Victor Davis Hanson on Citizenship - Western Conservative Summit 2021

one of america's best named known and most prolific historians victor davis hansen is the author of hundreds of articles book reviews and newspaper editorials he's a senior fellow at the hoover institute and has also written or edited over 25 books in his new book that comes out this october the dying citizen how progressive elites tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of america he details how to identify and counteract the progressives desperate lunch for power friends we have speakers that speak for the day we have speakers that speak for the decade victor davis hansen is one of those thinkers that we can reflect on years from now and enjoy the wisdom that he's brought to this year's western conservative summit friends please welcome one of the smartest in the business victor davis hanson [Music] thank you very much uh i think i'm our last speaker today i hope i'm not the least last and least but i'll do my best a lot of the problems that we're all worried about when we talk about woke wokeness or censorship or de-platforming or elections i think has to do with citizenship and the idea that citizenship is a very rare idea throughout history modern and ancient history and we're losing it but before i go into why very quickly i think we should go review the events of 2020 because they were the catalyst not that these other events are not contemporary but they were slow moving they were in the process of changing the left was in the process of fundamentally to use a famous phrase fundamentally transforming america but suddenly in the year 2020 and this year they were reified they happened very quickly and why was that and i think the way to look at it is that we we experienced a perfect storm and all of these events lined up in the order that we never expected they could and the result is we're strangers in the strange land right now the first was we had our first global pandemic in 102 years our generation uh had never had that before our parents hadn't our grandparents had lived through the so-called spanish flu of 1918 1919 not that coveted 19 was as serious killed five hundred 000 americans uh coveted has killed 600 but the population was far smaller was about almost about a third so in today's terms it would have been a million and a half but what was interesting about all of these events was the reaction in the media and how they were reported to this day we do not know the origins of the covet 19 virus we know that it originated in wuhan and we know that when we were told that it was impermissible to say there was a connection between the wuhan lab and the origins of the virus that is no longer tenable but it's no longer tenable 12 months later had we known that the lab was integral to the genesis of this pathogen we might have acted differently and saved lives so that was a double whammy so to speak we've never had a national quarantine this country has faced typhus typhoid yellow fever but every prior lockdown has been local or regional i know under our federal system that was supposed to be true but it turned out to be a national lockdown remember it was envisioned as flattening the curve for three weeks and then it went on and on and on and at its very inauguration people were worried they said if you'd lock down 330 million people not literally but in the sense that you were denying people medical access you would you would have spikes and what's family abuse sexual abuse substance abuse suicides increased rates of cancer and heart related issues when people couldn't go to the doctors and now we're starting to see all this not to mention keeping 50 million children out of school so there was never any idea in the past that you would attempt that and yet when we look at the coverage of it we were told that mass were of no utility when it began then they were essential then you better wear two or that herd immunity was 50 60 70 80 90 necessary before we could go back never in our right mind did we think that the architects who advised us the medical establishment many of whom were compromised they had routed federal dollars through a non-profit called echo health into the wuhan lab to do what gain of function research we didn't know any of that the third thing was we have never had a self-induced recession by that i mean recessions were organic they were usually a result of too much printing money exuberance and then a correction that went too far through bad policy and could end in depression but we've never had somebody say just shut everything down and the way it was shut down was interesting because the media covered it in very strange fashion if you if you in california if you had sort of a pornographic shop you could stay open but a gun store was shut down a church was shut down if you sold a mom-and-pop shoe store you were non-essential but you bought your shoes at target that was open to buy shoes so almost every commodity that was specialized in small business was shut down but walmart and target and all the big ones in amazon and the result of is that we found the greatest equilibrium of a 12-month period in terms of income redistribution we've seen and yet that was covered as if it was normal it was an election year and because of covid remember the constitution specifies that state legislatures shall have the primary responsibility to set rules for national election unless the federal government steps in on rare occasions such as the 18 year old vote women's suffrage etc but in this case in march and april in most of the key swing so-called purple states people went in and sued in the courts and made administrative and bureaucratic fiats edicts dictats and what did they say they said that they were going to change the cutoff date for absentee ballots to be made in mailed in they could go 10 12 15 days later you were going to have early voting of 20 30 40 days you could have a signature that was improper it wouldn't matter the address would not have to be verified the result of this is 102 million people 63 percent of the electorate voted not on election day we've never had anything close the closest was 2016 when we had about 42 million and the error rate of a non-election day ballot went from the usual of about four percent when they were adjudicated down to about point four magnitude of ten so think of that we had rendered election day a construct so the last debate of our campaign whoever won that debate depending on your own vision it didn't matter because 60 million people had already voted and it meant that if you were going to have 102 million people mail in or vote early and you're going to change the rate of rejection you have about 4 million ballots on a normal election year that were counted that would not have been counted and that could have made a big difference so you had that and yet you had that reported and i can tell you someone who's a faculty member if you were to mention nothing about conspiracies nothing about the kraken and sydney powell nothing like that just what i told you now you could come up on charges of fomenting uh disbelief in the integrity of the election and you would be cited or you would be in career jeopardy so there was no tolerance for for discussion i'll end on the notorious assault that we all deplored on january 6 but we were told that it was the greatest attack on the capital since jubal early civil war rape or on a country i thought we almost lost the pentagon and we had a plane aimed at the capital uh on 9 11. that was that didn't exist pearl harbor was an attack on the united that didn't that wasn't mentioned and then all of the reference of that attack turned out to be not true there was no hierarchy no conspiracy we haven't found a conspiracy that has a map and says on january 6 this cadre goes here this goes here at 905 there was none of that you saw the guy with the cow horns he was a buffoon it was not organized and then we said i looked today when i was preparing an armed insurrection all over the media nobody who was arrested had any firearm i'm not trying to lessen the severity the iconic idea that you attack a capital but nonetheless there was nobody who had or used a firearm and then we were told that they five people were killed five people died but they were not killed by trump supporters four of them were trump supporters apparently three did not die violently one person ashley babel a 14 year military veteran was shot maybe you could say she was committing a felony maybe not but she was shot and she was unarmed and then the protocols of 2020 if you shoot an unarmed suspect that officer's picture is flashed all over the country in a nanosec to this day we don't know who killed her had no idea we don't know the videos we don't know this was very bizarre and then we were told by joe biden as recently our president at the summit that the trump supporters killed an officer and we were told that brian's sickness he lied and stayed in the capital as a fallen warrior in defense of freedom but he didn't die violently he died a day later from a stroke so all of these things together we might have survived any one of them but plague quarantine recession election a strange election this assault it and then we have to add in as the final asterisk we had 120 days of riding protests demonstrate violent non-violent looting we have never had a series of civil disobedience of that magnitude 2 billion dollars in damage 25 people killed 14 000 people at least arrested never had that before and we've never had that level of insurrection if i could use the same term with complete immunity from the authorities and i mean in the sense that if it's a police precinct with police in it if it's a federal courthouse nobody from civil authorities tried to protect that in fact i think that the portland mayor termed it brick and mortar we don't worry about brick and mortar property remember was the essence of the u.s constitution and it has been for 2500 years that consensual society start out with the idea that if you cannot hold your property and pass it on to your children you have no government so all of that created a a climate of crisis and out of that crisis long stewing elements that were eroding citizenship came to their full and what were those we had a phenomenon from i would call it the pre-modern forces of history before civilization the way things were before civilization and post-modern the way they are after what were the pre-modern forces that always threaten a republic or a democracy the first was the middle class has been hemorrhaging for about 40 years and until 2017 they had lost real wages for 12 consecutive years the number of people who will die with a net worth of less than ten thousand dollars is about half the country we were making gains and home ownership up to 62 or 63 percent were going backwards and the percent of a budget that is necessary for a mortgage payment is at an all-time high and you can see some of the results of this is that we are raising a cadre of young people who collectively owe one half of them 1.7 trillion dollars in student loans and that will never be paid back the universities themselves who did not want to deal with a hazard so the moral hazard was fobbed off into the government over that period of that debt aggregation charged above the rate of inflation for housing room and tuition and board at these universities this same group of people as i said cannot buy a house in many states because of the increased cost for homeownership they the age in which people in america are getting married has gone from 23 to 25 to 28 to 29 the age in which people are having children it's gone just in 20 years from 2.1 down to about 1.8 the fertility rate has gone all the way up to 31. and so we have a whole group of people who in some ways are in suspended animation prolonged adolescence and all the conservative traditional incentives that make somebody grow up don't think of yourself think of your spouse don't think of your spouse think of your family as well put off spending because you have the responsibilities to shelter your family in a house make a car payment so you can tr all of those have been postponed and are now in some ways irrelevant it was brought home to me with the life of julia commercials you see that during the obamacare crisis where life julia was on a commercial by the federal government from the day she's born until the day she dies the government will take care of her she's a single mom she doesn't have her own home or maybe the pajama boy commercial where somebody is an adult but he has pajamas on drinking hot chocolate as if this is the way to persuade americans that to be like pajama boy and buy obamacare the affordable care act so it's that's a radical change we're peasants we're not a middle-class society second is very quickly we're residents now the idea in the past was that people who lived under a emperor or king or a government they're either a serf or a subject a slave or a resident they just happen to wander through but the idea that you were a citizen and you had enabled rights and you could adjudicate and censor and call in the government that was yourself was a very radical idea that was invented nowhere else but in classical greece 2500 years ago and it's very hard to have a citizen citizenry when you have two classes masters and serfs and not a middle class the greek said that citizenship is based on mesoy middle people so it's getting very difficult but we have about 20 million residents in the united states who are not citizens from what we've seen in the last three months were on a schedule to have one million people come into the united states under illegal auspices with no legal ramifications at all it's very very difficult to assimilate to integrate to intermarry new citizens when you have so many people without diversity coming from one place often without english often without a high school diploma that makes it almost as if people did not want that to happen that they wanted an unassimilated block it used to be that the citizen could say these are my citizenship rights and residents that are here illegally don't have all of them yes residents are protected by the u.s constitution but to leave the united states or to come back in most cases they have to have a passport and only citizens can have passports but i can tell you as a resident of california if i leave my passport in my hotel and i forget about it or i lose it on the plane i will not be admitted as a citizen in san francisco airport if i fly to mexico city and walk across the border i will be the same thing about entitlements in my hometown anybody can use federal entitlements when anybody can use them it means in zero-sum healthcare a lot of people can't so we have second and third generation mexican-american citizens who are being denied access to health care dialysis essential medical services because the services are being swamped by people who are residents and you can see that the progressive project wants to accentuate this rise in residency and so it used to be there were these clear distinctions residents can't vote only citizens can vote well that's not true in some school board elections in san francisco now people who are not just residents have illegal residents can vote we used to say that you could only be a citizen and work in a political campaign that's not true now a lot of people who are green called green card holders and are here illegally are working in campaign the only thing that i military service doesn't matter whether you're a citizen or not the only thing that i can think of that is left of citizenship is a right to hold office and that's being questioned only citizens can run for office and only citizens should be able to vote in a national election but i think those two are under assaults as we speak very quickly the third another pre-modern idea that is returning is tribalism we should remember one thing tribalism is the natural order of things past and innate to humans people identify by the way they look superficially martin luther king's idea that it's the content of our character and not the color of our skin was an attempt to say to history we're not going down that route we're going to judge people by their character their talent their morality and we have one allegiance as americans that's our first allegiance our race is going to be incidental not essential to who we are and that and people who have said this we're looking at places like rome where in the fifth century people just migrated in as residents no borders but they also the huns the viscos the oscars the vandals they all bunched together their allegiance wasn't to roam it was to people who looked like them the germany if you had blue eyes and blonde hair and white skin you'd wanted nothing to do with romans that is returning as we're seeing from critical race theory to wokeness and it says we are going to identify with people who look like ourselves that's fatal to the idea of citizenship in a multi-racial society we have two in the world besides us india a multi-racial democracy and brazil and i don't think they're working very well it's very hard to do without coercion like the soviet union or the ottomans tried but that's not all to finish there is a postmodern a sophisticated and articulated assault on citizenship by the academic world by the legal world and by the political world one of them is a rise of people who are not elected or not accountable sort of juvenile the roman poets worry who will police the police we have about two million people affiliated with the federal government and some state agencies and they have not been elected and yet they make more laws than does the state and federal legislatures put together in this cycle of news if you think about it if you look at our most esteemed federal bureaucracies we can't vote on them we don't and we don't vote yes or no on james comey but think what happened these are the most powerful people in the world these are conservative constituencies that conservative voters they think these are our people these are in the military these are in the intelligence committee these are in the investigatory committee and what happened james comey went under oath and on 245 occasions in front of the house intelligence committee he said i can't remember try that with the irs and see what happens to you i don't recall we had a special prosecutor work for the doj robert mueller this entire case was based on was there or was there not russian collusion whose genesis was the christopher steele gps dossier he was asked repeatedly what do you think of jeep fusion gps and christopher steele i have no idea i've never heard of it before this was the chief prosecutor we had the acting fbi director andrew mccabe on four occasions say something that was not true which he admitted was not true about leaking to the press from the fbi to warp a particular media narrative if you turn very quickly to the intelligence agency before this terrible year of 2020 but one of the luminaries was james clapper he was an anal an analyst on television every day trying to guide us through the russian collusion he under oath to the u.s senate had said that the national security agency does not spy on you without a warrant he admitted later under that he was under oath he said i offered the least untruthful narrative least on true i've never heard that before least untruthful so he lied james clapper did not tell the truth john brennan is the esteemed head or was of the cia on two occasions under oath he lied he went into a senate hearing under oath and he was asked point blank does the cia spy on senate staff computer users no why would we do that and he was asked has there ever been collateral damage with drone hit no we don't do that we only hit target then he was brought back in and he said there's evidence contradict i'm sorry i lied under oath when you have bureaucracies doing this it's very scary because these are the people that you honor in the conservative traditional community we're not talking about the irs we're talking about the most important bureaucracies in our government i'll just finish one other when hunter laptop hunter biden's laptop was found we had over 200 luminaries from the intelligence community nsa cia retired military who came out and told you that this was russian disinformation hunter peyton didn't say it was russian disinformation he said it could be so they were out huntering hunter and these are our esteems but we can't elect them and we can't throw them out they're just there i i'll just a very quick anecdote i didn't know how what the power of the federal government and the unelected were till i started farming after i got my phd i came back and a farmer said wait till you learn how the federal marketing order of 1937 really works i grew up on it but my parents handled it so i quickly discovered when the price of raisins crashed from 1400 to 400 i didn't own the grapes on my own vine the federal government owned it and i mean by that if i wanted to pick them and dry them and sell them at farmers that was illegal i had to give the federal government 70 percent of my crop on the vine before i could sell the other 30 so that they could throw it away put it for cattle feed give it away overseas but keep it out of the u.s market in other words and did people try to resist yes and were they charged with felonies yes imagine that you have a cro a vine on your property it has grapes you dried onto raisins and the federal government says that raisin that you worked all year in borrowed money is now mine at least 70 percent i decide this year might be 80 next year might be 40 next year so we have left we have created a federal octopus at strangling citizenship we've also got evolutionaries on the postmodern side these are sophisticated legal and academic minds who do not like the constitution they do not like liberty they do not like freedom they do not like equality they like equity not freedom of opportunity freedom uh as they defined it as opportunity of result are free everybody is going to be equal on the back side or what tocqueville said in democracy in america one of his greatest fears he said that most people human beings being what they are if they had a chance to be all wealthier with more inequality they would choose to be all poor and have everybody have the same and so he said that's a very dangerous tendency of human nature and republics must react to it so we have what do the evolutionaries want to do to make us equal on the back and they want to get rid of the 232 year electoral college without any argument why our founders created it we could go in we don't have time they want to get rid of the idea for 60 years we've had 50 states and they don't want to do it through a constitutional amendment but by fiat they want to get rid of the tradition of 180 year filibuster they want to get the tradition of 150-year nine-person supreme court if you really want to dig into the legal analysis that they're publishing they cannot stand the u.s senate they want the u.s senate one man one vote just like the house of representatives in other words why they say does these nuts up in wyoming have a senator for every 250 000 people and people like us in california it's 20 million well that argument is uh voiced and echoed through almost every major political philosopher going back to roman greece they haven't read that they just said that's not fair and so that's their next argument they want us to evolve beyond a republic into a way any what anybody wants on any given day can be reified or actualized by 51 percent of a vote and that's not what a republic was intended to do republic was supposed to allow protections of liberty a consensual government but very wary of both dictators on the right and what they call oclocracies or mobocracies on the left and finally there is a final threat a postmodern threat to citizenship and it's what the ancients called cosmopolitan cosmopolitanism we would say cosmos just mean world just means world in greek politics means citizenship we're all going to be citizens of the world people will say ruth bader ginsburg just said once i don't understand why our we stick so assiduously to the u.s constitution we could learn a lot from the constitution of south africa said that and uh when we signed the paris climate accord the press secretary in the obama administration when he was asked that's a treaty the constitution says that you shall have a two-thirds majority to ratify it or it doesn't become law he said why would we turn our responsibility over those guys they don't believe in climate change when we had the iran deal which was a treaty we bypassed the u.s senate i think it was ben rhodes who said it was very easy to do reporters are just young people that quote unquote know nothing and we created an echo chamber and so they just reported what we want that it wasn't a treaty and everybody bought it and so there's a lot of people who look at the world at large and by that i mean the international criminal court why shouldn't americans be subject to a panel of iranians north koreans who knows out cubans who can adjudicate whether they're committing war crimes in afghanistan why don't we set our economic policies uh in synchronization with what the world bank international monetary fund says or better yet what klaus schwab and the great reset say that this coveted crisis and he wrote a book called covet 19 and the great reset it's what gavin newsom said as our governor he said the great the the panic the lockdown it's tragic but it gives us a great opportunity to create a more progressive capitalism and so in these versions these people across the seas are more sophisticated than us they don't do stupid things like have a second amendment it's only in the united states they're not crazy and oppose abortion as we do they don't have this crazy first amendment where you can say anything at any time to anybody anywhere and there is an enormous pressure from the left to say we have to harmonize what we're doing in the united states with what is the norm at the united nations and the european union and it's not just abstract at the g7 remember the g7 that's canada and japan and the western europeans and us they adopted a 25-page statement i urge you all to read it they're going to harmonize or regularize their system as a systematized a corporate tax rate of 15 percent on multi-co national corporation you probably don't like them any more than i do but what if ireland says i only want to do 12 and a half percent well they'll hate ireland as much as they do nevada or you know florida that don't have state income taxes the point is that they can't do that under this new system so where do we all go in conclusion where this is not just academic during the 2020 race michael bloomberg said california is our goal we all want that's the ideal as a lifelong native of california sixth generation i would say the opposite that it's our dystopia that's what we don't want to end up so all of these points that i mentioned california has no middle class it's mostly coming to places like colorado or texas or florida it's a coastal corridor from la jolla to berkeley and everybody else 30 million people that live on about 20 of the geography the the richest most privileged people in the world and the rest of the state in the interior there is no middle class it has an open border 27 percent of the state was not born in the united states that might be i would be all for it if people came legally they integrated they spoke english they had a high school diploma that's not really often the case it's very hard to have a state when 27 percent of the people have linguistic difficulty or they're not here legally california is a tribal state where everybody is self-selecting by their tribe and what's scary about that is once somebody goes remember how they used to say if that country goes nuclear we're going to go nuclear well it's the same thing with tribalism different groups i talked to somebody who was not of a classified minority not long ago and he said i'm going to go tribal i said why in the hell would you do that to survive is what so i said well you're going to go you're going to be what a serb or a crowd or an albanian or kosovar yes that's how people survive they all went back to their pre-modern affinities and boy if that happens this country is absolutely lost but it's happening in california california is famous for the ninth district court and that exercises rights well beyond the legislature and our state almost as soon as we passed prop 8 187 i think the next day the california 9th circuit federal court said sorry it doesn't matter californians voted twice that they were not in favor they were in favor of civil unions but not gay marriage that was annulled by the almost immediately by the courts so there are unelected people that have enormous power in california as i mentioned in the case of raisins i could do it with the epa farmer has a pond on a little bit of water on his farm all of a sudden somebody comes on it and says that's an inland waterway and i can test that and if i find too high a nitrogen level that you fertilize and that puddle that's in existence for the next three days before it dries out i can find you and when you deal with these people they're very happy because they're working for the government and they both kind of envy people in the private sector but they secretly don't like them too well either and then finally californians are globalist if i talk to colleagues on the stanford faculty and i say where's a good place to eat in shanghai tokyo or london or paris they can give me an a to z encyclopedia just x curses go here this street's here there's a little place in london you'll love if i say where should i eat 140 miles away in fresno or bakerfield they'll say what the i've never been there so they have more allegiance culturally socially politically to people in the west to asia people in the east to europe and they don't really care about what's in between and so what we have to do is uh all of us according to our station i don't think it works anymore we've tried it this year keeping silent nodding saying i can't i i can't get canceled because of my family my response i'm a year away from retirement each according to our station have to speak out and say i am not in the 233rd year of this republic going to give up citizenship just because some bully says that i am that my country was no good from the beginning or it's no good in 1950 or it was no good in 1968 it's a good country it's better than the rest and you all have to say and by the way we don't have to be perfect you can be good without being perfect thank you very much thank you very much thank you you really appreciate it standing ovation for dr hansen [Applause] and he did that all without notes i don't know if you saw that a true academic he was able to give that without notes well done so i'll be honest though it it it sounds dire it is it sounds very dire is there a pathway back it almost sounds like you're calling for a renewal of citizenship a reformation of citizenship is that the pathway back i think it is there were things that started to happen the last three years one of them was we went back to class affinities in other words people started to say the republican party is not going to be just a bunch of guys on a golf course i mean that was never true but that was a stereotype so they started to appeal to people who were black who were brown who were asian who were poor white and they said we have commonalities we're peasants and that really bothered the democratic party i'm not trying to be partisan but they are the party of wealth and i mean if you look at the zip codes uh if you have a map of united states zip codes the wealthiest zip codes are all blue if you look at congressional districts by congressional district income they're all blue if you look at the fortune 400 the top 200 are very wealthy and so what we were saying to somebody who was hispanic or black you have more common commonalities as a working people than you do with oprah or lebron and they were saying to white people why in the world would you want to we you know talk about being white when mark zuckerberg is white and bill gates is white are these your people that you admire and are part of so it was an effort to get rid of tribalism and to to seek commonalities by common grievances i thought it was working slowly but working it can renew itself what does that look like as far as inspiring to renew a return to citizenship are there organizations that need to do that how does that play itself out practically in your mind yeah if you want to well if you want to destroy citizenship i'm just kind of quoting cokeville or machiavelli or orwell what you would do is what you're doing now you would say you did you never had a country didn't exist in 1776 it existed in 1619 you'd say well there were a lot of people a lot half two-thirds of the country that were opposed to slavery and they didn't know if they could have a country uh if they had a slave owning south right next to them and so they tried to postpone the inevitable civil war they did pretty well for you know a hundred years but it was inevitable and so but you try to say that nobody cares if i go to the hoover institution i look down one day and there's father junipero sarah plaza a great man after all a spanish missionary risk his health to found the california mission system and i judge him by modern morality and i go back to a pre-industrial era and then i say he's canceled i go in one day and there's no more father it's gone it's like trotsky's uh pictures cut out during the stalin era right so that's what people do when they want to destroy the credibility of citizenship they say your country is no good you dropped the bombs because you were racist there were all white people at d-day you didn't do this the noble native american never did what you did and so you rewrite history you change names you topple statues and that's what we're doing right now and we want to undermine the idea that a american citizen is an ancient and venerable idea and it's a privilege and we all have to work at it it's a very unusual weird bizarre thing that people can come all over the world and as soon as their citizens as teddy roosevelt said they have as much right as a guy here six generations or they can look like anything you know i i was i lived in abroad three years and in the 70s a greek i lived in greece three years and uh two years and i i'd come back again and a greek said who are these americans i said what do you mean he said are they black or brown or what they they come in the military and i don't know who they are and what he was saying is they don't they're not identifiable by race that was an experiment and everybody says you know you you weren't perfect therefore you're raised well nobody's ever tried to be that way right if you wanted today to go to china and say i want to be a chinese citizen try it and see what happens if you say today i want to go to mexico city i want to be a mexican citizen well you can get your you might be able to do it legally but you will never be accepted if i want to say today you know what i'm very fond of african culture i think i want to go to rwanda and be a citizen of rwanda i'm not going to be accepted as rwandan i don't look like rwandans but america was a different idea so we all before we destroy it and throw it away we better understand what the alternative it is it's something pre-modern and dystopian postmodern well i think that's key to understand because i think the left believes they want to pull from the very best parts of america but we've got to go further than where we currently are where we've got a history of injustice we've got to overcome i i don't see them wanting to go to a dystopian they believe they're going to an enlightened place but see the left believes in relativism yes that if we say it's it's utopia and you say it's dystopia then it's just your opinion that's your truth this is our truth well i'll tell you what no such thing exists there are abstract criterion across time and space so i can take you to san francisco and i can walk you across the sidewalk and i can say did this exist 20 years ago is sir as a syringe is feces if i go to a hotel in san francisco to speak did the doorman come up and say excuse me are you a a hotel guest yes could i look at the bottom of your shoes i said why in the world because i think you might have human feces on them because i saw you walk from that street or when i go to san francisco somebody said don't bling your car because they'll bash in the windows and if you have less than a thousand dollars the police won't come that's dystopian no matter what you say you can say it's got great restaurants and all the silicon va valley grandees have their own private security guards there's nice areas it's a dystopia and so that's what we're worried about and then the left never says compared to what right compared to what right so that's what what uh would you know i don't see anything what we're trying to do in this country in terms of culture social values race club that any other country even attempts right the provost uh where i work the provost at stanford now the director of the hoover institution condoleezza rice former secretary of state former national security advisor she had a meeting not too long ago with the at our uh with kay james the head of the heritage these are conservative the two most uh known conservative think tanks they're both black women wow you think the germans have two institutes called the institute or the with two black women i don't think so [Laughter] i don't think they do you think the british shoot no you think the chinese have a two institutes the wuhan biology lab and the wuhan counter intelligent and there's some guy with blue eyes and blonde hair running each i don't think so you are uniquely positioned and i want our audience to understand this a lot of what we have to deal with in popular culture starts in academia it does that's a very good that's an excellent point everybody thinks we're just well we are kind of esoteric stupid idiots but people for some reason give respect to the letters after people's names have you noticed that md oh wow we better believe that you wear two masks even though you're vaccinated and you're driving your car by yourself you've got to wear two masks because that guy with an md said so or a guy with a jd said you know what if it's less than a thousand dollars of crime it's no big thing to steal or a phd so when we say things that with phds you got to be very careful well my question is uh you know critical race theory it began in academia and around the 1970s and it was an offshoot of critical legal theory and then critical theory and that went back to world war one and the frankfurt school and gramski and in italy and basically critical critical critical was critical of the establishment both in europe and here and why because people were dissatisfied my own prejudicial view is that europe never recovered from world war the suicide of destroying its culture in world war one and then again in world war ii and that gave rise to the idea that these people are all bad in the establishment and they imported it over here and it says basically that if i go in and shoplift i shouldn't be prosecuted because that is what the establishment says is theft but if i steal money and i'm a stockbroker they don't they do but they say they don't so you arbitrarily pick this is illegal and that's illegal based on your privilege your clash your money your race or you name somebody because and there are elements of truth to it but it's not the truth and so they've created this relativist mishmash that we're all supposed to say you know there are no laws or all our traditions are all there are no custom they're just narratives they're truth my truth that's all based on power michelle foucault gary dolacon all these people who if i want to be really cynical try to explain how the magnificent french army in world war one was never beaten and held back the prussians at verdun and then in world war ii collapsed in six weeks in 1940 to the bear mark and when that catastrophe hits a person you're very likely to say facts don't exist we really didn't collapse we really didn't just give our country over to germany it's more you know and that's what they that's where it took hold in though i don't understand that we've had historical grievances with germany and and vice versa and we've come to help france but we have understandings of why we wouldn't want to be french vice versa so why did we embody and and enhance and worship and deify two bankrupt ideologies that came from germany and and france it doesn't make any sense would you see anything that we need to be aware of trends that are developing within academia that we may not be aware of outside of that that yeah that you absolutely want me academia is engaged today in a war on meritocracy so they're getting rid of the s.a.t and the ac team and the funny thing about that is one of my best friends i have lunch every two weeks with for the last 15 years until the lockdown was tom soul and he used to lecture me and he said the a.c.t was s.a.t were heaven because i could go in and i was not a black man i was a test taker and my score allowed me to do things and the same thing with jews that had quotas against them at harvard and yale this old white book so the idea i taught classics at cal state fresno for 21 years and i had mostly minority students and i'd always say to them we want standardized tests we want gre for you guys because we're going to learn latin greek reading knowledge of french and german greek history latin history when i get done with you guys if you do it you're going to just ace those tests and they did so i always thought and this was kind of the asian-american lesson they may not like asians but when we get all these great test scores but instead we we just threw it away and so that's a big worry and the other worry is were were taking emphasis away from the western tradition of constitutional government democracy rationalism market economics private property which everybody wants apparently because we have more immigrants come here than any other place in the world each year and we're replacing it with isms and ologies that aren't true and so that means to understand the western tradition you should be able to know what homer was you should be able as i mentioned earlier you know who machiavelli you should know what dante was it doesn't mean that my ancestors were stupid but believe me and when i read nals saga an icelandic viking song it's it's interesting but it's not homer and so i don't feel that i'm being shorted as a scandinavian that we don't give proper credit to a bunch of guys in horns that were running around hides killing people right and were pretty wild until they were christianized by southern europeans that looked brown basically as a story this is what i don't understand about race there is no word in the in the classical greek or roman languages for white there's not even a word for anybody and there are black people mentioned in greeks and rome in their literature but they're always noble from ethiopians and when they go across the rhine in the danube and fight savages tacitus and caesar says beware you guys we're only about five four romans and these big monsters are about six feet and they have hair and they do crazy things the women are topless and they bathe in cold water and they drink cow's milk and they bury their people they hammer live people to trees or just weird devils and we've got to beat them and so all of a sudden this tradition that's stored in greece and rome is whiteness it doesn't make any sense it doesn't and it's it's based on ignorance well as i mentioned dr victor davis hanson doesn't just speak for the day he speaks for the decade can we give him a round of applause he did a wonderful job thank you thank you so much doctor we really appreciate it you

Channel: Centennial Institute

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Id: Y66u_zSNolE

Length: 52min 50sec (3170 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021