the judges. | |
| And I think that's the secret war that are not not enough Trump supporters are aware of, of just how radically he's de-radicalizing, in a sense, the judicial bench with his appointment. | |
| Yeah, I think that's true. | |
| I work at Stanford University when I have conversations to the extent that I do with leftist professors and researchers. | |
| It's always struck me as funny that the pure hatred comes out over the Trump judicial policy and his appointments and they'll say things to me like he's ruined for 40 years. | |
| What they mean by that is he's given a modicum of balance, maybe 40%, which means that if you file a lawsuit to destroy A plebiscite or a referendum or a constitutionally enacted piece of legislation. | |
| You only have 40% rather than 90% surety of having it succeed. | |
| And that's how they do business. | |
| Because they have no public support, at least in most cases. | |
| And this will be a good referendum on the American people to see to what degree they can see through all this. | |
| And they can vote on the real issues, the economy and their national security and people who are worrying about globalization and want to go back to a more nationalist, U.S.-centered policy. | |
| But so far, as you said earlier, it's counterintuitive because you would think of a rare candidate who said, let's, two years ago, green light drugs and bypass the FDA or let's close the southern border or let's... | |
| Tell China no more exploitation or let's question globalization in the EU and let's be for Brexit. | |
| You'd think that that would be a winning message that everybody would say, wow, this guy for all of his crassness is pretty prescient. | |
| Everything he's said in the last three years has been coming true, but true in a really scary way. | |
| Right. Well, I appreciate it. | |
| I know our time's limited today. | |
| I could just prevail upon you for a closing statement. | |
| I've had some people on the show who've been quite alarmed about coronavirus. | |
| I do want to balance it out with a historical perspective. | |
| What is it that you would like to say to the listeners, at least of this conversation, about how dangerous things are and continuity of supply chains, and should they be all too worried or just a medium amount or not much? | |
| I think they have natural apprehension, but I would remind them that if we go back and look what the modeling was in January and February and March earlier, we did not have 250 dead today. | |
| We had thousands. | |
| When people say that half the country is going to be infected, you should be very skeptical. | |
| And then we should also use data that we're supposed to not use, and that is things like 50 million people that have the H1N1 virus. | |
| 17,000 died and we didn't cease the economic existence. | |
| So we have to find that golden, very difficult mean between being careful and then being self-destructive and panic. | |
| And I think we're going over to the latter extreme now. | |
| And we know how to defeat this. | |
| We just get more testing. | |
| We get accurate rates of lethality and then we all make as individuals informed choices and we say you know what it's about two or three people per thousand as it is in Germany and as it seems to be in Korea once the government acts and I can take those risks especially because my grandmother or my aunt who is vulnerable I'm going to be careful to isolate and more importantly if they go to the ER They're going to have advantages now, | |
| in the next few months, in a way that people did not in January, because we know more about the protocol hygiene, new drugs coming along. | |
| And then finally, the experts almost seem to fear to say that, but most viruses tend to wane in the summer. | |
| And we're seeing that with the coronavirus. | |
| But countries in Africa, the Philippines, by and large, if they haven't had large influxes of Chinese expatriates, have fewer Well, and I hope, of course, when people see how inaccurate some of these models were, they can start to question some of the models that give us temperature changes in 100 years. | |
| All right. Well, thanks very much for your time. | |
| I really do appreciate it. I'll put the links to all of your materials below, but it was a great pleasure to chat. |
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