Mike Rowe Takes Up CLASS WARFARE with Victor Davis Hanson | The Way I Heard It.

you talk about a large population in this country uh that have come to see themselves as Lab Rats that this is not a political podcast we never have these kinds of conversations they're always Evergreen But Chuck read this to me yesterday while I was out walking and I thought I can't I can't take it anymore get Victor on the phone please because this to me you've written The Emperor's New Clothes for grown-ups Victor I introduced you uh in the Preamble with great enthusiasm fonded all over you and said many many nice things but I feel

compelled to uh to keep that going because it's such a pleasure to finally meet you in person thank you for doing this well thank you for having me Mike I uh I hope or I assume maybe that you're in your in your Farmhouse somewhere in the Central Valley I am yeah I'm uh somewhere between velia and Fresno and for people who have never been to either such place you know you're looking down from heaven at California where exactly is that b North I'm almost in the the exact center of the state I'm halfway between this

I'm um I'm about 75 miles to the crest of the sieras and about 100 m 130 miles from the Nevada border and I'm about 150 Mi 40 Mi to the Central Coast San Louis abiso right in between the two of them and then I'm I'm exactly halfway between San Diego and the Oregon border when you think of this state so it's kind of the state yeah like when in the context well in in all its Glory do you think of it in terms of northern and southern or do you think of it more like Eastern

and Western in terms of how the state might be divided well it's such a huge State and it has so many different regions and Pockets but since I was a student I I grew up on this farm and I had to work uh when my grandfather ran it then my parents and when I did so I was going back almost every year I mean every U weekend from UC Santa Cruz which was kind of the leftwing Mecca in the 70s and then to this area which is very conserva I did the same thing at Stanford

and I work at the Hoover institution at Stanford so I get these two different polarized views so I I always think of the San waen Valley not just the Central Valley because Sacramento is now very different but somewhere between Stockton and Bakersfield all of the Foothills all of the Eastern mountain ranges and then the Inland Empire that is east of Los Ang Angeles to the Arizona border as kind of a cons not just conservative but maybe more conservative than red States Ultra conservative and then I see that, 900 mile Corridor 50 miles uh wide from

La Hoya to north of Berkeley and then the wine country is ultra liberal and Bluer Than any blue State and that's where 30 so the state is is 30 million hardcore leftists and 10 million hardcore conservatives and then the the region reflects that too it's almost if you look at the map 75% of California is probably conservative regionally right and the 25% that's not has 75% of the population so it's it's it's it kind of is bizarre that and we produce Adam Schiff and Devon Nuna in the same [Laughter] yeah I mean not to belver

the point but I just think it's so interesting I've been reading your books and and following your commentary for for years um but I didn't get really interested in in your world view until I understood that you moved back in to the childhood home where where you grew up and where you had established your your Bona fites and so many traditional uh call it higher educational uh benchmarks you know uh you I guess I mean foret this is pretty high cotton but in the same way Jefferson was a farmer first and then an intellectual I

just always think of you that way and it's such a short list Victor that really there's nobody else on it and I think it gives your writing a perspective and I and I think that while I've been really Blown Away by it on many many occasions this latest thing that I just saw on the blade of Perseus your website fantastic Name by the way um where you where you talk about a large population in this country uh that have come to see themselves as Lab Rats that this not a political podcast we never have these

kinds of conversations they're always Evergreen But Chuck read this to me yesterday while I was out walking and I thought I can't I can't take it anymore get Victor on the phone please because this to me you've written The Emperor's New Clothes for grown-ups and you've just gone down a list of things that I feel deeply and I know a lot of other people feel deeply people who incidentally are not no fans of trump but who nevertheless feel like something so IND dispensable and concrete and and real has been moved shifted and man that that

to me is the conversation of our times and um thank you for writing it and if you wouldn't mind i' I'd just love to unpack some of it with you right now and start by asking why why did you write this and why did you write it now well part of it is personal is that I was gone for graduate and undergraduate for about and I lived overseas for about nine years I did come back to where I grew up but when I was uh 26 I decided not to go into Academia and I just

came back and farmed and then I got back into academic at the local State University but my point is for most of my life I've been going going back between those two worlds and while that that other world the academic Urban Silicon Valley Stanford world was condemnatory of where I of this type of world and I mean when I would talk to people about farming or Fresno they they just thought it was you know one person said I don't know how you can even live in near Fresno and then when I talked to people here

to the degree they knew about those people and they didn't necessarily have a positive view but they were never they were never were hypercritical they just said wow that's neat what's it like up there what do you what do you do every week or but these people thought a fate worse than hell would be to live among people here it was a very um diverse area of Armenian Americans mexican-americans Japanese Americans poor White Oklahoma now it's mostly Mexican American from the open borders but it's odd that they are they are assuming the ethos and the

culture of the the the earlier mixed diverse uh communities in other words I don't know of a Mexican-American man over 40 that is not voting for Trump but I'd say most of their kids and their wives are not but there's that it's a very muscular Blue Collar uh it's been very good for me also because I remember when I came home from graduate school I was very happy that I told my father who was a farmer and a college ad a junior college I said I passed my Italian German and French I attached my Greek

and Latin composition I only have nine more exams and he said did you ever learn how to wire the 220 raisin dehydrator like I asked you and I said dad I I'm a full-time student and he said I know you are and my dad had actually gone to college and he had but he said I need the rais de hydrater wire and I don't want it to burn up so all of the skills that I thought people thought were very important were not important here it was can you drive a tractor for nine hours and

not take out a Vine can you well can you do rudimentary Plumbing can you uh prune trees and over there it was nobody thought not only nobody knew they they didn't even know they existed so I and then the the the the vocabulary of disparagement so I I started looking at these adjectives clingers irredeemables deplorables drags Chumps Hobbits crazies those are words that John McCain even used whom I liked Barack Obama uh Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden they have a it's not just Trump supporters it's a it's a looking down at those people and uh

I was trying to figure out what happened and and I think a lot of it was globalization that people who had the skills to capture that 7 billion person Market in high-tech Finance Insurance the media uh became fabulously wealthy to an extent we' never experienced in the history of civilization I mean I I see people at Silicon Valley that come on campus that are worth three four five billion and then the people who were muscular whose jobs could be Xerox at a cheaper rate or they deal dealt with natural resources that could be offsh or

something I'm talking about people who provide our fuel or our housing our food or Timber or mining they didn't do so well they either lost their jobs or their wages stagnated and then we created a postao ex Jesus like well they didn't do very well because they never learned a code or they didn't get with it or they didn't get with the plan or their their okis or their whatever and the problem was it so the the explanation followed the reality and you never when you would say to them I would go to Whole Earth

uh Foods in po Alto sometimes I'd see some of my colleagues I say come over here look see the grapes see the tomatoes where do you think they come look at the almonds you know how hard it is to grow grapes to make them look like that especially in today's regulatory environment or you know when I would go places I'd always talk to truckers you know or you know what it's like to cuz we used to have truckers come in and get our fruit and you talk to these guys they drove you know all night

long keep the fruit cool I'd say when would when would our fruit get to New York don't worry Mr Hansen we'll get it there in two and a half days I promise you and all of that took enormous intelligence and skill I remember one guy told me once you know if you don't get a job haha you can always run a 7-Eleven I said I don't think I could run a 7-Eleven in inventory labor security my God those guys are walking Einstein to be able to do that profit margins so as our Farmers though I

mean the great generalists of our time you know one of the first big lessons on dirty jobs for me was working with farmers and and miners in fact it was a minor who pulled me aside one day and said Mike they're only there are only two industries in the world you know the rest are jobs the industries are farming and Mining every single thing in the room where I'm sitting now and and you was either grown from the ground or or pulled from the earth and fashioned into something useful those are our Industries everything else

are jobs yeah and that was it is that was sort of the thesis of Dirty Jobs and I so wish that I had been thinking about this in 2016 when um Chuck Tod invited me on to Meet the Press everybody was stunned by the result of the election and because I had had a front row seat to a few hundred of the jobs you just described they thought perhaps I might have some insight as to how Trump could have possibly won this election I mean they were Gob smacked and and I didn't have near as

eloquent an answer as you provide in this in this latest piece but I did fumble around and and try to express the idea that we're no longer two sides of the same coin you know half of our Workforce has has become subordinate you know owners of these vocational consolation prizes and the other half has become ascendant and that pisses a lot of people off and and and that started to grow and fester and that's what I saw on my little show and before you comment I I just want to read a quick quote from you

that I that I love because it speaks to this weird delineation that I think we're all suffering from you said or wrote Somewhere I see my whole career as integrated I grew up on a farm and inherited a tragic view from my parents and grandparents studying the Classics for eight years both here and abroad and teaching them for 20 years all reiterated the sense that human nature was unchanging and that the human ordeal was predictable whether it was working on a farm or reading Sophocles the message kept being reiterated in different ways nothing really changes

and that to me is baked into this idea that we really are two sides of the same coin as a country at least we're supposed to be but we're not integrated anymore and God what a mess that's caused I know and and there has to be what the founders were very worried about was and toille wrote about it in Democracy in America as an as a foreign Observer is it they felt that you had to have a not the majority necessarily but you had to have a large group of people as the foundation of a

consensual society that worked both intellectually and physically and they understood nature was not to be romanticized but to be treated with respect but to be mastered in some sense and they were independent they were autonomous and that isn't I mean the farmer was the emblematic of that but we still have the independent shopkeeper we have the independent trucker all of those people are not part of the Borg so to speak and they're very valuable people if they're viable uh when I look out this window I can look 360° and there's at least 12 Farms that

when I was farming looked at my social security thing the other day from 1980 to 87 ' 86 I never made more than $7,000 apparently and they all went broke and we're all Tess in a mosaic of about a 12,000 acre big farm I like the guy I know him he's really nice but we're all renting our places out to him and all the farmhouses were they grew families we you know they were in the Little League the hospital board the parents were on the school board they're all gone and there are people who came

in here from Mexico which are great people but they're they're Farm labors for this big corporate Enterprise and there's nobody really that I know of that is farming that does their own work they're owners they're managers and the and why this is going to continue is if I look out on this orchard right out my window and compare it to when I farmed it looks better now because there's so much science and capital on the corporate level a a a computer turns on the irrigation a computer puts in herbicide a computer puts in uh Nutri

nutrients and nitrogen a machine mechanically picks one man can do this whole 43 Acres I have but I can but when I go out there I see there was my great there was my grandfather when I was six telling me Victor you've got it this is how you irrigate there was my father there was my brother there was I go out I went out to the the shed today to get some something I remember my brother I had a twin brother in 1983 turned around to me he said I just cut the end of my

finger off on a grinder and I said my God he said don't worry I'll get it and he was out working the next day and that and my grandfather would funding my Swedish grandfather done the same thing and I said well Frank did it so you're in a good tradition but that was just everyday stuff and it was very dangerous farming is is by statistically the most danger dangerous I've seen so many people and you know when I talk at Stanford some brilliant economists and I like these guys I really they're my colleagues but when

they talk about the market adjudicates and um when we have an inefficient industry it with creative destruction I all I get that and uh but when the price of raisins which was where we what we used to grow phenominally went from $1,400 to $400 in one year everybody went broke and a guy about a mile from here he put a new he was my high school friend he put a noose around his neck he turned on the pickup in his garage and sealed it he ODed on drugs and he shot himself in the head all

at once wow well he covered everything covered chances and and then the ditch tender shot himself and uh our family just disintegrated we had 200 Acres had been our family for over 100 years and everybody sold out and moved away and I'm the only one left just with my 40 acres I have the original home place but what I'm getting at is that Devastation of globalization it was caused by EU subsidizing the price of raisins at 600 a ton and then capturing World Market so everybody you know went broke but when the people and I

I was a conservative but when when Regan's guy came out from the raisin administrative commission I asked him we had a public meeting I said this is terrible why do you allow these people to dump this stuff in here and he you know what he said to me and that's when I really he said this is good for you Mr Hansen I said how is it good to compete with raisins that have an 800 a ton subsidy and there's substandard raisins he said you will have to be more efficient because you will have to beat

that the PE number two the people who won't be efficient will go out of business the consumer will get a cheaper price and more importantly that they won't be sustainable well they're still doing it you know 40 years later so and that a lot of the economists I know believe that that where I work that that's that creates a better product and they you know they despise Trump and the magga people for even suggesting a tariff but if you're on the other end and you're working really hard and your margin is 1% and a country

like China or somebody is dumping stuff below the cost of production and you think that's going to make you a better producer to compete with that or it's going to help the American people for you and your operation to go broke there has to be some balance is what I'm trying to get you don't want a protected economy you don't want an open but uh that was kind of what and then because I was on the at a university for the last 22 years and I went there earlier all of these ideas and this is

getting to your point about why I wrote about it you know they would say to me teacher unions are good and there's a bunch of right-wing people that want all these charter schools and I'd always say so you like the public school yes where are your children well they're at Sacred Heart they're at castala or they'd say we've got to get kilowatts up the price of kilowatts up to 30 5 cents that'll discourage electrical use and be good for the planet we can all go wind and so and I said have you ever been in

Fresno or Bakersfield when it's 115 because you should come because poor Mexican American people are in Walmart and they're there all day long because that's how they get free air conditioning they cannot turn on their air conditioners at 30 cents a kilowatt or then you would say it would just be down the line on all of these issues that they would be protected from the consequences really of their they would tell me you know what I I I shouldn't talk about somebody you know postmortem but I used to really like Milton Friedman but he once

debated me and um it was a friendly debate I was young I just got the Hoover I so it was on open borders and so he said you know I don't really worry about open borders let the market adjudicate and I said what does that mean and he said when the price gets down to a doll an hour they won't come and I said but are you going to be living on Knob Hill and I'm going to be living where everybody's going to be trying to live on a dollar an hour to compete with that

and I've seen it happen already and people kill themselves or they don't work it doesn't work to let the market adjudicate letting millions of people from the most impoverish circumstances come up here without some type of regul ation or he said no as soon as the the wages stabilize on both sides of the Border you don't have a problem and the only way to solve it is I have an open border and I thought this is lunacy later he said you know you can't subsidize it but it was that kind of jarring from both left

and right I would go back and forth and and it was it was hard are you more stunned like in terms of cognitive dissonance are you more stunned when you hear somebody like fredman who I assume you you know almost categorically admire yes say something that that feels so out of context or or when you or when you hear someone who you categorically dismiss all of a sudden stumble across some great truth that's either elevated by history or or or is just truthful on its face in a way that you know in your big giant

brain matters I don't know if that happens a lot to you these days it happens sometimes uh it it's funny what you're describing is bifurcated when I see people on the so-called right that I'm kind of surprised that they're so doctrinaire and theoretical and they're not worried about the human implications it's almost always economic when I talked about people on the left that they're hypocritical or paradoxical or they don't care I to give one example I was talking to someone not long ago about the busing of illegal aliens into Martha's Vineyard and I said it

was just perfect 24 hours virtue siging performance art they need beautiful puff coats they need food next 24 hours uh these guys got to get out of here as quickly as possible I cannot have them here and sometimes when I was talking to people they on the left they admitted that they would say that the only problem with is I call it a John kism I think I mentioned that they feel that as kind of platonic Guardians they have to have exemptions they have to fly on Gulf streams to to address gold global warming if

they had to sit nine hours like I do trying to get a connection out of Fresno to go somewhere in the east coast then that hurts everybody because they're so valuable they have or they want public schools and they don't want they want teach teacher jion but their children are going to be so important to the future of this country they have to go to prep school and in the process they don't realize that if you don't experience what you Advocate something happens to you and you know I was a in 2003 I was a

big supporter of because after 911 of getting rid of I thought existential threats so I supported the Iraq War but after about two years I thought you know you're 50 and you you didn't join the military your dad and grandfather and your person you're named after they were all in the military and he was killed you better get over there so when I I was embedded for two two times 2006 and 7 it was pretty hairy and then you start to see what your advocacy means in the real you're talking about being on a Blackhawk

at night with an 18 year-old kid from Nebraska sitting out there with a 50 m machine gun with no you know he's sitting out on a little platform and you're flying 180 miles in the dark and he's looking for little signs of gunfire and you ask him when you land wow that was weird how often you do it I do it every night how old are you I'm 18 are you scared N I don't I'm not scared these are the bad guys my job is to get them and and then when he talks to you

and you're in that Blackhawk are you okay if they're going to shoot me they're going to have to go shoot my first before they hit you or I was in a Humvee in a bad place and the colonel turns around and says stop now we're going to there's a good chance we're going to be blown up on this thing I want you to sit on the left rear on a plat on a big steel plate so if we go up you're going to be okay or we'd go into the sons of Saddam the Arab Spring

and he said they might they blew up a guy here and so you're going to sit at the door so if there's these guys with suicide bombers and this is a setup and they do not want to join us this is going to blow up but if you're in that door you'll blow out the door and when you meet people like that then it really brings home when you support something you better be very careful because you're going to take people that are you're going to send him to a god-forsaken place and it came up

again we 45,000 uh soldiers short in the military and the military doesn't want to talk about it and I have a lot of friends that are high General so and they they're very angry at me but I went through and looked at the very hard to do but if you you really dig you can find out what the problem is because the military does keep statistics on Race as you know and ethnic and and that 50,000 shortfall is inordinately white males in other words Latinos and blacks women gay everybody is sort of joining up and

I think it's directly correlated oh they will they will argue with you and I want to be respectful they'll argue but it has something to do with the mark Millie Austin white racism read Professor Kendy Dei and then we're going to see if there's a cabal of races and they did and of course in December of 2023 they released the Pentagon report and said they didn't find it so then I was curious about who dies in Iraq and Afghanistan and they don't want to talk about that no but they want to talk but I found

out if you look at the statistics white males died from 72 to 74% in Iraq and Afghanistan in other words the people from the lower middle classes that we rely on generation after generation Vietnam their grandfather golf one their father Afghanistan Iraq the grandson the great grandson's not joining and we depend on them to do two things to join the military and die at twice their numbers in the demographic make up about 34% of the population and yet they die at Double those numbers and yet we had the audacity to consider them on patriotic or

racist or cabal then we find out we can't find evidence so we we released the report in December the Pentagon report that finds no cabal in the meantime now we're short all the people that will go to god- awul places like taji or fua or Helman Province and they're ref to them they're not joining now you referred to them um I say them and I don't want to paint with too broad a brush but I love the expression the the muscular jobs the muscular class it's also a muscular uh state of mind you know for

that kid in that helicopter to take that position that was both protective of you and just so matter of fact in the face of unspeakable danger that that has to be taught you know that that that attitude that sensibility is a is a result of a collection of choices and we seem to have waged a war on the people who make those choices back to your back to your article one of the things I love about it it's 1900 words 1888 by the way don't know if you counted them but I didn't but what's so

well it's your own website like some editor is going to tell you Victor can you shave 200 off for me just to make it a tight 18800 probably not dealing with that but at its heart is this indictment of hypocrisy but nowhere in this does the word hypocrisy appear you don't you don't use it and that's so interesting to me because it's the it goes right to the heart of what I think I I don't want to speak for anybody but me but I'll forgive stupidity and I'll forgive ignorance but it's very hard to forgive

this level of hypocrisy because it's wanting and because it's calculated and it's and it's so deliberate so I guess if I were to morph into a question I would say you know the recruiting challenge you just described in the military which by the way I don't know if you've read this Pete heith has a book called The War I it's excellent it's so good and he pissed off the same people you've pissed off because he's he's talking about all of these Equity celebration at the expense of the very thing you mentioned which comes back to

the recruiting challenge which is weirdly similar to The Agrarian world the the generational aspect of farming your fifth generation right yeah and all of a sudden you know so we've got a whole new generation of kids who Maybe for the first time are going you know what I don't I don't think it's for me so somewhere in all of this is how do you make a more persuasive case for Farmers a more persuasive case in light of what's going on in the military for service a more persuasive case in light of what's going on in

the skilled trades for for for that kind of pursuit finally I'll just tell you this it's not quite a parapa but it was certainly an an agaricus if I'm getting my Arista tilian terms straight you are me I'm backstage at a Future Farmers of America event in 2008 and I'm giving the keynote and I'm going through some brief that was handed to me and on the front page it says very clearly we are no longer referring to ourselves as the Future Farmers of America we are now the FFA and I I pulled the muckety muck

aside and I said what why what is this and long story short the word farming had become a pejorative and it was affirmatively impacting their ability to recruit so I'm just throwing all that out there to say how much of this is self-inflicted in all of these different vocations and is there a way to to change the broader societal mindset around these jobs well I I think a lot of it did come at the beginning of the 21st century with high-tech and and the global markets and the the and this professional class of people who

made a fortune these universities that went from a billion doll endowment to 3040 billion doll endowments and these tech devices these virtual you know everybody's on their iPhone and all that and I think what's created there's a there's a human Timeless desire for something real and there's nothing more real than devotion like this guy that I was talking about on the the blackhaw he was doing something real he thought I think he was doing he was trying to defend what he thought were the interests of his country he wanted to protect people who were civilians

and he felt that his he had a tragic view of the world and the tragic view was I can't I join if I get shot that's what that's the way it works it wasn't I can't believe I'm here or what's happening to me this isn't fair and the farming is the same thing you talk to Farmers and they'll say the price of almonds has dropped from $453 to a157 so it's below the cop it's boom and bus and it's bus now and you talk to these guys and they're going broke and they'll say well I'm

still I'm still go out there every day and I produce a product and people eat it and I said yeah but you're going broke like I don't have enough money to pull the orch by the way yeah yeah stoic or tragic both and I don't have a way out and but that what I'm getting at is that they feel that all of these people that do these types of jobs feel they they it's something concrete they can when you build a when you lay a cement ptio or you're you're prune something it's real you can

feel it and it does something that's good for people uh I had a Mexican-American guy came by about a year ago and he said hey bigor I helped you you build the stone wall around your fence 20 years ago you remember that hey Javier what are you doing I got go look at it let me look at it one more time how is it working and and that's that sense and when you're a virtual Society or you're making I mean I no bigger defender of American Finance than me and insurance and Tech but it it

brings you away from concrete things and then when it the more you do that the more you rationalize it and the more distant you become and we are creating a class that you can spot now by their clothes their accent their attitude that are completely divorced from what we used to think was the American Center or tradition and and California is the loc is the great experiment because we are producing the most asymmetrical Society of not just wealthy people but hyper hyper wealthy not just the zukerberg of the world but I'm talking about the high

professional classes making three five 6 700,000 and then 21% of the people below the poverty line and people not making it in and it's this is new because most of the time we said these guys that are wealthy and they're right-wing and they're greedy and we're going to tax them now these guys are well we got to need this money for global warming and changing the climate and we've got to help people uh adapt to the high-tech world and we've got to have startups and we're working on climate change and diversity all the and it's

very Insidious and I don't know what we're going to do about it but for me right now the great threat and that's why one of the reasons get back to your question it's very hard to talk about an exploitive class because these people the the wealth in the country has changed enormously I went to the Fortune 400 they're no longer Fortunes in assembly manufacturing mining for uh trans they are all investment Tech Insurance media speculation and they're mostly not all but they're mostly on the left side of the ledger so they have the added attraction

of they're doing this for everybody they're using their the sores of the world are trying to help people they're not the Rockefellers they're not the uh J Morgans are not the robber borns but when you look at the techniques the monopolies or the attitude about extreme wealth or the use of wealth to generate what they think is we should all we labat should follow they have the exact same ethos or mindset only they have and you mentioned hypocrisy at least you could say of the 19th century captains of industry the JP Morgans or the gugenheim

or whoever that they they were Unapologetic they said we're bilding America we've got to have railroads we got to have lights we've got to have electricity we're going to do it our way people will benefit I'm happy I made my money it was upfront these people well I'm making all this money but I'm not really rich I wear you know jeans and flipflops and tie-dye shirts I'm just one of you and I'm using the money for good purposes oh by the way I have five homes and I have two golf streams and I'm living a

life completely antithetical to the things I tell you to do you can't have a natural gas stove in California anymore but I have an Italian imported one you can't use natural gas to heat your home but you know I have an olympic size pool down in Malibu I got to get it heated that kind of stuff you got to have a little EV with a 300 mile range but you know when I get off my Gulf Stream I need to have a uh a Range Rover with 15 m a gall and it's so easy to

do that and that by Coastal Elite is is uh they're very dangerous people because they're they're almost like New England Puritans they have that Zeal to do good we're going to make America like New England and that that was very good you know but these people now are they've lost their God they're secular but they're still that frenzy to convert and to dictate and to make your lives better and you have we you have to give us certain latitudes and exceptions and hypocrisies so we have the freedom and the ability to make you happier as

we see you be happier and someone said to me it's very dangerous I well I think obviously it's it's getting crazier and crazier so much of this piece like you don't actually spell it out but it feels like especially in the early parts of it you're tacitly saying how much of this are we going to take you know it it's like back to the uh the metaphorical experiment and and the lab rats in question will they take this will they if we tell them that was a successful Retreat from Afghanistan even though we left $50

billion in material behind do you think they'll buy it if we tell them think so you know if if we tell them that the Border is secure as they see Millions coming over it do you think they'll buy it and you know the indictment of the whole thing is that yeah so far we have but at like I guess maybe the question is when do the lab rats in the experiment look around and say screw it we're going to chew our way through the maze enough enough well that's very it it's coming and that's why

of course they demonize it oh you people are all going to be January 6 crazy but it's not going to be like January it's going to be a more Broad and it's going to manifest itself um I call it a monastery of the mind sometimes I just talk to people and they'll just casually say I haven't watched a Hollywood movie in years Disney I don't care about Disney I don't buy budl light I wouldn't buy it I don't uh what's the Oscars I don't even know what it is what is the Tony what is the

Grammy I turned that out years ago I was looking at the NBA under Michael Jordan 30 million people playoffs that was 20 years ago now it's they they're happy when they get three or four million so there's a whole segment of the population for a variety of reasons is kind of checked out and so far they're very passive and if you talk to them and you talk to them as much as I or more than I do what they're worried about when you say they wake up and it's a different country it's a neoism before

we had in the 7s a crime way but nobody said I'm a advocate of critical legal Theory and it's okay to steal a candy bar in San Francisco because the law was just made up by wealthy people who don't steal candy bars there's nothing wrong with stealing a candy bar if it's under $950 or we used to have an open border but there was a border we never had a situation where somebody said the borders just doesn't exist it's a it's a construct or we used to have racial essentialism but we didn't talk about it

because tribalism is a is a pre- civilizational idea and now people just openly will say things that you know they'll talk about their race in a way that is the most illiberal racist manner in the world but we we we're conditioned to do it and so I guess what I'm saying it's a very it's not that we are lack is we've destroyed the whole foundation so we don't have any measur any measurement anymore it reminds me so much of the French Revolution you know you get rid of the Bourbons then you get a very good

constitutional republic and then you want to go a little bit further with Danton and then you get the Roes Pierre brothers and the Jacobin and they think if a man votes equally now that's not enough he has to be equal in every aspect of his being so we're going to kill all the priest destroy the churches name rename the days of the week rename the months worship a supreme deity called radio or Reason and the revolution is going to be total and that's kind of what Equity is now it's like okay we got equality of

opportunity but it didn't create us all equal so we're going to go in and we're going to change names we're going to we're going to tear down statues and it's going to be a holistic revolutionary experience crime is going to be redefined race is going to be redefined the border is going to be refined and that's what I really meant when I said it we were in the middle of a revolution we don't even know or appreciate it's I'll just finish this rant I was going to school about a year ago and I had been

overseas I drive into hpio U Sarah plaza where my the my office is and something's weird the sign's not there anymore just 30 days and then I see a little sign that says Arrow Jane Stanford Clauses so I said to my assistant what happened and he said they changed the signs I said what he said you don't live you don't work on hpio sah Plaza anymore I said where do I work you work on Stanford Plaza I said why because hpio Sarah in 1700 whip some people and they're all angry and so they just changed

the name overnight the students and the administration did I said this is like the Soviet Union did we have a discussion about it I said you could make the argument that's Leland Stanford was as liberal or as illiberal toward Chinese workers as hpio SAS but what I'm getting at it's an effort on the the part of the left a total 360 degree 247 effort and uh it's it's really scary because that it involves entertainment the media foundations the administrative State and with when it's supercharged by this level of wealth and technology and uh I did

an experiment on my podcast about a year ago I said I I'm going to do a Google search in front of all you guys now and I'm going to Google uh May 2020 riots and we'll see what comes up you know what came up January 6th January 6th yeah and it didn't have the word January 6 it was May it was 2020 but so there's algorithms and things like that that it's it's a revolutionary cycle that we're in and it's not going to end well because it's all predicated as you implied on the patience of

the people who are the lab wraths and the experimenters whether it's three Sexes or separate bathrooms or as I said uh you're you're going to have to get used to being a semi-truck driver where you charge your truck up every 150 miles rather than every 1100 or something I don't think they're going to take it I I really don't I don't think they are either but at the moment they are at at at the moment feels like it it back to Hans Christian Anderson we're at the point in the story where the town's people are

still nodding in agreement about the beauty of the imaginary clothes the kid has started to point and ask questions and some of the town's people people are going little bastard might be on to something you know but they're still waiting for a queue they're they're it hasn't tipped and I'm most interested in wondering or knowing when it will tip will it tip before November are we going to have to when does it go Splat and and when will we run out of whatever good willll uh has kept things somewhat civil so far yeah I I'm

worried about that too um there's certain things that we have a Revo with I'm very worried when Trump was almost whatever feeling about Trump when you come a quarter inch from blowing the ex president and leading candidate or nominee of the major blowing his head off and then you have no overt transparency about to happen and there are people that celebrated that I saw a lot of blogs where they said sorry he missed things like that and then the Hitler the reducto add hitlerum which they're doing all the time I don't think they understand two

things that if you tell everybody that the Republican nominee is Hitler and he's as bad as the third right and you also send the message inadvertently that a 20-year-old no nothing can get within the confined of local law enforcement FBI Secret Service and take eight shots at the president with impunity until he stop then you're going to have a lot of people out there who think a I can do better than that guy if that guy got within I can get really pull it off and be if I were to do it there's going to

be a lot of people who think that I was some kind of heroic figure and when you add those two preis prerequisites you're going to have something happen dangerous I'm really worried about that and I'm also really worried that in 200 20 uh you know Trump was excessive over the top Etc but we had a candidate that did not really campaign and we were told that he was perfectly fine but he didn't want to campaign because of Co we changed the rules from 30% non-election day to 70% in most of the of the Swing states

and then we said that this was a very moderate candidate that's a very that that was a very brilliant tripartite approach but if you do that again and you say this candidate we don't want this candidate to be out because cognitively or intellectually or they won't articulate an impressive uh interview or they won't they won't be able to hel but we're going to keep this candidate hidden and we're going to rely on 70% of the people not going to the ballot showing an IDE on Election Day and this candidate is going to have a new

veneer and be remanufactured as a oldtime moderate maybe not from Scranton but maybe from Berkeley I don't know and you're going to present that and you're going to get the whole media thing generated it it's going to it's going to cause a lot of problems it was very what everyone thinks about Biden or Harris or anything but to see the media say on on June 13th there's nothing wrong there's nothing wrong how dare you the Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of themselves this is cheap fakes then on June 14th oh my God this person

is cognitively challenged he's got to go no he's and then and then they say we he's not we're not going to leave because this vice president is not able and then he does leave and then suddenly on June 21st somebody who was considered a liability is almost like George Washington the person who resigned is no longer selfish she's George Washington as farewell address and the person who takes over is not in articulate and not comfortable with crowds or or or hostile interviews but is Cicero what I'm get I'm just taking that as one example when

you have all of this establishment in media and they have these orwellian narratives and they go like this and this and this it's like Prov you you can't expect the American people people not to become cynical and you know if we had this conversation 8 years ago and I said fake news I thought that was kind of a hysterical word and it was on the The Fringe right and it was kind of stupid but but now everybody understands that it's that the media is is kind of like a state media and when you think well

my paranoid then you read wow Twitter was working with the FBI to suppress the word the the laptop information I could not even imagine that so incrementally we're going to Regions or territories where we didn't even imagine but we're doing it so insidiously we don't realize we're going to hit a a make or break can't return and people are going to push back and I think that's starting yeah I think push back I'm a I'm in a different part of California than you I'm just a little North of San Francisco over in the tiberon area

and most of my neighbors and and friends up here are left of center and I was at a dinner party the other night and this exact conversation came up and it was funny most of the people there uh still sort of rejected the idea that there was a giant bias in the media um they were still grudgingly they maybe there's some but really the argument was it's it's it's not determinative of anything and I said well let me ask you something and look we're all friends so just just be honest if the former president that

got shot at eight times and got his ear clipped happened to have been Barack Obama where would we be right now in the news cycle three and a half weeks out would we be demanding like would the journalists that you watch on whatever whatever channels you favor would they just be moving on or would there would there be a giant demand for not just retribution throughout the Secret Service local police whatever but we just got to get to the bottom of this we have to understand it and and that actually landed everybody at the table

because they were very supportive of that former president said well yes yes of course and we would be right there encouraging those demands and I said well that's my point guys the it's a it's why would you not encourage the same level of curiosity and diligence around the orange guy than the other guy and there it is and we had dessert and some wine and left friends but I made my point and you know I wonder if you agree yeah I've had similar situations although some of them have been more candid and their cander kind

of runs like this but they're not the same Victor because Barack Obama was a sophisticated intellectual uh the first African-American and he was an iconic figure and Donald Trump is an O Shyer overweight slob cruel so of course we have to have different and that attitude I know it it can be easily mocked but that attitude is firmly entrenched on all these issues and it gets back to what we talked about before the left really does believe either because they're more affluent now or they feel they're better credentialed or they control most of the institutions

that that was almost their Birthright or maybe there're it's a most of them are not actively religious but maybe there's some type of divine Force that has bequeathed them those opportunities and success but whatever the reason is they feel that they have an entitlement to be hypocritical because they are morally Superior and better educated than the rest of us and so if they make a decision that isn't equally applicable to both sides they just say well you've got a point I am hypocritical but on the other hand you can't compare who I am or where

I live or what I do or what my child does or what I think with you guys and it was brought home there was a commercial that came out this week I don't know if you saw it from the left and you know I believe all fair and square in politics I don't care that I don't think you know anything's Beyond The Pale basically but they had a lot of uh voices that they were trying to make As Trump supporters to talk about their outrageous extreme views so they did these interviews I don't know if

you saw it so the first guy says I uh I I I just think what people do in their bedrooms is my business and I don't want them to do have this that's fine and the next person goes I don't want one abortion if there people have to have back alley boy that's what they deserve next person I there's only two SEC it was all these social hot but the point I'm making is not what they said but the way they looked they were fat they had perspiration under their arms were half shaven they looked

like they were deranged and it wasn't just one it was every single one of them so the message is these positions that are different than ours are held by people that don't have the same right to have them as we do because they're substandard people and that was physically and Visually and figuratively transparent when they did that and you wanted to think well there's professors that believe the same as these guys why don't you just have one Professor or one lawyer or one uh CEO but they didn't and so it it's a reflection about what

they think and when I'm around them for during the week some weeks uh it it's not it's Unapologetic it really is that uh how they think and I and I don't know I um it's sometimes it's minor I go to a restaurant and I show my license if I have a credit card once in a while they don't know me and they'll say where's Salma and I'll say Fresno oh my God I would never go there why would you live there when you can live up here and or they'll say things like where where do

you live so I asked a guy the other day I said have you ever he said there's nowhere to eat there is there I said yeah there's plenty of places to eat and I said I bet you if I ask you you can tell me five good restaurants in Paris and five good in London and five good in Rome but you can't tell me one in Bakersfield or Fresno what do you think 180 Mi away from you versus 4,000 and that was he didn't want to answer that question because he said he knew the best

restaurants in Europe and he didn't know one and he did not want to know one 180 miles away from him and so when you have that attitude it's uh it's it's predictable and the problem is the people for the first time I think from talking to them they're starting to be aware that these people don't like them and they're starting to be confident that they are the ones that make the country they're the ones that go to Helman Province they're the ones that Frack they're the ones that grow food they're the ones that find Rare

Earth minals they're the ones that climb up on uh wind machines they do all the stuff that makes life possible and they feel they're not appreciated they're not compensated to the same degree and it'll be very interesting if they that's over 50% of the population and what November and Beyond will try to demonstrate to us will popular push back be as powerful as institutional control in other words if you don't have Hollywood and television and professional sports administrative State uh the media the foundations Wall Street can you can you by sheer numbers organize people to

show that you you reject where the country's going and that'll be very interesting to see yeah and I'd be derelict if I didn't ask you to to throw education in there and and Riff on that a little as well I don't know how much you know about me but the the foundation I've been running for the last however many years we award work ethic scholarships to kids who are going to trade schools and I have I have nothing against a four-year degree I've got one served me well and obviously you're a man of letters but

as you look at what's happening in education uh where do you where do you put that particular institution in the hierarchy of the others you've mentioned Tech and Hollywood and and finance is it the tip of the spear or is it of the wood behind it I always used to say that the craziest idea in faculty Lounge takes about two years to be implemented in the white house so it it's very influential there's too many people going to four-year colleges and they're not learning anything we have 1.7 trillion in debt and so the university is

very culpable because we have this problem now where we went from 2.1 fertility down to 1.6 it was catastrophic in 201 5 years so we've got this whole generation of young people primarily also male young people who they're not getting married they're not buying houses they're not having children which is affecting our fertility rate and they're encumbered and you look at and I have them in my own family and I talk to them how did you get 150,000 niece or nephew and the majors that they're they go three units here six units here five units

here and they they consume their 20s because of this myth of the four-year degree and then you have these universities and you say to them and I've said this to a lot of Administrators why don't you just tell you know when I buy a car I'm told exactly what the monthly payment is what the total cost is and am I aware of all the ins and outs and I have a 17 Page thing to fill out would you just tell the student when they take these loans what is the average compensation of a sociology major

a psych major a Classics major whatever it is just tell them tell them how much the interest will cost them and what is the price per unit in dollars so that they can make a decision and not just f it off on a guaranteed loan and then would you also Pledge Your endowment get the government out just pledge you if you're Stanford University and you have a $40 billion endowment why don't you just tell the students that they'll have the student loans but you are on your responsibility when they default and maybe if that happened

you would offer courses that were relevant and the students you would be very critical of the faculty who couldn't teach Etc and then another thing until recently we had SATs and the pre premise of the SAT was the GPA cannot be trusted because there's such a a wide disparity in the quality of high school so an a from my high school Salma High School where I graduated is not really an a compared to PO Alto High School and that was true so therefore I had to take the SAT why don't we have an sat in

the back end because I guarantee you that where Stanford is today and watching it they are not turning students out like Hillsdale College I teach it both 20 years ago the Stanford student was far better prepared and educated and came in not now and if you had an SAT that said everybody who needs a ba has to get I don't know 85% a 520 on the SAT you would be surprised how much they they hate that idea and because they don't want any accountability that either they haven't taught people to improve in the skills they

said were necessary to take their courses and uh I'll just finish this with I had a guy in Silicon Valley last year I gave a lecture and he came up to me and I said at some point their reputations are going to suffer these fouryear colleges because they're watered down the curriculum and it's Dei and he said where have you been Victor he said in the last three years Stanford University LED in 20% Whit students we don't care what color they are but to get that ratio they had to exclude people that were brilliant so

they rejected 70% of those who had a perfect sat even though was alter you know it was a choice they sent it in and that became a mark of vulnerability it's it's like one 0.11% of the SAT get perfect scores Stanford refus 60 or 70% of them that applied so then he said and then you have the therapeutic culture so I said said what are you getting at he said when we're in Silicon Valley and we have a choice now in 2023 to hire somebody from Stanford whether it's public relations or coding or Texas A&M

Georgia Tech we will take them any day and I say are you serious he said yes because two things they're better trained and the first thing they do not do is go to our HR department and complain you you're students they're not as competitive they the your faculty to accommodate the new student body had to either water down the courses inflate the grades but accommodate the fact that they are letting in students by their own their own admission did not fit the requirements that they used to preach to us were absolutely necessary or as he

put it in 1998 these guys would come up to us and say you know what it's a very rare person that can can get in sford University and once they get in here we give them the toughest classes and when we go out to they go out there these guys are brilliant they're trained and so then he says to me well if that was true and now they admit that they've thrown out the SAT then they're admitting they're letting people in that can't do the curriculum on the books that they said was necessary to to

ensure their Prestige so why would we trust them anymore and in fact when we and that's what's happening to Harvard yet 80% of the grades that were A's so I think what you're saying is not only is the demographic shrinking there's a fewer students but the costs are going up above the rate of inflation the students are not getting any means to pay back the loans and the the universities are no longer mccratic and that's even going into Medical School law school business school and so a lot of people are saying I want my child

to go get skills I want him to go to a trade school I want to go to Community College and I the elite now believe it or not I get a call twice a week Victor I not going to send my kid to Harvard Yale where I win or Stanford is it Hillsdale is it Pepperdine is it St Thomas aquinus where do I send my child or do I send him to University of Oklahoma Oklahoma State and so I'm very confident that there is a revolutionary movement in education to get rid of this toxic I

have a bunch of letters after my name therefore I'm educated therefore I can I can I'm an expert and what the universities have done is really is almost criminal to put us the taxpayers on a a $1.7 trillion exposure so they can raise their rates of INF uh tuition above the rate of inflation and they're not accountable and their students are getting they're not competitive compared to other other universities so such I think that's we've that's going not that's not sustainable and what you're talking about is very important because that's kind of what you're you're

kind of leading that people are going to look toward the the the real thing is when a person says I'm very proud that I'm a master electrician and doesn't have to say I have a ba and I think we're getting close to that because now they can say well I didn't go to that lunatic place and I didn't go to that water down school I went out and really learned a valuable thing that that was mraic to acquire that skill and I think happing MUSC muscular trade yeah well we're in we're in such violent agreement

on that it's almost embarrassing I um you know I only brought it up because I read something the other day that I that I verified that I thought encapsulated it pretty well which was the average GPA at Harvard in 1955 was 2.56 this year it was 3.98 I don't I mean if we're going to talk about inflation it it it certain certainly does leap frog from the economic definition into the credentialing it does it does that's happening that that I mean it's it's happening and it's not happening in trade schools because you can't grade on

a curve for the electrician or for the welder you can't and if you try I mean isn't it funny none of the protests seem to be happening at trade schools none of the flag burnings seem to be happen happening at trade schools no Dean from a trade school has been summoned to Congress or somehow called out in a some plagiarism Scandal I think that you know that's that's part of your article too you know because if that implicit question is you know how much will we take you know how how much will we take on

faith how much will we accept um you know at some point it goes this way people are going to look at those diplom on the walls and they're not going to see a diploma they're just going to see a receipt and that's going to be a recruiting problem for the big boys it it's starting already and uh it's it couldn't come at a better time and a lot of people I know a person who's got four children I you would call her in the upper upper 1% and she is a graduate of Stanford her whole

family went there and she just said to me there's not a chance in hell one of my kids are going to go to that University because they're going to come home at Thanksgiving I'm not going to recognize them and they're not going to be very well educated and they're going to be have the worst of both worlds are going to come back arrogant and incompetent and I don't want to subsidize that experiment and we'll see if they correct in time all of these Universe they know when you talk to them they know exactly what's going

on they're worried about it and the question to quote Livia is is the medicine for them worse than the disease and there one guy said we know what we have to do but we that would mean a lot of guys are going to get fired and I don't want to be the one to get fired because we know what everybody knows what's going to be do it's kind of like you got to baell the cat if you're a mouse but I don't want to put the the Bell around the cat's neck and so it's uh

I it's a very strange time and uh just to finish when you say how long are they going to take it it's going to be a transition point from passive resistance or dropping out or not participating which we're watching now you know I don't people are leaving the blue States and droves they don't go to San Francisco like they used to except that versus active resistance are they going to go out to vote are they going to register their friends are they going to become politically active are they going to do what the left does

and boycott a particular obscene ad or they find disturbing are they going to you know really push back in a political sense and they're starting to but they haven't yet realized that they have a lot of numbers and they're very strong they don't even know their own strength yet but uh we'll see yeah well then that's probably a good place to land the plane I mean I I should just ask you briefly about about Hope in general possibly because I'm almost finished the end of everything and Chuck if you haven't read this thing oh my

God I mean thieves Carthage Constantinople the unpronouncable capital of the Aztec empire not just beaten not just subjugated gone dude gone wiped out gone and and Victor walks us through the ancient world in a way that rhymes perfectly with the quote I read from you earlier that ends with nothing really changing is and when you think about what happened to those cities and those civilizations and when you look at China when you look at Russia and Putin and pin and so forth and so on I don't want to go down this whole rabbit hole but

but I think that's on people's minds too and wonder I mean we wonder if nothing ever changes as a historian you know I think I know what's keeping you up at night but I don't know where you might assign a measure of optimism as we look forward well I'm very optimistic in one sense is that uh I'm just always amazed how many smart people I meet I don't mean as assessed by intellectual vocabulary or I'm talking about just common sense hardworking all different races ethnic backgrounds how and how under appre appre they are people don't

understand what's it's going on I just got back from Europe and you know when I watch people in Europe build and versus here even at this period of decline it just it's it's what's wrong with the United States is a supervisory class but not the people who actually goes up I I have a barn right out here and it was built by my great great grandmother with eucalyptus poles they couldn't afford Lumber and it was finally after after 150 years starting to go so I called up a roofing friend and he said well you have

only two scissor trusses we need 10 we've got to reinforce the walls and within five days he had a crew up one guy had 70 lbs of shingles on his back tiptoeing on the crest of that roof other guys were hanging from the ceiling 40 feet above a cement slab with a little little safety holster working on the trusses they did the entire job in six days it was just like they were brain surgeons and so when I see that and there and the guy who one of the contractors was he had only been he

was a legal uh citizen but he' only been here 20 years he had a very thick and he was talking some got in Spanish they were all legal but it was amazing I just asked him how did you do this and how's business and he said said I've got 3 months back ordered my two kids are going to engineering school I bought a new home and what he was telling me is that I can do stuff that nobody else in this country can do I love this country I'm very successful I love it I like

these people and there was none of what I hear on the coast it was none I'm tired this is unfair this is not nice it was Mr Hansen we'll get this done by tomorrow night if you don't want it tomorrow night then I'm going to give you a discount and I said well that guy is way up there what if he he's never slipped he's done this for five years this is nothing and that racho upbeat and I hear that all the time and so I'm very optimistic I the problem is not with the middle

and upper middle classes it's with the credential Elite and they I'm not confident about them but I think we have to hold them to account in the media and the university especially but so I I think we'll see what happens in November and you know the Republicans have a lot of problems too but we'll see it's not so much about Trump or Harris it's more or less at this after 233 years we're not going to call the country a failure and it's races systematically unfair it's exploitive and we're going to we're going to terrify we're

not going to do that sorry if you don't like it that's the way it's going to be we're going to vote and we're going to we're not perfect but we don't have to be perfect to be good and we're better than the alternative and for that that's good enough and we're going to press on that's the attitude and I think it'll Prevail thank you for that um finally what did they call in the ancient world the guy that stood behind the emperor and whispered in his ear you know you are but a man and so

forth sick Transit Gloria he would yeah at the annual well when they conquered a people they had what they call a Triumph and it didn't really have the pejorative name they got the conquered guy and they put him in Chains versing goric or somebody like that and they had all the wealth and then they had the legions and then the emperor would come out and right along him his attendant usually a slave would whisper into him sick Transit glor a sick Transit Glory so goes Glory meaning this is all transitory and you better remember who

you are and so goes okay so finally the title of all these episodes is almost always a quote from the guest and I know if I talked to you long enough I'd get what I wanted so we're going to call this one so goes glory and I'm going to say in a perfect world whoever wins uh we'd be a better country if Victor Davis Hansen were whispering to our leader in the White House and perhaps imparting a history lesson or two along the way uh as for the rest of you the end of everything is

excellent the case for Trump is back in paperback with 20,000 new words also excellent the blade of Perseus is a website I encourage you to go there and read all about the lab rats maybe you see yourself as one maybe you don't but either way you should share that story and um drink from The Well of Mr Hansen and you shall be restored thank you for your time thank you Mike and thank you Chuck if you like what you heard won't you please well I hate to and I hate to pleas but please pretty freaking

please please please subcribe [Music]