← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: The Decline of Religiosity is More Worrisome Than the Rise of Artificial Intelligence
01:04:11
In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler continue their Sour 16 competition with growing irreligiosity squaring off against artificial intelligence. Which does Hanson feel is more worrisome?
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- [00:00]
Jack Fowler
Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift. Well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now.
- [00:13]
Victor Davis Hansen
You call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose?
- [00:16]
Jack Fowler
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time.
- [00:20]
Victor Davis Hansen
50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 month or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy see terms. I am very worried about secularism, atheism. If you don't believe in any transcendence, then it affects your humanism. That says that you're only here now. There's no mystery anymore. I mean, there's no, you don't know why you're here. Even the pagans believed that there had to be some transcendence. It's imprinted on our brain and for people to say there's nothing, it's just a nihilistic creed in my view. I think it's very important that you have a Judeo Christian dominant tradition with exceptions that you are tolerant of Buddhists and all, you know, Muslims and other people without diluting the main tradition that affected the founders. I think Christianity's done a wonderful thing and it's the country will not survive without it.
- [01:37]
Jack Fowler
Well, hello ladies and hello, gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. I'm Jack Fowler, I'm the host. You are here to listen to the wisdom of Victor Davis Hansen who is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. And, and he's also a senior contributor at the Daily Signal and he's a man with his own website, the blade of Perseus. Victorhansen.com Check it out and do subscribe. It's only 65 bucks a year, folks. We are recording on Tuesday, December 23rd for this special episode. This is one of four special episodes. It's actually the second of the four that are looking at the sour 16, the issues that keep you awake at night. And we're going to find out, we're going to pit them against each other and find out which one actually deserves status as the worst issue out there. Victor and I recorded one episode with eight and now this episode today, we'll do the next eight. By the way, Victor, as I said, it's December 23rd and somebody told me this is the day of Festivus, which I don't know that you're a fan. You're familiar with Festivus.
- [02:50]
Victor Davis Hansen
I didn't want to mention it to you, Jack, because. How can I say this as a classical scholar? I am a very devout person and I believe in the sanctity and the redemption as a strong Christian. But I. Yes, I'm a sinner in the sense that I don't go to church every Sunday, but I did teach the New Testament. I read every word in Greek.
- [03:08]
Jack Fowler
Gospel of John, right?
- [03:10]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. No, John, Mark, Matthew, Lou, Revel. All of them, yes. And some of them are. Luke is difficult, more difficult than John is easy. But anyway, Acts and letters are not easy. And revelation is bizarre in Greek. But anyway, my point is, I believe in all. And I said at a moment of existential identity, as I think I told you, when I was in Libya, and they came to me and said, at the red Crescent Clinic, Mr. Hansen, you have a ruptured appendix for maybe two hours. We have no surgeon, we have no anesthesia, we have no antibiotics, we don't use painkillers in Libya. Your country boycotted us and torments Mr. Gaddafi. And anyway, if you were going to be operated on, you needed a AIDS test. And I said, I gave a prayer. And all of a sudden. I'm not kidding you, Jack. Three hours later, I had 105 temperature. I was in shock. Five parent tonight, five. Three hours later, an AIDS tester just came in at 4 in the morning and gave me an AIDS test and cleared me. An hour later, a guy walked in the door in pajamas, smoking a cigarette and they had put out Christopher Hitchens. I had written my son and said, call somebody. Billy had cell service. I'm very ill. And he looked at my desk and saw a number. He didn't know whose it was. It was Christopher Hitchens. Christopher Hitchens called somebody in washing. Somebody in Washington called. There was no embassy, but they called someone. And that someone called the main hospital in Libya, which I couldn't get in. And that person said there was an Egyptian doctor that was a surgeon somewhere in Libya. They found him. He showed up at 4:30 in the morning smoking a cigarette in pajamas. He was a wonderful guy. He said he'd never taken on a rupture, but did I care? No. Then he put me on a wood table and the Pakistani nurse interpreted and she said to me, you need to pray to Muhammad and you can convert and you will live. And I said, I have all my trust in Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, and the power of Christianity for even a sinner like me. And she said, I can remember it as if it was in. Carved in stone. Okay. He was a prophet too. And then they gave me an ether thing and somebody yelled at the person to put his match out because they had a tank of ether with a long tube coming into my hospital. I woke up three times over the two hour surgery. I saw during the surgery. Yes, yes, I. Yeah. And they just go, they started yelling, they're just two. They're just the anesthesiologist with the tank and the surgeon, no nurse, she was just interpreting. And when I got. I was out and they put a. They put that thing over. And as soon as they put that thing over, I said, I remember this at 6 when they took out my tonsils, that awful smell of ether. And then I woke up in a pitch black room and I thought I was dead. In fact, I thought I was in hell. And all of a sudden somebody started shaking me and it was the doctor. And he said, you had a ruptured appendix and it's gangrenous. It was there for two days and it's down. I don't know how many inches. It was 10, but I cut it out. I cut your colon out and I cut enough that I could stretch it so you don't have to have a bag. He said this in broken English and then he picked up a huge plastic jar and he said, there it is. And there was this black appendix with six little cysts on it. He said those were each time this leaked all during the last year or two and you were sick and here had creeped down. It was going down so many millimeters an hour. And I got an inch beyond it and there's no gangrene. And I said, so I'm home free. Well, no, no, no, no. We don't have antibiotics because your, your government cut us off. And I said, he said, you have perientinitis, but it'll get better, but you still have it in the. And he said, we didn't have any suction, so we just took a silver tray. Silver. And we washed everything. And he had the tray with all this crap in it. You know what it was in there? Grape seeds, sunflower seed bits. It was like a garbage.
- [07:43]
Jack Fowler
Oh, really?
- [07:44]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. So then anyway, to get to the quick, I thought, well, I'm dead. And then all of a sudden a doctor came in an hour later and he said, I have been contacted. I'm a Libyan American. I'm setting up an MRI system and brain scanner for Mr. Gaddafi, he's calling all Libyan. That was during his reform 2006. He says, I'm calling all Libyan doctors in the United States to come back and help the country. And guess what, Mr. Hansen, I have a suitcase for you. He opened it up and he gave me Cipro, Augmentin and Flagyl. He said, you got to take all three. And six hours later the fever broke. And then I was in there, this really bad clinic. And then guess who showed up. The envoy. And he was the person who was killed? Pretty sure, yeah. Chris Stevens. Yeah. He came, he said, I got a place for you in the Malta owned hotel and we're going to put you in this room. I was there for a day and then the company that had hired me to lecture on the mosaics, the Roman mosaics, which were quite fabulous, but I had a temperature when I was doing it. Anyway, they said, you've got to fly, get out of here. That you got to get to a western country. So I flew to London. I still had an open wound and I hit it with a big patch and a heavy coat so I could fly. And the doctor, the Libyan doctor knew the Libyan pilot, so he flew me on that commercial. So they let me on and I got to Heathrow somehow. I got a taxi, I checked into a hotel and there was a Polish house cleaner. And I said, I will pay you $100 if you will bring me food for one day. And she did. And then the next day I said, I'm going to fly to San Francisco tomorrow. If you wake me up at 3 in the morning. She was wonderful. I gave her $200 and I flew to SFO. And I don't want to be. I have to be very careful about. The end of the story was I had my little appendix with me and the colon, and this doctor looked at it. I won't mention where he was or who he was. And he said, this is not. Those are not cysts. You have stage four colon cancer. Those big balls are a cancer that is. Yes. That have exited the. I said, no, no, It's a ruptured, black destroyed appendix attached to. It's attached to the colon here. And it was all in Arabic. I can't read that. So we're going to have to buy. I said, are you going to. I want to keep it. I don't want to have it biopsied. I want to have it. No, no. We're going to grind it up and I'm going to tell you. And then this is what gets me about modern Medicine. So what did I do? I called up the lawyer and said, I'm going to die. I have stage four colon cancer. And they took out my appendix and they found it. I need to have a trust. So I made a trust. And then I kept. They didn't call me, and then I kept calling and calling. Did you get the pathology? Did you get the. Seven days later, I finally got a hold of the doctor's assistant, and he said, I'll check. And he said, why are you calling? Three days ago, we told you it was a serial cyst appendix that had perforated four or five times with characteristic cyst attached to it, plus 8 to 10 inches of a gangrenous colon that was resected, and it's all benign. I said, why didn't you tell me that it's been a week. I thought I was dead. He said, well, you never ask. I said, I've called all the time. And then finally that particular person said, you're taking too many antibiotics. Had been about a week. I felt great. They're too strong together. And I stopped Flagyl and Cipros and I got peritonized for the next three weeks. I didn't feel well for another six months. So my point was, if you've got a ruptured appendix, go to Libya.
- [12:08]
Jack Fowler
Wasn't Donald Rumsfeld somehow involved in this?
- [12:12]
Victor Davis Hansen
Somehow? Well, Christopher. I was a good friend of Christopher. He said that he called somebody and talked, and Donald Rumsfeld, he said to Donald Rumsfeld, there's only two people stupid enough still to support the stupid war in Iraq, and I'm one of them. And Victor's even stupider. But if you don't. If you don't call an envoy or someone, he's not going to be around. Yeah.
- [12:34]
Jack Fowler
Well, folks, this all began with a mention of Festivus and I don't know that. Strangely connect.
- [12:42]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, you can. You can find it in the 2006 City Journal. My Beautiful Libyan vacation.
- [12:47]
Jack Fowler
Okay, well, we're going to talk about our. Our face off of eight issues. We have four contests and of things that keep you awake at night, which maybe next time we do this. Victor, A diseased pancreas, or whatever you have here. And your gallbladder would be one of them. But anyway, we'll get to these when we come back from our first important message. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I have to add, Victor, that what you. The story you told had to do. You were on a cruise, right? And nothing bad happened to you on a National Review cruise ever?
- [13:27]
Victor Davis Hansen
Wait a minute.
- [13:27]
Jack Fowler
No, wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't get into Roman get. And drinking. I don't.
- [13:32]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, no. I like Roman Glenn. I never speak. He's the illustrator of your. I like him.
- [13:38]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [13:38]
Victor Davis Hansen
I just had a. I will mention one or two prominent never Trumpers that. That were in a period of mourning, and they took it out on me.
- [13:49]
Jack Fowler
This is the night.
- [13:49]
Victor Davis Hansen
But I'm not a victim.
- [13:51]
Jack Fowler
No, you're not. This is 2016. After the election. Yes. Okay. Was David Frenchman.
- [13:59]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes.
- [14:00]
Jack Fowler
Poor Davey. Poor Davey.
- [14:03]
Victor Davis Hansen
Oh, wow.
- [14:04]
Jack Fowler
Okay.
- [14:04]
Victor Davis Hansen
He looked at me like I was infected or something.
- [14:08]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [14:09]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah.
- [14:09]
Jack Fowler
Well, he's.
- [14:10]
Victor Davis Hansen
What.
- [14:10]
Jack Fowler
What a piece of work. All right, Victor, we're gonna.
- [14:13]
Victor Davis Hansen
We're gonna.
- [14:13]
Jack Fowler
We have eight issues, and we're gonna take two at a time against each other, and they're gonna proceed on to the next round. This is the sour 16. They'll proceed on to the hate 8. So here's the first two issues we want to get your take on. Victor, which of these two is the worst issue that keeps you awake at night? The educational free fall in America versus Europe's collapse seeming collapse pending collapse to Islam. To Islam. Which worries you more, the ignorance and stupidity of America's students or Europe's coming collapse to Islam?
- [14:54]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, that's a hard one because I'm a very patriotic American. So it could be answered in as much as I love the Western tradition, I love Europe. My. My energies are directed toward our country. And I taught for 21 years at a California State University campus. And When I started Jack in 1984, I taught a course called Introduction to the Humanities. And I had nine readings. And it started out with Homer's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey, a play. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Euripides, Bacchae, Aeschylus, Oresteia, selections from Thucydides and Herodotus. And I finished with this was the ancient part of the Humana, first semester, and I entered and I ended with Plato's apology in Crito might have had Aristotle. When I finished 21 years later, that same course had two readings, Homer and Sophocles. In other words, I could no longer ask students to read that material. And I started with 30 students in the class, and at the end, in 2004, I had 58. And I would say all of them could not read those things. So I would. I was curious about this. I never. I always try it, you know, to be empirical rather than just get, you know, angry or something. So I would Call one of them. And he said, Dr. Hansen, I can't do your class. I got a drop. Can you please get me out without an F? I can't keep up with the reading. I said, I don't think you're studying, but don't believe me, come into my office. So he came in and I gave him the Odyssey. And I said, can you read? And I said, the Iliad, I think it was. And the. For, you know, sing maiden, the wrath of Achilles. He said, what does wrath mean? He said, what does sing mean? And I said, it means to sing a song. It's a. It's a active verb. What's an active mean? What's a verb mean? And then the next, you know, then I would go down. I said, could you read this out loud? And I'm going to time you to see how long it takes you to read. Well, it took him 10 minutes to read the whole one page. So I said, well, we'll say half five minutes. It will take you to read this short pages of, you know, hexameter. Translated by Richard Richmond Lattimore. And I said, if you. So I said, you know what? You're absolutely right. It would take you a week to read the Odyssey and you can't do it. So I let him out. And then I decided that I looked at the administrative cast. 21 years, it was three times the size. And I was getting directives all the time. This person is on the football team, this person. And I would call and I said, he's getting an F. And they said, well, he wasn't supposed to take your class, so he didn't belong there in the first place. So I want you to give him now. Okay? And then I would get from the. What we called EOP or equal opportunity. Jose Mendez or Jack Smith is the first in his family to go to college. You know, if you give him an F, you're denying him, then he won't be eligible. And then it was the weirdest thing in the world. I just walked in, I walked 2004, walked to the PERS office right in the middle. And I just said, I quit. I said, you quit? I said, I'm retiring. And they said, you're crazy. You'll have 21 years and you are 51, 52 years old. You're going to get a terrible retirement at 60. I said, I don't care. I can't take it anymore. I've done. I built this class. Your people are letting in people and they can't read. They can't Write their ideologies. I can't do it anymore. And so then I didn't know what I was going to do. John Racing had offered me a job at Hoover but he needed the funding. So I called him and said, well I'm ready to go to Hoover. He said, you did what Victor? And then he said I'm going to help you come here but it's going to take me a couple of years to get pool funding.
- [19:13]
Jack Fowler
So you track the ignorance 21 years from 10 to 2 and not even being able to read. And that was 20 something years ago, correct?
- [19:22]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah.
- [19:23]
Jack Fowler
That you retired.
- [19:24]
Victor Davis Hansen
So they can't read. They can't read.
- [19:27]
Jack Fowler
Imagine how it's degraded in the 20 plus years since you.
- [19:30]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, I'll put it this way. Stanford University has introductory math classes and I had a very, I have interns and I have know a lot of students and I went out to dinner with a lot of students and one student just said to me he wasn't going to complain what's happened because he takes the math class that's required and he just sleeps because he said I can, I did this in high school. It's a joke. I said you don't have to do any. No I don't. Just I said well. He said well if you don't. If you had four years and you didn't have the SAT required and you let in all of these people and you decided that you didn't want white males and you wanted them at 9% and you let in people for other reasons. That's the beginning, isn't it? Then the next step is what do you do with people who don't fit your curricula that you advertise all over the world? That was the toughest in the world and if you graduated from this university and you could do this, then you were hot prospect. But if you can't do your curricula with the students you have, then you either have to lower the curricula standards and the 80, 70, 80% of people were getting A's or you have to cut back the load like I did at Cal State or you have to create new classes. I think that may be changing but four years these elite universities didn't have an SAT requirement and they didn't, more importantly Jack, they didn't have a comparative analysis of gpa. So I went to Selma High School and got a 3.9. I had one two B's in four years and I went to UC Santa Cruz which was really hard to get in. It was harder than Stanford because it was an experimental. Everybody thought that was neat. And I was in a class with students that got 800 on the SAT and they had maybe 3.5 and I had 3.99 and they were so much better educated than I was. So the point is that if you say you got a 4.0 from Selma High School and somebody has a 3.5 or 3.2 from Pebble beach or something, they're not the same or a prep school. And yet when you let in people into Stanford, Yale, because they say they have 4.0 without an SAT and that quality of a high school is not nearly as demanding, then you're going to have a lot of students. It doesn't have anything to do with race or it just means that you said you betrayed your own brand. You said to everybody that we are merocratic. We're Yale, we're Harvard, we're Stanford, we turn out the top students in the world and we take 3% of the applicants and if you're one of us, you're going to be branded with this degree and you can do anything. And that was not true. They just, they use the brand but they didn't have a quality of students or the faculty who was left wing kept mum about it and changed the grading and changed the course content. And so as I said, I talked to a lot of people in Silicon Valley for fundraising and things and one guy just openly said if I have to hire somebody in Silicon Valley, I prefer for most part not always, but you know, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, Texas A and M because they have not done what Stanford and other countries. I think these elite colleges are in big trouble because you saw that with Brown. How in the administration is so incompetent and the, the, the faculty is so ideological and the students are admitted on non merocratic criteria and they have anti Semitism in their veins that it's not going to, I think in five years you say, oh, I went to Yale, we know what Yale's like. You know, that's what the attitude's going to be. And they're going to start saying I went to the University of Austin, I went to Hillsdale College, I went to Thomas Aquinas, I went to Pepperdine, I went to Grove City. That's going to be a lot more important. Amen.
- [23:29]
Jack Fowler
So I'm going to say Victor, you pick the education free force.
- [23:32]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, I'm worrisome, I'm very worried about it. Well, you're, that's, I'll say one Thing else. If you look at the Mycenaean period. Jack, this is very interesting. It's not off topic. Where did Greek mythology originate from? Well, the Mycenaeans, that was that monumental civilization from 1600 Mycenaean 3b to 1200 BC. And then it collapsed. We don't know why it collapsed. People say climate change, that was not it. The sea peoples, maybe, maybe not. Systems collapsed. But they did have a right written script, linear B. And you've seen the pictures of Mycenae and the monumental architecture. It collapsed. The population declined by 90%. We know that from archaeological finds, writing was lost. So the period from 1100 to 800 is called the Dark Ages. It was not even much farming, it was nomadic.
- [24:25]
Jack Fowler
Excuse me. It was not from plague, not from catastrophe.
- [24:28]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, it was either from conquest or had. There's a mythological account of it, and that's the Trojan War. That when they came back in the Trojan War, everybody got killed. Ajax committed suicide, Achilles was killed, Menelaus and Agamemnon was killed by his wife. That may reflect the idea that the Mycenaean lords who actually staged a raid were destroyed somehow. Because what happened was the genesis of myth making is always in a impoverished society that follows a monumental society. So for these 400 years, the first generation would say, well, there was a Mycenaean lord named Achilles and there was a Mycen because their names are on linear B and Ajax. And they went over to Asia Minor and they probably did. And then they lost the ability to write linear B. And then the next generation, the next generation, the next impoverished, nobody can write. So they are an oral culture. And suddenly somebody like Homer, 400 years ago, 400 years after the Mycenaean starts to compose poetry. And all of a sudden the Mycenaean walls are called Cyclopean walls. The Cyclops built them. And when you're walking around Greece and you're a Dark age shepherd and you fall into a Mycenaean Tholos tomb, you think the gods made it. And you hear about the Trojan War, but suddenly it's not a Mycenaean trade war, it's about Helen. The so called seduction and rape of Helen by Paris. So that's what the exaggeration is. And then all of a sudden civilization came back at 800, they got a new Alphabet. The Greek language was re energized, it was literate under the Phoenician and 1600, 1500 city states, the whole thing. And then myth making stops because you have a written language and all of the 12 Olympian gods and all of that from the Dark Ages is then codified. But it's kind of academic. But my point is, I'm afraid we're kind of in that cycle. And the same thing happened with the collapse of the Western Empire in 450 A.D. then you had a 400 year 2000 where oral culture mostly, etc. But what I'm getting at is this. When I go through California and I see the California Aqueduct and I see the California dam system, and when I see some of the most sophisticated overpasses that were built in the 60s and 70s, say when you go into LA on i5 and the Fort, you know, all of these, I say to my. And I see the, the education level. I say to myself, this is a dark age. These people can make fun of that older generation, but they can't build what they did. They don't have a skill. And I look at, I'm, I'm listening right now to trucks going back and forth on high speed rail. $20 billion, not one foot of track laid. These truck drivers are going insane. They go 65. They don't. They're not even like the old truck drivers. So my point is that we still have that Mycenaean elite, but we don't have an educated class to implement and to run the technology. And I think that we're getting to the point where people are going to say, wow, who built Pacific Palisades? Those beautiful homes? There's one there, look at it. It was a beautiful Romanesque home. It's got. Well, we can't do that. And they haven't built. They built one house in a year. And high speed rail, wow, look at the tracks, all the bridges. But how do we do this? We don't know how to build high speed rail. We don't have the skill. People don't know what they're doing. And the same thing with the school. Look at Fresno State, look at San Jose State. Look at these professors on the wall. They were writing these books. Now they're teaching gender studies and race studies. And so I think it's a general decline. And we're going into the Dark Ages and we're getting into a myth. The only difference is the Dark Ages mythologically worship whoever the Mycenaean Greeks were because they saw they could do things. Our generation looks at them and says, yeah, I don't. Empire State Building. Well, the Empire State Building as we learned was a lot better built then, you know, and built in 13 months. Yeah, world Trade, Hoover Dam, Just anybody who's listening just say to yourself, could this generation build the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building and Willow Run factory that made one bomber per hour? I say no. No, no, no, no, no. They don't have a skill. They're too regulatory. They're pure bureaucratic.
- [29:31]
Jack Fowler
Well, we're going to pick up another twosome here. But first, Victor, we're only a few weeks into winter and already brutal colds, huge snowstorms in much of the country, and of course, power outages. Think about this. If the power goes out when it's really cold, do you have a way to keep yourself and your family warm? This is a real problem. Winter power outages can even be life threatening. Like in Texas a few years ago. Folks, remember that horror show? That's why so many Americans are getting a Vesta off grid heater from my Patriot supply. It's a space heater that doesn't use electricity or propane. It runs on something called canned heat, which is an indoor safe fuel. With a Vesta stashed in your closet, you know you can keep warm no matter what. It even doubles as a cook stove. Stove to cook your food on. And that's pretty cool. Except when it's hot, of course. The best part is right now you can get the Vesta and a bunch more preparedness gear as free gifts. When you order the winter survival kit from my Patriot supply, just go to my patriotsupply.com VDH to see everything included. The offer won't last long, so go to mypatriotsupply.com VDH today once more, my patriotsupply.com VDH and we thank the good people from my Patriot supply for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor, we're going to talk one more dust off here before we take a break. And that would be the competition, the worrisome competition between rampant growing irreligiosity versus artificial intelligence. Are you worried about either one of these or which one worries you more? And I just heard you talk about your religiosity on a piece of wood in Libya, but go ahead.
- [31:34]
Victor Davis Hansen
You mean the decline of religious religiosity?
- [31:36]
Jack Fowler
Yes, the decline of religious I'm more worried about.
- [31:40]
Victor Davis Hansen
I know that in the end of everything, I looked at a popular account, as I said, of an AI simulation the Pentagon ran where they programmed self survival into a intercontinental ballistic missile and put it on a computer simulation and it was headed toward our enemy. And then they pushed the kill button and on its own the thing circled back and was going to hit The Pentagon. And they couldn't stop it. In other words, that in the process of giving self preservation prompts, electronic prompts to this algorithms to this AI it went on beyond that and said anybody who tries to blow me up, I'm going to go back and get. So they canceled that. So I am worried about that. But I'll give you another example. I got a pathology report. I couldn't understand anything. Anything. It was the TBGA168Y gene is Contra. Is heterogeneous for this particular adenoma. All this stuff I just typed Grok and I cut and pasted it. You know what I mean? And I could not believe it. I said this has scanned 421 scientific articles. Two minutes later it gave me the most clear succinct explanation of exactly what percentage this. What would happen here that. And I, and I have never used it really before but I've been using it the last month. It's amazing. The only thing I'm worried about is if stupid Victor is so stupid he doesn't even know what's going on. I've been teaching at a certain place and I had noticed that some students were writing beautiful stuff. So just as a, you know, an example, I thought well, I'd like to write a book about a Pamanondas the Great. And I just said could you please write an essay on what were the chief achievements of Pam Ananda's. And it started coming out and I remember it started recognizing. It had the style and prose and syntax of a lot of some of the people that I had included class and my wife taught class. She's a PhD at a community college and she is far more schooled than I am. Said well Victor, you know there, there are programs that can spot that. So that is danger. But I think all in all AI will be valuable if carefully controlled. Not regulated to the point of death but. But monitored. But I am very worried about secularism. Atheism. Atheism, if you don't believe in any transcendence then it affects your humanism. That says that you're only here now. There's no mystery anymore. I mean you don't know why you're here. And the neoplightness of the early church, you know, when the words of Jesus Christ were recorded both orally and later in the ensuing century by the. The four gospels, they needed an architecture for a church. And so they were very learned people for the next 400 years. You know, Jerome, Augustine, etc. So they did look at Neoplatonism and you know in Plato that it's very clear that your soul is immortal and your body is not. And the, the metaphors that Socrates uses are the lyre, what we would call the harp. If the harp is destroyed, does that mean auleng zai? Say you're playing auleng zai on the harp and you destroy the harp. Does the song disappear? No, it only becomes reified when it has a body, an instrument, and in their way, theirs is not a Christian, but it's a transmigration of souls. So you die and then your soul was either dented or ruined by your appetites, and you're given a reincarnated body until you get it right. And then finally you don't have to go through this process of memory, losing memory, who you were, new identity. But the point I'm making is even the pagans believed that there had to be some transcendence. It's imprinted on our brain. And for people to say there's not. It's just a nihilistic creed in my, my view. And. Yeah, well, thank you.
- [36:15]
Jack Fowler
Thank you.
- [36:15]
Victor Davis Hansen
It's very valuable. I don't want to get into what particular creed you are. I'm just saying that the Judeo Christian tradition. And by the way, Jack, you pointed out that we don't. We're very confused in America why we have suddenly substituted the Judeo part, the Old Testament. And it's just.
- [36:36]
Jack Fowler
We talked about that on a recent podcast.
- [36:38]
Victor Davis Hansen
You know, I knew Steve Bannon. I like Steve. Steve Bannon. But he was giving a talk and he just said, we're going to Christianize the country. And I thought, you mean you're going to re. Emphasize the Judeo Christian creed. And he didn't say Judeo Christian tradition, which would include the Old Testament and the contributions of Jewish culture to Christianity or the fact that Jesus was Jewish himself. So I think it's very important that you have a Judeo Christian dominant tradition, with exceptions that you are tolerant of Buddhists and Muslims and other people, without diluting the main tradition that affected the founders. But it's an acceptance.
- [37:27]
Jack Fowler
The founders were blase or not ignorant, but uncaring about, about the Old Testament and Moses and the gang is. It's just a. It's just a lie.
- [37:40]
Victor Davis Hansen
So grandmother was a devout Methodist and took me to church. My parents did not. Were not devout, they were Christian, but they didn't. They had grown up in kind of very rigid religious. Religious environment. So they kind of rebelled, I think, but they were. They made it clear they believed in Christianity to me and they felt that and, but my grandmother would take me and she would give me 20 cents for each poem. I Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray my Lord the soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I played my soul, my Lord the soul. If I should live for other ways, I pray the Lord to guide my ways. 25 cents. 1959.
- [38:23]
Jack Fowler
It's a lot of money. Yeah.
- [38:25]
Victor Davis Hansen
So I remembered them all. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I don't know. I think Christianity's done a wonderful thing and it's a sin. The country will not survive without it. Amen.
- [38:35]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, we're gonna, we have two more dust offs to get your take on and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages. We are back for Victor Davis Hansen is, in his own words, on the Daily Signal. By the way, I got an email the other day from our glorious guru head editor friend Rob Louie, who said The Daily Signals YouTube subscribership has topped 1 million.
- [39:04]
Victor Davis Hansen
Happy.
- [39:05]
Jack Fowler
Much of that has to do with Victor Davis Hansen's podcast and the, and the four times a week you're doing a seven, eight minute video Victor Davis Hansen in a few words. So folks, should, if you're not subscribing, you should.
- [39:19]
Victor Davis Hansen
I had a call, I had a call yesterday from a Stanford affiliated former professor and he said, I'm very disappointed. He was polite, but he was disappointed because you're spouting out facts that are not true about China and data. And I watched you and you're talking so fast and your lips, you're not thinking. And I said, that's not me. I'm sorry. And I, you know, and I remember. So it's, that is amazing that we have a lot of subscribers because there is so many videos out. And all I can tell you is I talked to my friend Devin Nunes at Truth Social, who's a wonderful guy and up on, he says it's just an epidemic now. Trump is out every day. Fake Trump AIs are out every day. Eric Erickson wrote a blast email the other day, this is not me. Megyn Kelly wrote that. That this is not me. That there's a lot of AI out. I don't know what's prompting it. But when you have a million views of VDH and it's not VDH and we're still competing with just the, just the old one, you know, the Victor Hansen podcast. It's amazing because we're competing with 900 past episodes of myself, plus thousands of fake, fake and As I said to the person, did I have a kind of, I don't know, kind of different voice, gravelly voice, because I've had a health problem. And they said, no, you were just, you were firing away. And I said, that's not me.
- [41:03]
Jack Fowler
I do wish the folks that post these things and they post them think Victor's great. He's terrific. Listen to what Victor has to say here. When you tell them, that ain't Victor, would you please delete this? And they don't delete it.
- [41:15]
Victor Davis Hansen
That.
- [41:15]
Jack Fowler
That is a little maddening.
- [41:17]
Victor Davis Hansen
And a lot of it. I would say 50% of it. I would not say what. What I'm saying anyway. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
- [41:24]
Jack Fowler
Well. Well, let's look at two. Some here of one fight. And again, we. These are the. The sour 16. Who. Who are who. Those who quote, unquote, win will go to the hate. Hate the aging population of America and I guess the world and widespread euthanasia, which is associated with that. That's one thing. That versus the emasculation of the American man, the emasculated American man versus an aging population. What worries you more, Victor?
- [42:07]
Victor Davis Hansen
That's hard because I'm aging all the time and I can feel it.
- [42:12]
Jack Fowler
As opposed to everybody else.
- [42:15]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, I'm 72. Of course I've had this health problem, but I used to At 70, chainsaw things and do it. Maybe I will when I get better. But I've really felt it and I feel emasculated. And it's like age. And I, you know, I've read a lot about what the Greeks say Solon says about old age. And you know, the Greeks said it was decrepit. It's not pretty. It's ugly. It's terrible. Da, da, da. So I hope to get better and then I'll enjoy it more. But right now I'm not enjoying it.
- [42:52]
Jack Fowler
But let me just be clear about it. Masculine. We're talking about the attack on young men, you know.
- [42:58]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, I'm talking about, yeah, the old age. But I was trying to say it is emasculating. But we're talking about something different. And I am more worried about the latter because you can. I just went to a longevity center. Just. They're doing things that you cannot believe to keep people youth. And people are getting older and older and they're more active and they can cure diseases that killed you a few years ago. And it's going to increase exponentially. Exponentially. But this thing about young men is it's so multifaceted. It's there's about eight components to it. Very quickly, globalization basically said to the two coast. If you have particular skills that are international nationalized, if you're in the media, if you're in academia, if you're a lawyer, if you're investor, if you're a Wall street person, if you're an NGO, then you have 7 billion people as a market. But if you're muscular and you're in, I don't know, Dayton and you assemble, you can be outsourced or offshore. And we did. And then we made a vocabulary to post facto justice. You're a clinger, you're garbage, you're deplorable, you're irredeemable, you're dregs. So that was one thing that hurt young people. There were not jobs when I was graduated. Out of 244 students, Jack five of us went away to college, I think five or six, and they thought we were stupid. All my kids, friends that were 18, they went to the Fruehauf trailer in 1971 and they started out at six bucks and hours welders. Or they went to Del Monte Fruit the cannery, or they went to Calcan cannery, or they went to upright Harvester and they were getting assembly manufacturing jobs that were paying more than assistant professor. They really were. That's gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. So there weren't. That generation doesn't have the muscular. It's starting to come back. But that's one thing. Globalization really hurt it. The other thing was DEI, and that was doubly worse, as Mr. Savage wrote in his compact article, because it was inflicted mostly by white males on other white male. White males of my generation. But I must say it started against my generation, as I've said a lot. I had a PhD at 25 and I was told I could not get a job. And I didn't for five years. I farmed. I was unemployable. But I had a book coming out and everything, so. But my point is, we took a whole generation of young people and we didn't hire them because of their race. And then we said that they were oppressors and victimizers and they had all of. They had all these advantages and people like Jasmine Crockett and Oprah and Joy Reid, they had all they had been suffered, they suffered. And somebody in East Palestine, Ohio was. He was a top dog. That was just an absolute lie. So we also demonized the young up and coming white class. And then we didn't give them very good education. We said that we're going to do isms and ologies, Gender studies, leisure studies, peace studies, race studies, laza studies, black studies, Asian studies, environmental studies. No. Philosophy, art, literature, calculus. Not to the same degree. So they're not educated and they have a $1.7 trillion in debt. And then we did something else that is very controversial. We redefined sexuality. So we had this schizophrenic idea that our popular culture sensationalized nudity. The Kardashians, influencers who go on social media and they're almost buck naked and then charge you to look at them. Or you go into a university campus and you see young coeds with cutoffs in the summer in California that are below their navel and a top that starts right at their breastbone. And then. So the male then sees that then they're superimposed on that is you don't have to court, you don't have to pay for it. Women's lib said, you're absolutely equal. So if you want to have sex, you don't have to wait for marriage. You don't have to have a permanent relationship. You don't have to have anything that transcends the sexual act itself. Love you just. She's an independent woman. She's going to make more than you are. She pays the tab and she takes her. She defines her own sexuality. Okay. The male said, this is great. I can't get a job, but I'm in my mom's basement, but I don't have any money to date. I can't buy a car, but I can go over and meet Judy or Jane and have sex without any ramifications. It's a male's dream. And then they added a third component to that. And by the way, if that hookup doesn't work out, well, meaning psychologically and historically through the ages that women are more apt to consider sexual coitus as meaningful than, you know, cad men. If she wakes up the next morning and you split and she calls you and you say, I don't want to talk. I'm dating somebody else. She goes to her sexual harassmentor or the women's studies and they said, you don't know it, but you were taken advantage of. You. Did you give consent for each step of that act? No, he didn't. Did you. Would you have had sex if he didn't give you a beer? No, I wouldn't. And then you get. And then the male's reaction is, I'm not get. I'm not dating. It's too dangerous. I'm going to go to porn and I'm going to go to that on my computer. So it is a toxic brew. The young male today, they don't have the educational skills. The society is affluent and leisure enough. They can stay with prolonged adolescence through their parents income and health and house, they can't buy a house. They have debt. They didn't get a good education. And the whole women, women, men matrix of the ages is warped beyond ability. I'm worried about it. It's really terrible.
- [49:39]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, they're all worrisome issues. But this one is more so than.
- [49:43]
Victor Davis Hansen
The but that said very quickly, every time I go to Hillsdale College or Thomas Aquinas or Pepperdine and or when I went to, I went out once or twice to Charlie Kirk's, you know, and I see young people, I do get, I do get encouraged. There is a new, don't you feel it a new traditionalism that's of women who say, you know what, I have my career and everything, but I want to get married and have children and.
- [50:11]
Jack Fowler
Be a good there's clearly something is percolating out there and that's, that's terrific. And we have to I think as we've both admitted Christians embrace, be not afraid to some extent. But the point of this exercise is things we are, I think we're legitimately afraid of, worried about. All right, Victor, we have one more dust up to come and we'll do that when we have we come back from these final important messages.
- [50:40]
Victor Davis Hansen
And we.
- [50:40]
Jack Fowler
Are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, talking on December 23rd for an episode that will be up on January 8th and by which time Victor will, I'm certain, will be easily recovering from whatever grueling things he will go through in the next few days. Victor, let's have this final competition of the sour 16 and that is you mentioned just before the I put down here the workforce, the permanent basement workforce versus the ruin of cities. And by the permanent basement workforce I mean these able bodied young men and or women who have just remove themselves from the labor market if we can use that as the gauge and the guide. And they have I don't know how the hell they get by long term other than mommy and daddy. And this is a growing and seemingly ossifying thing in our culture versus the ruin of our cities. And so many cities in America have just turned into we won't use the word Donald Trump uses for Haiti or other countries, but my gosh, it's a horror show of San Francisco and Detroit and Chicago and St. Louis and you just keep naming them. Anyway.
- [52:08]
Victor Davis Hansen
What worries you more, Victor? It's the cities I know that young people are lost. And the basement. I can remember my father. We would come home on Friday afternoon, work on the field, in the field, and then we would go to play football on Friday nights. We get done in football practice. We were exhausted. We'd get home at 11:30 and then we would sit. We'd get up in the morning and say six o'. Clock. We'd be sitting around breakfast and he'd say, this isn't an old boys. This is not an old man's club. You think this is a rest home? It's Saturday, you guys. And I said we didn't have a day off. We either had to work after school or do homework or play at Prior. I don't care. There's walnuts to be picked up. There's spring toothing to do, there's disking to do. You go down there and you check in with your grandfather. And then Sunday was project day. Oh, we're going to build a fence. We're going to lay cement and make a sidewalk. We're going to lay bricks, prove the house you guys are going to do, shingle the garage. It was that every. And you know, and I finally would say to my dad, you're just making work for me. And he'd say, it's ennobling, Victor. And you know what he did very quickly? He was a staff sergeant in the US Army Air Force Central Fire Control Gunner B29. So on Sundays he had this little list and it says, orders from staff sergeant. And this is. We're talking 20 years. Just 20 years. So he was 20, 21. He was 41. And he said, orders from Staff Sergeant William F. Hansen, Orders of the day. And it would say, private Nels Hansen. That was my. Oh, he was corporal. Corporal Nels Hansen, you are now instructed to go into the bathroom with a toothbrush and bleach and scrub the grout.
- [54:04]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [54:05]
Victor Davis Hansen
First Class Private Alfred Hansen, that was my twin. You were to get pruning chairs and start with the hedge. Private First Class Victor Hansen, you are to go up and clean all the gutters. All personnel shall repute to general headquarters in two hours for further instruction. And then he had the second. And then we'd say, well, you're going to give us 15 minutes. And he'd always say, well, it's not like I asked you to fly 1600 miles at 30,000ft and fight. You know Japanese Kates and Oscars all the way. So don't. I'm not too sympathetic you guys. So that was kind of good. But yeah, that, that is a problem. But the cities are eroding and it's not just the big ones. It's things like Fresno and Stockton and Merced and Modesto. The downtowns are gone.
- [55:00]
Jack Fowler
San Francisco leadership is so corrupt in most so many. There's many so, so much.
- [55:04]
Victor Davis Hansen
It's all of them. It's DEI leadership and basically they loot. The California is going to be worse than Minnesota. I think there's going to be a hundred billion dollars in unemployment, fraud and homeless fraud and all these other projects that have failed. Yeah, they can't do anything. And I can't understand how Newsom's going to run. I mean Pacific Palisades a mess. The battery factory blew up. The solar plant is dismantled.
- [55:35]
Jack Fowler
The Chevron's moving out of the state. Did I just read that?
- [55:39]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. So is Valero. Yeah. We're going to lose 3 or 400,000 barrels of oil a day and refinery the gas. UC Davis said it'll be up to $8. I was in Atherton Palo Alto and it was 650 on Junipio Serra Drive. It's going to be up to $9 in the bay Area and the power bills. A quarter of people can't afford it. So they've destroyed California. Gavin Newsom should not be running for president. He should say I get down on his knees and say I pray to God and I'm a sinner and I have destroyed this state and I've made life miserable for people. They can't afford gas, they can't afford electricity, they can't afford natural gas that their truck drivers are killing them on the roads that I gave licenses to and I'm giving reparations and healthcare to illegal aliens and I hate the middle class. That's what he did. No water projects. Water goes out to the ocean. No rebuilding, nothing. And everybody leaves. And he says good riddance. We're for diversity. So yeah, I mean the whole blue model again the locus clock is classicist is Joel Kotkin and he writes every week he gives another new data point about this many people are leaving from blue states. This is the aggregate debt burden of Minnesota, California. This is the crime statistics. These big blue cities or blue cities within red states, they have terrible crime, they have corrupt Soros. Prosecuting attorneys, the mayor and city council are all di and they all have race based or gender agendas. Corporations and businesses find Too much overhead because of theft and petty crime. They want to get out. It's not safe. Their infrastructure is crumbling. Their debt obligations for pension is unsustainable, sustainable. Meanwhile, the old confederacy, which we never believed. Florida, Texas, Georgia, Arizona, the Carolinas, they have a red state model and it's working. Montana works. Wyoming works. Not these states. So yeah, that's, that's a terrible problem. It's. I'm afraid that the cities are going to become. There's a big shopping center, you know, is it Westview in the Bay Area?
- [58:08]
Jack Fowler
It's empty in San Francisco. I saw that article.
- [58:11]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah.
- [58:13]
Jack Fowler
The Sunday before Christmas and you couldn't see anybody in the din.
- [58:17]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, we used to take go up there when I was on the farm because when I lived in Palwal as a graduate student and you know when you went to that shopping center, the reason we didn't like to go to it, you had to drive for hours to find a parking place. Just circle and circle and you'd go in there and it was packed and it's like a ghost town. Who wants to go and get mugged?
- [58:40]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, you might step on a needle on the way or something else fecally. Well, Victor. Okay, well we've, we've, we've. I'll tell everyone. Our moving on to the Hate eight are. These are the issues that Victor has selected. The rogue nukes, gain of function, destruction of the nuclear family, the growth of radical Islam, education, freefall, irreligiosity, emasculation of youth and the ruin of cities. And these will be pitted off against each other on our next episode. And we appreciate your watching and viewing. I want you to consider subscribing to Victor's website, the blade of Perseus. Victorhansen.com if you are interested in what I do, I write a free weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts. It comes out every Friday and it has 14 recommended readings and you go to civilthoughts.com sign up. It's totally free. I know you're going to like it if you're on Twitter or excuse me, Xdhansen is Victor's handle and if you're on Facebook, VDH's Morning Cup. Victor, you've been terrific. Thanks for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks folks for listening and watching. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye bye.
- [59:54]
Victor Davis Hansen
Thank you everyone. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features. In addition.