Victor Davis Hanson Lecture | September 8, 2021

good evening everyone looks like everyone's made it over this is wonderful it's my honor and privilege to introduce this evening speaker victor davis hanson is a farmer he is a farmer on the family farm that has been farmed for five generations being a farmer makes one practical wise and aware of the world around them he's not just aware of the world around him however he has studied the classical world up to the present world he earned a phd at stanford university in classics and then went on to found a very successful classics program at cal state fresno after leaving cal state fresno he went back to his alma mater stanford where he joined the hoover institution and is the martin and ellie anderson senior fellow in residence at the hoover institution but he's also a faculty member at hillsdale college where he comes every year to teach [Applause] he's been coming here since roughly 1998. he is the wayne and marcia buskie distinguished fellow in history here in hillsdale he is an award-winning scholar he has been awarded the national humanities medal the bradley prize the edmond burke award the william buckley prize the claremont institute's statesmanship award and others he has been an advisor to statesman he has been a teacher of young people he's a generous and kind person and he's here to talk to us tonight about a pressing issue the dying citizen which is the title of his new book this new book released by basic books will be published on october 5th you can already pre-order it on amazon happily for some and not so for others we were able to secure 200 pre-publication copies that dr hansen has signed and they will be available for purchase after this evening's event out in the lobby if you're not at the front of the queue no worries he has also signed just as many book plates that can go inside a book and you are free to order a copy we have order forms and you can order a copy and receive that book with a signed book plate within it as well if this is something you're interested in this will take place out those doors after dr hansen's lecture when he finishes his speech however there will be some time for q a and i would ask that if you have a question you please wait until the microphone re reaches you uh it's important for two reasons you want dr hansen to be able to hear the question but you also want the folks who are still over in the serial center to be able to hear your question as well so those are our marching orders for this evening but rather than hearing me give marching orders i'd rather hear you speak to a wonderful man and great teacher victor hansen please join me in welcoming thank you mark i enjoy every year coming here my wife says uh she doesn't call it hillsdale she said you're on your way to see mark kalkhoff and tom connor and al philip we three of us have been hanging around for 18 years so it's i feel like it's home i speak a lot of universities and they're usually hostile places so when i'm you this is a very nice introduction i was usually introduced until recently a guy would growl and he'd say oh here he is a raisin farmer from salmon california and he teaches where jerry tarkanian is coach at cal state fresno that was about it so this is nice i'd like to talk about our contemporary crises in the context of history and culture and citizenship and if you try to make sense of the nonsense that we're seeing every day it's very difficult you if just think of the images on our telepho television screens we've seen we saw these poor refugees flying in 100 000 of them and i was watching this the screen i had great empathy but i realized that we had not screened them and that the soldiers who were entrusted with with their lives i think maybe wisely or unwisely were asked or not i should say mandated to get a vaccination they're citizens but the refugees who were arriving were not how could such a thing be true and after risking all of their lives the commander in charge of the relocation said i want to reassure the american people that we have the proper gender ratios in the plane and we have culturally sensitive food i said the united states just suffered the most humiliating defeat since saigon 1975. what's going on two million people are crossing the border in this fiscal year the first act is to illegally cross a non-existent border the second act is to illegally reside in a country that they don't have legal permission to do so and the third is to find identification that's not legitimate to legitimize what was illegitimate and yet nobody raises a word and i i was looking at wage gains of the middle class a person was on television said we've had enormous three and a half percent wage gains but i thought wait a minute the annual price consumer index is rising at six percent so what does all this have what's going on in the united states we say it's wokeness it's chaos it's cova it's a lockdown it's a recession it was trump it's i think it's a destruction in the idea of a citizen us people that had a very exceptional i want to say very quickly that is a very rare idea we have we assume that since the dawn of civilization 7 000 years ago in the near east everybody was a citizen they weren't they were subjects they were servants they were slaves they were serfs it was only in greece 2500 years ago very late was there an idea that a politics political politics and later in rome 500 years later a kiwis civil civilization emerged and this was a unique idea that the people the residents had legal status started out believe it or not the right to pass on property to your errors without interference from the government that seems so crass but that's what started citizenship the right then to determine when you and when you would not fight and who would fight and your national cause whether you would have a border or not have a border and then the idea of freedom of speech and expression came later but it was a very rare idea it's rare today of the 190 nations in the world less than half of them are what we would call constitutional with true citizens so we have to remember that this idea of a multi-racial multi-ethnic democracy it's it's never been tried before india is trying it and brazil and those are the only two large countries that can try and they don't do very well so the idea that we're going to have to be perfect to be good when all we have to do is be far better than the alternative this is a new idea this demand on perfection on a a very rare incident in the history of civilization so what's happening to citizens i think it's being assaulted it being citizenship organically insidiously from what i call the pre-modern level and the first of course is you cannot have a citizen unless you have a middle class that goes back to aristotle and it's a theme throughout western thinking to alexis dick tocqueville and why did they say that because they felt that the rich had inordinate power to influence government officials in quid pro quo fashion and the poor would always be dependent either on the rich or on the government for subsidies but only the independent first it was the independent landowner we changed that idea and evolutionary the middle class homeowner the small business person but they were economically and politically autonomous and they were they took on the responsibility time consuming to participate in constitutional government what's happened until 2017 we'd have 13 years of economic stagnation we have right now 45 percent of the americans die with less than 10 thousand dollars in net worth and most people 50 percent die with money on their credit card that hasn't been paid back i think the most frightening is we have 1.7 trillion dollars in aggregate debt right now student debt and some kind of nefarious bargain between the federal government and these huge universities that raise the cost of tuition and the woman board faster than the rate of inflation because there's no moral hazard the federal government comes in and subsidizes that loan and they don't give a damn about what happens to the student when they graduate whether they're prepared to get a job or whether they can service that debt twenty percent of the debts are not going to be paid back about 30 percent are inactive and it has repercussions on the middle class the age when people marry has gone from 23 to 30. the age of a first child is 25 to 22 32 and the age when people buy their first home it's now it we had made enormous strides uh at the turn of the millennium we got up to 64 home ownership we're going backward now and you can see this housing boom in california nobody can buy a home that's middle class but we're doing something that again i don't want to quote all the philosophers but tocqueville said one of the great dangers of a maternalistic democracy is prolonged adolescence these are people who do not want to go out and face life get married have children whether they want to have children doesn't immaterial buy a home be productive and you can see it in the government during the obamacare controversy do you remember the pajama boy ad where we were all supposed to listen to a man with footsies and he was in his 20s and he was in his pajamas drinking hot chocolate and he said drink hot chocolate be cool get obamacare i thought who in the world would be attracted and then i was told it was a great success the other ad was the life of julia do you remember that ad julia when she was born her mother had fine noble thing federal prenatal care when she was born she had one to three federal assistants she went into a federal and federal this and federal doubt and it was bragging on the idea that from the moment she was born to the moment she died and i thought cradle to grave was a pejorative but i saw today that the new reconciliation bill is called cradle to grave benefits and the positive sin there's nothing more injurious to citizenship and a democracy than to have a prolonged adolescent generation it just doesn't work the second challenge is you know in the ancient world people love borders the greeks would have something called a horus a stone that marked out the limits of thieves or corinth or thespia or sparta and sometimes they were natural sometimes they were artificial but borders were really important wars started in the ancient world over borders now why was that was it because they were chauvinistic was it they were militaristic no they felt that if you did not have a special place a landscape in which everybody shared common values traditions holidays rituals you could not inculcate a cultural and social aspect that would reinforce constitutional government we have no border in the south now we have 50 million people living in the united states legally and otherwise that we don't know their status but they were not born in the united states some are citizens some are legal residents but 20 million we know are illegal residents so we are creating caste of citizenship when you see a person 27 percent of the california population was not born in the united states so that one means when i see somebody i don't know to what degree we have a commonality other than just residing there do they believe in christmas do they they know what iwo jima was do they have any knowledge of gettysburg all the civic rituals that are so important so important to reinforce a constitutional system it can't exist just politics you have to reinforce it constantly with shared experiences even a shared physical space and if you don't have that you have nothing and yet we have destroyed the idea of a border and why we're all guilty central american governments in mexico this year will get 60 billion dollars in remittances from people illegally it's the largest source of foreign exchange and guess what most of that money will be freed up because the federal local and state government are subsidizing people to allow them to have extra cash to send back to countries that will either cannot or will not help their own people it used to be common knowledge in mexico it still is it's a safety valve rather than marching on mexico city you'll go to the united states so it really is deleterious to the mexican people because a system is inherently racist and unfair the dissident doesn't agitate they come here it's almost like the reverse of frederick jackson turner theory of the frontier only or we're the frontier second thing is all of us and especially in places on the co the by coastal we have created an aristocracy that depend on cheap labor when i was going i don't remember people in california of the upper middle class having a gardener a nanny a cook and yet they assume that that's a birthright and they're not worried about where what the mechanics of that are are the results on a society at large and this is not just the left it's the corporate right as well that wants cheap labor and has driven down wages for the middle class and of course then there's the democratic party they feel that these constituents that you see on your screen will have fealty to their party because they will be generous in the entitlements they feel that they'll never be a california of ronald reagan george took maize and pete wilson even arnold schwarzenegger it's over with and they have flipped nevada they feel they flip new mexico they're about to flip arizona they think they flip colorado and it's a pre-meditated idea of bringing people in and so there was a lot of guilty parties but you cannot have citizenship when people are residents and we don't know that there's any difference between cast used to be that a citizen was eligible for federal entitlements they were allowed and only they were allowed to go in and out of the country because they had something after 1941 call a passport and they were responsible for military service and they alone could hold office or vote i don't know how many of those still apply i don't think any of them do we have people i think it's a noble thing that are in the military that are not only not citizens but here illegally we have people going back across the border that don't need to have a citizen's passport if i come in or you come in from europe and you don't have a passport you're not going to get into the united states you can come across the border and get in the united states without a passport in california and the local election board in the bay area you don't have to be a citizen to vote the la all i can see the difference now is that a citizen still can hold office and somebody who's illegally here or a mere resident that snotty says and cannot i think that's just about ready to go as well there's a third thing that we were warned about about antiquity and that's the danger of tribalism when you read a historian like thucydides they always start with the idea that a pre-civilization pre-modern society has no meritocracy you hire your first cousin or your general appearance is essential not incidental to who you are and the tribe then is the enemy of progress it's the enemy of meritocracy i've been i think to every country in the middle east except iran when i talk to people journalists there they always say something it's it's a constant refrain the reason that things don't work here is because we hire our first cousin and we don't hire the most capable person because we judge people by their blood ties or their superficial appearance we had been fighting with a legacy of slavery and jim crow in the south we've we're now in 50 years since the civil rights movement and affirmative action and we were starting to realize martin luther king jr's dream of the content of our character rather than this color of our skin and we've gone back 50 years with this woke movement we have this woke movement was not started grassroots this is a top-down phenomenon this is oprah winfrey from her 90 million dollar statements montecito complaining about ill treatment to meghan markle in her 15 million dollar uh mansion this is brocco and michelle obama worth 100 million dollars coming out and then pontificating on the unfairness as they go back to their 38 acre 14 million dollar martha vineyard estate i could go on but you get the picture the blm founder phyllis queller she's on house number four in topaga canyon professor kendy if you want to hear him it's twenty thousand dollars three hundred and thirty three dollars a minute for his advice about how you must be racist to stop racism and you must discriminate to stop discrimination and todd nahisi coates sort of the godfather the guru of wokism he's making a fortune writing comic books and comic book screenplays for hollywood these are not revolutionaries out on the barricades this is an elite driven uh drive for the spoils of america camouflage as if america is culpable when i heard general milley and the chief of naval operations and the defense secretary say that they were rooting out white privilege white supremacy and white whiteness i did think what's going on in afghanistan why we were losing afghanistan while joe biden was telling us everything was okay in afghanistan they have 300 000 men they have airport why he was calling the afghan president and stealthy saying even if you're losing it please lie what was our military doing they were cannibalizing their own ranks and when general austin said we want every aspect of our military to reflect proportionality okay white males to take one example you really want to go down that tribal road where every single person is is going to have a job based on their racial component because that's a trajectory to nihilism and it's not even it's not even represented we don't do that we did that in the nba when we were racist and we had it the nba was not as exciting now we're going 76 percent african-american i think that's great it's based on merit but it violates the very cannons of the left that says you cannot do that so when i heard mr when i heard austin and miley say that i said okay white males make up 33 of the population they've died in in iraq at 75 percent and they've died in afghanistan 74 are you going to call up the afghan airport and say hey anybody who's a white male pull back you have you've died and over represented so it's somebody else's turn to go get killed so you can see where we're going the ultimate manifestation is a dna badge so we all try to adjudicate whether we're going to go back to the south 1 16th drop unless you think i'm kidding elizabeth elizabeth warren tried that didn't she and she found out she didn't even have 1 16th jaw drop but she relied on hyde's cheekbone she didn't have the creativity and the imagination of ward churchill who at least took the trouble to dress up as a native american even though he wasn't and so that's what we're doing now under the racism that was in the united states especially in the south but it was there people then said i'm going to pass for white it was a tragic experience because they thought they would get superior and discriminatory treatment now it's i'm going to pass for non-white so we come full circle but we're no morally better than where we were and this is tragic because we were on the we were on the pathway to an assimilated intermarried and integrated society these are organic challenges of citizenship but there's also unfortunately a more deliberate planned effort that's top down from the elites what do i mean by elites academics lawyers political activists people where i work think tank and they also are eroding the idea of a citizen one of the things that's really scary i think you all agree is what we now know is the administrative state the deep state these are people who are unelected but they're deep in a bureaucracy they're spiritual forefathers or the 20 000 people at ancient athens that were involved in some way with the government of that democracy first bureaucracy the word bureaucracy remember comes from bureau in french the death people the death bound that came after the revolution byzantine it's a byzantine system the huge uh government class of thirty to forty thousand at constantinople under justinian the escorall the spanish empire's class people who really ran the french empire and the old regime in france were not the louis of various numbers they were the bureaucrats at versailles kings came and went and they stayed the same that's what we have and they are a judge jury and executioner whether you're lois lerner nobody elected her nobody gave should have given her the power to tell which particular non-profit group gets to get non-profit status depending on their political views so if somebody applies and they have the word liberty and their application then they're likely not to vote for barack obama they do not get they do not get non-profit status nobody voted for anthony fauci and the cdc where did we come up with the idea that the cdc could adjudicate whether you a landlord can collect rent from somebody who's living in your property and yet that's that's what we're living under as i speak perhaps the locust classis was the mueller investigation 40 million dollars 22 months the dream team the all-stars the killer squad we were told these ivy league lawyers and what did we end up with we ended up with two public servants both unelected robert mueller going before congress under oath when it was all said and done and they asked him two questions the font of this entire farce was christopher steele's dossier remember that all he admitted in british court that he had no sources made it up and the second font was glenn simpson and the fusion gps that paid uh steel and then passed it off to the government and mueller was asked directly would you comment on the christopher steele dossier and fusion gps remember what he said i have no knowledge of either one what are they what are they you just spent 40 million dollars using their evidence to go after people in a political campaign to destroy their civil liberties the second thing that kind of epitomizes it was james comey unelected fbi leader supposedly sterling character he got under oath under oath in the congress house of representatives he was asked questions about the investigation his leaking of memos his role with a forged affidavit he said 245 times under oath i don't know or i don't remember try that with the irs and see what happens and so i could go on but we are creating unaccountable bureaucrats and functionaries that have combined the judicial the executive and the legislative branch into one person and they have enormous resources out in california if you're a farmer and you have a low spot in your land and a federal epa official decides that he doesn't like you or he thinks that could have a high nitrogen he can declare that an inland waterway and reinterpret the epa act and find you until you come out without your permission and test your water why i can't think of a reason other than he can he can and that's why he does it there's a second group of people on the elite that want to denigrate or destroy or do away with citizenship i'd call them the evolutionaries these are not just the permanent these are people who feel that human nature is malleable it changes it's not fixed and with greater resources nutrition therapy education you can make a new human and if you have a new human you don't need an old constitution this was written by a bunch of old white men who were some of them were slave owners they were in a different era they weren't educated they didn't have ipads and iphones they weren't sophisticated and they wouldn't know how to use google if they bought them back here so we just need to junk that and if it's not just the constitution it's 150 180 years of tradition so no sooner did this progressive movement take power and they realized we do not have public support we came in through the covet crisis and a lot of things that happened in that terrible year 2020 so we've got to change the system now we talked about changing the demography but they said first thing we've got to get rid of a 233 year old electoral college without any discussion what it was for if you read the constitution the federalist papers it was to disperse political power so that people would go to rural areas because the founders had a great distrust of what people are capable living in mass in crowded conditions and they're prone to rumor and spites of madness and frenzies and somebody who was a cattle rancher or farmer might be a check on them or they thought if there was going to be fraud you couldn't accomplish it with a single national election that would be broken up in the states and they might check they get various reasons they wanted immediately to get rid of a 150-year tradition of a nine-person court would they have done that if donald trump had not appointed three judges no they want to pack the court pack the court when we were all of us in college was a dirty word that referred to franklin roosevelt's 1937 scheme that was roundly denounced by his own party nobody mentioned it there is a website packed the court and it's a term of approbation celebration there are a lot of arguments for a hundred and eighty year filibuster the only argument i can see that's being induced to end it now is we're out of power we want a ram we're in power we want to ram this through and we don't really care because nobody would be crazy enough to give us power again so we only have two more years that is changing the system we've had we've had for for almost 70 years 50 states it's not in the constitution but it's a tradition it's a custom why all of a sudden would we want to put puerto rico and d.c that's a federated provincial idea the idea that it wouldn't be partisan were the capitalists why would we want to make those states other than to give them two representatives and four senators and then be able to push through legislation in the near term it is in the constitution that the primary responsibility of voting is the is a responsibility even a national election of the states and you know in michigan we vote different than you do in california different hours but the idea is unless it's egregious or unless the federal government feels it's something of national concern like women's suffrage or the 18 year old vote the federal government keeps out not now the first effort is to nationalize voting and why would that be because for the first time in history 62 percent of the electorate voted not on election day and the error rate for an absentee ballot and an early ballot traditionally had been four to five percent mysteriously it went down to 0.4 even as more ballots were cast that's a magnitude of 10. 102 million ballots that could be four or five million ballots if they were placed in the right states pennsylvania michigan wisconsin ohio they could arizona georgia they could affect the outcome indeed mark zuckerberg believed that because he put 500 million dollars to enhance local precinct workers in these states and so now we're tampering with the constitution and trying to push through a national voter's law so this this is a very dangerous idea that you're going to evolve the government in our year of wisdom suddenly in 2021 we we discovered that we were geniuses and the prior generations were idiots and we're going to change the system because it didn't work for us and now we have a brief glimpse of power i want to finish with a final challenge and that is something that's also very old uh the greeks call it called it cosmopolitanism that meant i'm a politician a citizen of the cosmos and i'm not a citizen of athens or sparta meaning we're global citizens globalism did some good actually i mean it's a good thing that people in the amazon basin have penicillin it's a good thing you can get eyeglasses in mongolia it's really a euphemism isn't it for westernization in the economic sense consumerism but the idea that globalization should be extended to the political harmony of the entire planet really does mean that a very rare and exceptional society that nobody's ever seen before and will never see again the united states is going to surrender its sovereignty globalization enriched boston to miami and people who had professions that looked toward the eu law academics media i know that suddenly i was writing columns for 330 million potential readers and it became six billion because of globalization law firms entertainment hollywood and in california west coast from seattle all the way to san diego but those professions didn't necessarily represent all of us people with muscular labor in states like this or central valley of california anything that could be xeroxed and done more cheaply assembly manufacturing small farming was done and so when we confused cause and effect and rather than saying the jobs left we said the people got on meth or they were worthless or they're uneducated and they drove the jobs out we even created an entire vocabulary of disparagement for them do these words seem familiar on national scene and candidates clingers deplorables irredeemables drags chumps that's what barack obama and hillary clinton and joe biden introduced to the political vocabulary so we really in a very strange way it was very un-american we just divided the country and said these guys uh or as the cnn reporter said of a rally these are the people who have less teeth than i do in aggregate or as peter stroke said to lisa page have you gone to the smelly walmart lately so we disparaged a whole group of people we call them losers in globalization and then we we exaggerated the brilliance of the people who had skills that profited from globalization and out of that is developing this idea that we're really not americans we're citizens of the world i'm not exaggerating secretary of state lincoln you remember what he just said where he was calling in the u.n commission on human rights to investigate the degree of racism within the united states these are people like iran and north korea i mean they're going to come in and tell us that we're flawed the international criminal court wants to look whether into and they did the last five years of the pres our presence in afghanistan whether we were committing particular crimes or not is if the u.s military has lower standards than countries like china or again iran or countries in latin america or asia and so de facto when you surrender sovereignty to a fabian socialist in 1900 a league of nations advocate 1920 somebody in the u and today you are surrendering your freedom to something that is let's face it it's an inferior political concept it's only as strong as its weakest link and the links are pretty weak and yet this is what we're doing there's something going on right now called the great reset mr klaus schwab remember him he was the off author and architect of davos the idea is if you get bill gates and mark zuckerberg and a lot of professors and silicon valley wall street you bring them all to davos and they can plan out what the world should be like and if you read his great reset he wants particular governments to surrender sovereignty to an international body the first thing he wants to do is make sure that no one country gives tax incentives to a corporation like ireland does so that corporations have nowhere to go except to their body of high tax countries redistributionists he wants corporate boards to reflect diversity and their membership should be appointed on the color of their skin rather than their ability to bring a profit to their shareholders he wants to make sure that we phase out fossil fuels on a schedule that would be turned by an international body and he has enormous support within the united states one thing we should remember is the democratic party is no longer the party of the middle class if you look at the top 20 zip codes in the united states 17 by income 17 voted democratic of the 20. if you look at congressional districts by wealth the top 20 all voted democratic the republican party has evolved into a upper and middle-class party the democratic party is the very very hyper-rich and the subsidized poor we should we should remember that because a lot of what we've been talking about are the efforts of very wealthy people in wall street silicon valley professional sports hollywood the corporate boardroom the military to virtue signal their superiority because they feel guilty that they either don't feel comfortable with a poor they don't want them around and it's a very insidious process this wokeness and this this wealth i don't mean wealth is good but the idea that people have so much of it they're exempt from the ramifications of their own ideology you want teachers union for others you want prep schools for yourself you want everybody to have solar panels but you have a private jet that type of attitude and that is what globalism globalization has become let me just finish and say let's not end on a sad note what can we the citizens do and i think there's a lot of things we can do the first things we can vote i think there's going to be the greatest reset if i could use klaus schwab's word in the next midterm elections we've ever seen people are very angry and it's not a white thing or a conservative thing i live in a a city of 90 or mexican american middle class and believe me they're very angry and i think you're going to see a big everybody has to vote the second thing is i think people have to according to their station everybody has a different degree of autonomy and freedom and protection and family responsibilities but they just have to say no when they're called a racist and so you can call me whatever one has zero effect on me if you're gonna cancel somebody out you can say i could care less do your best do your worst i'll do my best but we have to all come out of the shadows and with one voice say this is this wokeness has a antecedent we know what wokeness is we saw it with the jacobins in the french revolution we saw it with the bolsheviks that hijacked the russian revolution we saw it with mao's cultural revolution that killed 70 million people we know where you're going and we're not going to take this country we have nothing apologize for the people who fought at okinawa we have nothing to apologize to the people who died at gettysburg or the 600 000 that died to freeze to end slavery this is a noble tradition you're not going to hijack it we also have to get confidence that although we have lost conservatives are worried about their families their jobs their community and they're not activists and then that laxity of all of ours and i'm guilty more guilty than anybody the corporate board room was hijacked the pentagon was hijacked wall street was hijacked silicon valley as i said sports entertainment hollywood and they have enormous influence if you go into google that search can be adjudicated by a result that reflects a political affinity you donald trump cannot tweet on twitter the taliban can so they have enormous policy but they don't have the people all the polls show that every one of these issues i talked about the american people do not support it and yet we have to find a voice and i think the voices we have to go the on the offensive and fight back and if somebody calls you racist and they say that they're going to do this and this and this and this person they're racist they're talking about skin color there's nothing wrong with saying the woke movement is racist to the core it's elitist to the core it's discriminatory to the core and i'm happy to tell you that every day of the week and if we do that i think we can end it and again it's an empowered citizenry that is the majority you're not the minority and you're not crazy thank you very much so we have we have time for uh 10 15 minutes for some q a as i suggested we've got mics over place make yourself known to the person holding the microphone and wait for it and dr hansel will be happy to address your question i'm sorry i walked off i have such a big mouth i talked i thought i went over my time i may have a mark as polite just a a quick question what do you think of the uh the movement to remove all the statues the civil war statues and now they're removing columbus and well we have a a word for that it's called the greeks again there was it's called iconicalism it's what the taliban does i have no problem if a municipality says this particular statue is offensive in this day and age and we're going to have a committee to study it and we're going to bring it before the city council and we're going to public discuss but that's not what we're doing they're all nocturnal people go in the middle of the night and tear things down without legal authorization and so that's my chief complaint against it the other thing in a broader sense is it's it's very dubious that we the generation that is the wealthiest and most affluent in the history of civilization look at history not as tragedy but melodrama that we are going to go back and we're going to say that person is wanting according to our standards and therefore we're canceling them and destroying them and we're going to take that's what trusts that's linen did that to trotsky stalin did that the trotsky so it's very dangerous to do the romans call it damnatio memorial each generation going back and attacking the past i think it would be very difficult if i was in a covered wagon and i was a woman who had to get pregnant 15 times to to have 10 births to come to term to have five survive childbirth and have three survive childhood diseases when there were no vacuum cleaners no cleansers and i was on trying to get to portland oregon in the willamette valley and i'm all of a sudden to say i think she was racist i don't think she had anything in her mind other how to survive one more day and i think any of these antifa and blm people that were in her place would be dead in 10 seconds so i have a great reverence for the path and finally remember people never think things are going to boomerang we don't know what people 50 years are going to say of us but they may well say wow what a primitive culture in 2020 reverted to pre-civilizational racial tribalism and then aborts a million people a year that they knew they had the technology to save if they were premature they may say that of us and they would be you know i can see why they would we have a question to the speaker's left yes dr hansen could you address the idea and practice of birthright citizenship either pre or post 14th amendment and whether it has anything to do with the dying citizen today birthright citizenship is the idea that the the vernaculars anchor babies and so in california and my hometown uh people come across the border pregnant and they have a child and that anchors them later on and i'm not exaggerating i've had people twice knock on my door at night and then spanish say do you know where dr x or y is in my little town i said how do you know they've heard of them 1500 miles away in oaxaca that you come to these little towns it's a good doctor he'll deliver your child so there was it's in the constitution in the 14th it's debatable whether or not people who and i'm not going to get into technicalities because i'm not qualified in jurisprudence but whether a person is subject to the laws of the united states when they're here illegally are subject to the laws of say mexico or honduras if they're subject to the laws of their native born state and they have not been nationalized then if they have a child then that child would not be a u.s citizen more practically the more liberal countries in the world the eu almost i think there's only three of them that allow this so everybody says the united states is so conservative compared to europe believe me in the last 10 years we make a conservative look like reagan we make europe look like reagan country we really do economically even but especially on this issue so it's very contentious and it's been so it's been it it's validity rest on court interpretations of that in amendment and i think that's going to be fluid remember steve miller was hated because that one of the first things he did is trump's advisor said that he wanted to revisit that with an executive war that never happened uh have you watched football lately and do you have a comment about the crowds of students and others that are totally unmasked well some crowds are more equal than others yeah i i i've been chastised at where i work for being quote out of my lane by commenting on medical issues because i'm not qualified although i'm a very close friend one of my best colleagues at the who is scott atlas and i do think that there's an argument that the swedish model that was to keep the economy and and to hoard your resources or to direct them toward vulnerable people rather than trying to cover everybody with masks and lockdowns might in the end be more advantageous i got vaccinated as soon as i was eligible but so that's an issue but what your point is i think is well taken i didn't understand that we were told follow the science and then in june of 2020 we had 5 000 people in a blm rally with no mask as well as an la laker victory lowry and then we were told by the scientists remember 1100 medical providers signed a petition that said it would be more injurious to the mental health of the protesters to forbid them from breaking the law by massing uh in street demonstration at that point i said there is no wall it's total chaos and people make it up as they go and as we've seen it's in times of panic in times of mass hysteria in times of perceived danger our constitutional liberties are the first to go and i i i think covet is a very dangerous disease because while 99 percent of us are not going to die with it not i've seen people who are healthy that for some immunological reason die from it so it's something that may may be different from the flu but not different enough to sacrifice the first second third fourth fifth sixth seven eight ninth amendments and that's what we've done we have a question to the speakers left hello sir thank you so much for that answer and i think we should all have a peaceful mostly peaceful protests against ohio state football i i would like to ask more seriously in terms of it seems like the citizen is a creation of western civilization and it seems like western civilization is the one leading the wokeness of our recent times what is eastern civilization most notably china uh doing in regards to the wokeness or are they just waiting us for through implode from it and have every the world fall into their laps did everybody hear that yeah well remember this is not the soviet union china this is 1.5 billion people and they have a very uh eerie machiavelli infusion of elements of free market capitalism with state control under the veneer of communism that is far more productive at least so far than the soviet union ever was and they have a degree of sophisticated propaganda that makes the old apparat from the soviet union look like rookies i teach at a university where somebody just calmly announced oh by the way that visiting professor of neuroscience we found out she was working for the chinese communist military okay and we have 380 000 students in the united states that are chinese many of them the vast majority are here to study but if it was only one percent that's more people working for the chinese communist party as their students and remember a high proportion of the students here are connected with provincial government and high-ranking government officials in china that's one of the ironies about it so they understand the united states better than anybody better than we do so when this woke thing started i said to my wife once we found out that it came from wuhan and once the chinese government as soon as the chinese government said it it was a bat or a pangolin had nothing to do with the stage four biology lab that had a hand with the military i thought that's it ev you did too everybody knew that and it was engineered but as soon as that i said to jennifer watch what follows next and it wasn't more than a week later then we were racist now you can call ebola the ebola virus for ebola you can call valley fever because it's from the san joaquin valley you can call lyme disease because someone you say wuhan virus or then you're a racist and that's what these and this is a time when they put a million and a half people in the wager concentration camps and they were pulling african uh residents off the streets of beijing to check whether only they were infected it's the most racist country in the world today and yet they understood the woke mind and remember one thing about the chinese propaganda effort we think in our arrogance that our magnaminity and our superior morality will be interpreted by them as welcome and will be reciprocated in kind they look at it as weakness to be exploited and they think if i had all that power and i had an economy 40 bigger than us and they do it with 330 million not 1.5 and one american worker even in this midnight hour of america still produces far more goods and services than his four counterparts in china if i had an 800 billion dollar budget if i had 7 000 nukes if i had 18 of the top 20 research institutions in the world if i had all that gas and oil i would be doing things that would make what we're doing now the silk road the belt looked like nothing we would actually have our world hegemony so they look at our constitutional system and our sense of restraint as weakness it doesn't mean we shouldn't do this but we shouldn't take them seriously when china says that we're racist we should say thank you coming from a racist country that means you're racist but we don't do that because it's part of the woke movement china has said china has said they're the big propagandists behind this myth that there's a bunch of white nuts from dayton ohio that are driving all the way to the bronx and manhattan and oakland and beating up asian americans we know that whether it's fair not we know that about 75 percent of the recorded attacks on asian americans are coming from african-american youth between 15 and 50. yet china would have us believe that this racist country that uses the word china virus is now attacking its own citizens and they've got half the country believing they know more about propaganda and how the americans are so sensitive to the charge of being racist or discriminatory than we do ourselves so i think we should be very careful that we have never had a rival like china that is so sophisticated not just in its advantages in population economy military we could go through i'll talk all night about that but so sophisticated in its understanding of 21st century american pathologies and how to exploit them and do it in a way that the american left celebrates it's a very dangerous time thank you [Applause] thank you to what extent do you think the elites that you spoke of are empowered by their ability to without any restraint print fiat and do you believe that what's happening say in el salvador only by way of example where bitcoin has become legal tender will allow the world to have a central bank without central bankers i'm not qualified even though i should because i live in silicon i mean i work in silicon valley about bitcoins cryptocurrencies but i think all of us are confused that george bush over eight years almost doubled the national debt barack obama and eight years double the national debt donald trump was on a trajectory in eight years to double but we have not seen anything like what joe biden is doing we were coming out of a recession we were having pinup demand of a year and a half there was a natural exuberance that people wanted to go out and travel they wanted to eat so we had a natural stimulation what we did not want to do is two things discourage productivity and pay more money for people to stay home than to be active and exhaust our stimulatory powers by printing more money and then jawboing job-boning producers by threatening them with capital gains estate taxes income tax hikes on the rise more regulation so he did everything opposite and he's printing this money he wants 3.5 trillion dollars to be printed at a top quantitative easing whatever the proper term at a time we're almost at 30 trillion dollars so when you look at economic theorists and people in the universities on the left they're not saying anymore as they used to say well the republicans did it too or this is temporary or we're going to tax you and pay you back they're starting to say there is really no such thing as debt and money is a construct and printing it is okay and they and they don't believe in classical economics of debt and obligation and contractual obligations so that that's what's scary that this radical spending or even the suspension of rent to a landlord or the idea that you pay somebody to stay home we're in a revolutionary period of economics where we have p p people and these are not people from selma california where i live these are people at stanford and harvard and yale and the federal reserve they really do believe that they have discovered a new horizon a new frontier in economics that will allow them to just create this artificial debt and there's no historical support for it and whether it's a marxist idea that it destroys the capital of people who have money by printing more money than population gains or productivity i don't know but for the first time in my life i'm reading from quote-unquote reputable economics uh professors that we don't have to pay that back or barack obama i'll finish with this said when he was asked about the reconciliation stimulatory package and then the infrastructure he said i really don't think this is the time that we really have to worry about paying the money back think of that because the united states i don't want to end on a sad note but i guess i did thank you thank you everyone we're under strict orders to end by nine o'clock and so the speaking portion is over but there is hospitality outside and the books available as well thank you for being here you

Channel: Hillsdale College

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Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america

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Length: 59min 44sec (3584 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021