Episode 13: A Farmer's Wisdom with Victor Davis Hanson

He is absolutely brilliant. You've seen on the TV, You've read his work. He's an absolute genius. The one and only Victor Davis Hansen. Professor Hanson is a classicist, military and historian, and one of the nation's most respected political commentators. He's published more than two dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller The Case for Trump, and his next book, set to come out in October, is titled The Dying Citizen.

How progressive elites, tribalism, and globalization are destroying the idea of America. I know, I can't wait to go get that. Professor Hansen is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and has spent decades in academia. And if that's not enough, he's also a farmer in San Joaquin Valley of California. Today, Professor Hanson, I have a wide ranging conversation about politics, the state of America, and the difference between elites who live in a bubble

and ordinary Americans who live in the woral world. I can't wait to get started. So with that, I want to welcome Professor Victor Davis Hanson to the show. Professor, it's an honor to have you on the Truth with Lisa Booth. Thank you for having me. I've seen your work, I've read your work. I've every time I've watched you on TV. You're absolutely brilliant. But I wasn't as familiar

with sort of your upbringing. So, you know, in researching for the show, I realized that, so your fifth generation grape and plum farmer, and you grew up on a hunder and thirty five acre farm in Selma, California. And what I find so interesting is you actually you had a PhD in classics from Stanford University and then you decided to go back to selma to help manage your

family's farm. What was behind that? I think there was two less idealistically, there were not a lot of jobs in nineteen eighty for classical I was a classical philologist, so that's the narrowest uh subset or subdiscipline, and classics that was being Greek and Latin language and manuscripts and philology, even though I wrote a thesis on ancient history. But also I had a grandmother who was ninety three, living alone. My parents were both trying to manage the farm and work.

And uh, I had a twin brother who was had just arrived and he had quit graduate school, so he asked me if I could help him, because we also had another forty five was about a hundred and eighty five acres, and we didn't have a lot of money, and the storm has kind of been run down because my grandfather, who had just died, was elderly. And so I did that for five years NonStop, and then for the next ten to twelve of I did that. But in I had also become a professor at the closest university,

cal State University, and I started a classics program. They didn't have any Latin and Greek program, and I started as a part time teacher at four dollars a month, and over the next twenty one years we had kind of a department of five people and it was pretty successful. Then I finally, when I was about forty nine, I retired and stopped farming and stopped teaching there. And then I commuted one day a week and have an apartment pow Out the last seventeen years and was at the

who I met, the Hoover Institution. But I still live here, and I'm speaking from you from my farm and I've really been nowhere else the last fourteen months, like everybody else. What kind of lessons do you think people could learn from farmers and farming? Well, the most important is pragmatism. That all of these ideas that we have are the abstract. They don't really mean anything unless they're matched with re all of of your deeds. So I can I learned that.

When I got back I'm Stanford. I saw my father and my family and they said, well, what can you do? And I said, well, I can write fluently in Grant, Latin and Greek. I can tell you all the manuscript family history of Esklis I'm an expert in the text of the cidities, at least I thought I was. And they said, can you go down and wire that Raisin d. Hyde writer, it's got a two twenty And I said, no, I haven't been doing that since I was seventeen eighteen.

And they said, well, what was the purpose then, And they didn't mean to mock education, They just said you have to be well rounded. So for the next five years I learned that if I was going to survive, I had to learn to well drive and service tractors, pest asides, uh, go to farmers markets, and pedal through. I did all of that with people who most of them hadn't graduated from high school, local Mexican American people I grew up with, some of them, had a lot

of people here illegally, and uh. It was really a way of testing your education. So if you had ideas and the abstract and it didn't work. And one good thing about farming, if you say, well, you know, I think that they're wrong about suggesting ten pounds of acre

of ammonium sulfate. I think I could do fifteen. And yet if you do fifteen acres and you burn one tree, and you did five acres, the first tree doesn't just burn, the next three burns and all of them burn because you were idealistic or abstract or theoretical, but you didn't know the actual conditions on the ground. So I became very careful about saying things and postulating or pontificating unless

I could see where the practical reality. And then the other thing very quickly is I gained a great deal of respect and uh, I don't know, adulation almost for people who made a living with their hands and their wits, farmers, independent truck drivers, mechanics, people that I got along with, and I did came to a really important discovery at a very early age that the people had gone to school with as an undergraduate undergraduate UH school were either

not as bright or no brighter. They were certainly no brighter, but many were not as bright as the people out in the real world that had to run a seven eleven store or a farm supply business. And that was kind of I mean, that's not anti enlightenment, but it's it's trying to remind America that it doesn't really matter what your degrees or your alphabet alphabetic cluster is behind your name, if you're not practical. We really saw that during the COVID with the careers of Dr Fauci, Dr

Collins and others. I think, I think that's so fascinating because you know, right now there's sort of the schism in the country, and you know, you you look at the left particularly, and they've really become this party of elite and very disconnected from a lot of Americans who

you know, have a working class background. And that's an interest saying for you because you've sort of been in both worlds where you'd have been in this sort of this elite academia while simultaneously having you know, sort of a rule and working class background. Yeah, I think so. I'll give you one example. I came. I grew up hunting on this farm, and I had we had every

generation about three or four guns. So the time I took over my great great great grandmother's house, the Victorian farmhouse that I have, I maybe had twenty guns, but they were all old, you know, and I never saw

them as weapons. But then I noticed that when you live out here and that the environment was changing, that all your ideas about gun control don't mean anything, because what really means something is when at two in the morning, when two people on PCP don't speak English and throw a rock at your window and yell at you in Spanish, they're going to come in and break into your house

and kill you. And the sheriff is forty miles away, forty minutes away, and your son who's ten, and your daughter who's eight, and your other daughter is six or crying. Then the only thing that protects you from the other world, the world of non civilization, is your ability to stop it. So I would get it. I had that. It was a very traumatic experience, but I got a shot down.

I went out and confronted the two people. I made them walk back to their car that was hidden in the vineyard, and I called the sheriff, and the sheriff didn't come, and he didn't come, and he didn't come, and I sat there in the fog forty degrees in a winter night, just waiting until he came. And he never came. And then I walked them out, took the keys through them in the vineyard and said you're gonna

walk to town. And I learned something from that, and that is that all the focism that I had been told as a child by neighbors, and I sort of wanted to get away from that and go to the university and meet people who were educated. And my parents had told me that because they were both educated, and they came back in the farm. My mother was one of the first women to graduate in Stamford Law School in nine and she was the first female appellate court

judge in California. But yet she went back to the farm and her sixties she would pedal fruit with us, or my dad would get on the tracker. He was a JC administrator and they were running the farm. And they had told me, don't ever ever look down on your roots or working people, and they will always be there for you in a way that your academic friends will not. And they were so right. How has this all shaped your viewpoint on immigration? You know some of

the stories you just told. Also, you know, working on a farm, growing up where you grew up, how has that shaped your viewpoint on immigration in the country. I think it's a tragedy because, say, yesterday I got up and I went to town. I talked to a guy who wants to paint my house. I went to home depot and got some parts I went to the diesel

mechanic and got some fuel additive. But I didn't see anybody who was not Mexican American or from Mexico, and all of them were wonderful people, and I didn't even. I don't even at this point, because we're about eighty five percent Hispanic in this town that was once about

eight white when I was a young kid. But the point of what I mean by tragic is every single person who came legally or is here legally, or came in a measured fashion uh and learned to speak English and got a high school to poema are are wildly successful that they're intermarried with different people from different backgrounds.

It may be predominantly Hispanic, but we're getting to the point like the Italian immigration of the nineteenth century, where people who were Catholic and came from Sicily faced greater prejudice than Northern European Protestants. But by three generations, if your name was Juliana, Giuliani or Cuomo, nobody could determine your politics. And that was happening here. And then when we open the borders and people flood in, many of them from southern Mexico and that's the point that's never made.

That people are not coming from the Northern province states as they used to, but Yucatan, Chiapas Oahaka, and they're much poorer. Some of them do not speak Spanish as their primary language. They peaked Uh, sort of a dialect mix of tech. They come up here, and as indigenous people, they've had a lot more prejudice in Mexico. They don't know English, and so they're much harder to assimilate. So at that very moment when immigration changed, and we should

have been really doubled down on the melting pot. And I tried for twenty one years at cal State, where I had mostly Mexican American students. I tried to teach them Greek and Latin, made sure they read French and German. That got them into law schools, business schools. But it wasn't easy. And what I'm getting at is when these elites just throw open the borders and let people come in here illegally with no English and no high school

diploma and not diverged. They're not coming from all over the world but from just one region, then it's so hard to integrate, assimilate, intermarry, immigrants, and they never suffer the consequences of their own ideology because they have the money and the influence to find a zip code or a geography that insulates them. Who does it fall most

heavily on Mexican American people. If they came to my hometown and talked to a fourth generation, their generation, somebody of Mexican dissent, they would say, oh, Victory, it's hard to have a p when we have all these people coming in. And you know, these gang members attacked my grandson because he doesn't speak Spanish, and I don't even

know who these people are. And when they get in erect they leave the scene of the accident, or they've got phony I d s. Or my wife is at the state dialysis center and it used to be an hour. Now they're waiting in line because all these immigrants don't have any healthcare and they don't and and they're here are legally excepted. So a lot of the opposition I think to the illegal immigration comes from the people that directly influences and but legal immigration, I think is a

wonderful thing. And uh a true diversity of thought and different groups. And I grew up, you know, with an Armenian neighbor, Greek American neighbor, a Japanese American, a Mexican American neighbor, and where they all kidded each other about their ethnic faults or shortcomings. Uh, they all judge these each other on how well they farmed. It was incidental.

So I'm really worried maybe you are too, at least about this Biden administration fixation on race, because I think there's never been a multiracial democracy except ours that work without you know, Soviet like coercion or the Ottoman coercion. And when we look around the world today, India is example, so is Brazil. I can't think of any others, and they don't do a very good job. And so it's we don't want to become the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, Iraq.

And yet Biden seems intent on emphasizing differences in grievances and victimizations rather than the melting pot assimilation and the dream of Martin Luther King. But what do you think is behind that? Because I've heard, you know, some of the words to describe the by administration. We've heard you know, communism, Marxist, socialist, they've sort of been used interchangeably to describe the administration.

You know, are those distinctions important? And then you know, how would you label the Biden administration because I've heard a lot about you know, basically, instead of class warfare like the Marxist of the past, now it's racial divisions that they're driving in a similar fashion. I think you make a good point. I think there's two phenomena working

in tandem. One or the people around him that go in and out of academia or the law or politics, whoever has advising And I don't know if it's people around Kamala Harris or the Obama's or chief of staff, but they are influenced by this neo Marxist idea that there's a permanently oppressed class. But that has never worked, that meaning revolution has never worked in this country because

of the successive market capitalism and upward mobility. So if you start off as a truck driver, you end up, you know, making pretty good money and you're not a class victim. But so gram Skin others said, you know, there is a cultural Marxism, social Marxism, and here they fixed on race, and they said, you know what, if we can prove that race is always oppressive and it sticks with you for the rest of your life. Then opens a victim. Jay z is a victim, Megan Markle's

a victim. The Obama's are a victim. They can be worth a hundred million dollars, they can be the most powerful couple in nine states, but because they're black, they're always going to be a victim. And we know there's too many victims for the number of victimizers, or we wouldn't have these crazy things like the juicy Smalett of fiasco.

So they're trying to create a permanent victimhood and then have a permanent class but this is a racial division, and then be the defenders of the oppressed, and then leverage the system for political gain and power. And then secondly, very quickly, Joe Biden, remember his campaign was in nobody'd ever done that before. He blamed the quarantine, but it was really his age and inability to campaign in the traditional fashion. His transition was inert and all he had

to his handlers had two points. Donald Trump is mean and tweets and he's angry and we don't like him, and he's a divider and I'm going to be old Joe Biden from scrant and two. We're in a quarantine. We've got to have a hundred million people vote, not on election day. We need my male own valut we need early about it. It's extensive crisis. We've got to shut people down. And that started to fade during the

transition with Operation Work Speed. By the time he was entering office, a million people a day were being vaccinated. And now Donald Trump is irrelevant really because he can't get on social media. He's been barred. He's he's very important within the Republican conservative circles. But CNN's, as you know, either there ratings or disastrous because they can't fixate on him. So Biden lost that, and he lost the uh COVID quarantine recession, all that stuff to blame mont Trump. So

what was he left with? Now people are looking at what he's done in the first hundred and forty days and it's not pretty. The Middle East he's screwed up. He could have left it alone, but it's a mess. The border is a mess. Gasoline prices and energy development are mess. Critical race theory and racial relations are mess.

And looks like we were bound to have a natural recovery with plenty of prior stimulus, but getting up the thirty trillion dollars at national debt and a lot of stimuli and paying people not to work while you hector and the productive class means we've got too many dollars chasing too few products. And so he did all of that and none of those things he's done. If you look at the poles pole. So it's a race war. It's this, it's that, it's that he's got to find

some bogey matt fascinating point, professor. We have to take a quick break back on the other side, and we created this massive welfare state over the past year due to government lockdowns and the amount of enhance unemployment that's being build out as well. You know, what impact do you think that has in the country both culturally and

then also economically moving forward. You know, that's a really good point when you you emphasize culturally, when we just say, you know, it's well, if you're getting fours here and eight hundred dollars there, there's no incentific go back and work and lose it. And that was always supposedly a right wing talking point, but it's absolutely true when you see it, and I can see it in a small town where you've talked to employers. I'm not talking about

corporate employer. I'm talking about small business employers that cannot find workers, at least regular workers. They can find people who will come in three or four hours a week and get cash off the book so they can continue to get supplements, or they can find are they themselves then play the game and they'll say, you know, I lost all of this money because of the dislocation, and

they didn't in some cases. So we've created sort of a massive shared industry that we're all looking back at the last fourteen months and saying we we were victimized. I had a corporate guy called me this week and I think it's net worth is five million. I don't want to talk too much about him, so the I R. S doesn't go somebody doesn't go after But he said,

I gotta STI I got a stimulus check. And then my son, who is a teacher, he said to me, we didn't ask for it, a stimulus check, king, what do I do with I said, put it in the bank, and they said, well, I'm I'm supposed to stimulate the economy. Am I I said, well, what do you need? He said, I don't really need anything. We live very frugally, but so culturally, we're creating this idea that the government is

in life of Julia Panjama Boy. Fashion is going to always be there, and we're doing it by printing money. And remember what Obama said the other day. Obama said he came out of retirement as his want now to make these pontifications. He said, well, you know, we've learned that we don't have to fixate on a thirty trillion

dollar dead. We have a new way of thinking about it economics, i e. We don't have to pay this money back that maybe will inflate the currency, it might hurt wealthy people might not that we're not gonna fixate on it. And so it's been very delectarious. And then the other thing, of course, in strictly economic terms, when you coop up million people for fourteen months and you let them out and they're being let out now, it's crazy. Uh,

you can't buy lumber, you can't buy a truck. I bought a new truck and I could not believe it. I went to this Dodge Ram place, and I mean they were selling four or five six rams a day, and not not in middle level of kind I bought, I mean luxury luxury ram pick up sixty seventy eight dollars and no down payment, zero interests incentives. They stopped that now, But my gosh. And then people call you up and say, you just bought a truck, will buy it back for you for what you paid for it.

We're short at our used card lot. So why is

that happening? Because when when you create and print all of this money and you let people out, and yet you discourage them to be productive and to produce goods and services, and you tell the employer, hey, guess what, as soon as we can, your corporate taxes are going up, your capital gains taxes are going up, your personal income taxes are going up, your state taxes are going by the way, we're gonna shut down this pipeline shut down, and MORSH shut down federal leasing, and your energy costs

are gonna skyrocket. Well, and that a lot of people get discouraged and they pull in their horns. And so we did the worst possible thing with natural demand staring. We artificially engineered a spike in it, and then we deliberately or maybe accidentally, I don't know, depending on your viewable Biden, we discourage production and the result is we're going to get inflation of five to eight percent, I think,

or higher. And what you do when when you're an investor and you've got your buying bank mortgages at two point eight percent for thirty years and your currency is going owned by five to seven percent, that's not gonna last long. Well, personally, you know, I think it's with intention because Democrats, you know, you mentioned Life of Julia campaign. They want people to be dependent on the government from cradle degree because it gives them control, it gives them votes.

That's you know, that's my personal opinion. But we're also seeing, sir, you know, Americans, a lot of Americans making the decision to not get vaccinated, which in my opinion, is their choice. I'm young and healthy, why should I be forced to get vaccinated? However, it's creating sort of this, you know, some the people that are choosing not to be are soletly being ostracized from society. It's almost like a new

class structure, the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. Where does that head? Well, the problem with that is that any time you take a multi ethnic, multi racial, quite diverse population and you start, for even noble reasons to make distinctions and to categorize and labels and I D cards, then new set of precedent. And when it's based on a lie. And so why is the left doing that? The left is doing as if you turn on the cable networks, they all say

white Republicans are not being vaccinated. These are the deplorable, these are the q on, these are all the conspiracy freaks. But then you look at the data and by ethnic group, and Asians are getting vaccinated about their proportions and the general population a little bit above. Uh so are white? In fact, they're a little above. In fact, they've been criticized for being privileged that more white people as a percentage of the state's population are vaccinated than other people.

So who are not being vaccinated according to their proportional representation in the demography. It's African Americans and their historical legitimate reasons why perhaps, and Latinos. So then we have this, when you start playing with race, you get these paradoxes. So we have all of these people a saying you've got to get vaccinated, we're gonna punish you. And they're

also saying, but the underserved communities didn't get vaccinated. So this is gonna be very interesting because are they going that starts turning away uh, minorities when they want to go to a movie or when they want to get on a plane, they're gonna say, sorry, you weren't vaccinated because those populations have a higher rate or higher distrust of the vaccination or whatever particular exergies as you want, than do the white majority that they think they think,

are they the kind of demagogue? Is the problem with the population in general not being vaccinated? Such an interesting point, and actually more people should be talking about that, So I'm glad you mentioned that. That's a really brilliant point. Let's take a quick commercial break and then we're back

with Professor Victor Davis Hanson. You know, to the earlier part, like you're saying, they're trying to use it as a way to sort of slander conservatives, to slander h Trump supporters particularly, But we've seen this for a long time, the dehumanization of Trump supporters to try to make them less than you know, that's why the left, in my opinion, calls an unborn child the clump of cells, because if

you do humanize something, it has lesser value. And they've been trying to do that to Trump supporters, and we're seeing even in with the January six event. Obviously it was terrible what happened, but we have people like President Biden saying it's the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War, which clearly it was not. No, that's a complete historical eye. I mean nine eleven was much more grievous. The Bonus March of nine two. They took

tanks out there and charged the crowd. Douglas McArthur did with tanks, and they were out there for three months. Twenty thousand people in continued protest. This summer, we had a hundred and twenty days. Two billion dollars was to damage. Thirty people dead, fourteen thousand people arrested. And and notice what he also does. He does he says the intelligence agencies say white supremacists. Well, that's only because of their definitions.

If you're Antifa or BLM and you try to burn down a federal courthouse or police precincts, that is not terrorism. If the January six is, they say, or if you want to shoot Steve Scalise and take out three publican leadership for James Hodgkinson, then that's death by suicide. That's why you did it. Our major Hassan in two thousand nine killed thirteen people, yelled allah akbar. Well, that was

workplace violent. So what the left does. They take all of these incidents and then they arbitrarily, in fluid fashion, determined this is a terrorist incident. This is a terrorist And I'm talking about not just the political left. I'm talking about the bureaucratic, institutionalized FBI left as well. And so when Biden says this, and I don't know what

to say. He says he said the same thing about anti Asian hate crimes when we know statistically about six of them are committed by people who make up about six percent of the population African American male. Or when he said it about anti Semitic at Texas and Jewish anti Jewish violence in Los Angeles and New York, we knew who was doing that. It was almost overwhelmingly young males of Middle Eastern descent. And yet you would think that this was all created by Donald Trump using the

term Mouhan virus or going to Charlotte's five years ago. Well, and of course that was a lie what they said about you know what he said about Charlottesville. You know that was a complete lie with the media pushed as well. Absolutely, and we know that, yet they keep repeating. And he said there were you know, bad people on good people on both sides. And then he said, I'm not talking about the plan and the Nazis and that, and that

was just completely left out. That that lie got a lot of currency and residents because so many of the never Trumpers jumped on television and just said Charttesville, Chartesville, Charttesville. And then the left said, see, look at these never trumpers as if they were they had any validity or currency. But I'll just finish by saying, it's very dangerous when you in Pavlovy and fashion just reject everything because Trump's

or anybody's fingerprints. So a lot of people have died because it was laughed at what Trump's at about the Wuhan Virology Lab having a role in this engineered gain and function virus, and we lost three or four months knowing what was going on. A lot of people died, as we know from recent research at the hydrox of cloroquine and iber methine. While they're not cure all, they

had efficacy in the early stages. That's demonstrably true. And yet because Trump said that they were completely blacklisted or shunned, that that route and a lot of people are sitting in jail, in some cases solitary infinement because of this lie that U On January six, there was an armed insurrection with people. Not one of them was found with weapons, and there were no architects that had sophisticated planned at stage a coup, and the officer sick Nick was not

violently killed. He died a day layer of natural causes, a stroke according to the autopsy. And there were not ties bought in by people trying to tie up and kidnap people. Those were police tie and I could go on. The only person who died violently was a fourteen year military vettman who was shot while in ouring coloniously maybe the capital, and she was shot by an officer who mysteriously to this day has not had his or her

name or gender are race identified. Yet that's our want again to do so in every case an urn armed suspect being shot by and killed by a police, so we live in an empire of I don't know, delusion and lies, and it's very It has a lot of scary ramification, deadly ramification. Professor I, I could talk to you for hours. I know that you are a busy man and you're on a tight schedule. I thank you so much for the time that you've spent on the truth with Lisa Booth. It's an honor to speak with you.

Thank you for having me. Lesa enjoyed it. I want to thank Professor Victor Davis Hansen for his insight today. The man is always brilliant, and I want to thank you guys at home for listening. If you enjoy today's show, easy leave us a review and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast. You can also find me on Twitter

and Instagram at Lisa Rebooth. Special thanks to our producer John Cassio, writer Aaron Kleigman, researcher Margaret Smith, and our executive producers Debbie Myers and speaker new Ingridge, all part of the Gingridge three sixty Network.