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We don't know who's running the country now,

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whether it's the Obama third-term people or no one at all.

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The society that is targeted or vulnerable

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has no idea that it is.

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It keeps reassuring itself that its grandeur is still there,

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it's still powerful.

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That has eerie similarities to the United States.

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They have no idea about the people who are attacking them.

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We're getting to a point now where the United States

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is the keeper of deterrence worldwide,

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is no longer there.

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For a variety of reasons.

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We don't have the economic clout with 36 trillion in debt,

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we're borrowing a trillion every 90 days.

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It's been a 360-degree destructive four years.

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And I don't know how...

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Sometimes I almost think they get in a room and they say,

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well, yeah, we let in 10 million people, there's borders open,

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and how are you going to stop that?

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The remedy will be worse than the malady that we caused.

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And inflation is high, but you know what?

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You're going to have to raise taxes on the people who deserve to be taxed.

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It's almost that the nihilism was intentional.

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And they knew that people wouldn't like what they did,

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but they thought they were going to hand off a revolutionary system,

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a Jacobin system, and then the effort to undo it would be catastrophic.

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I think our problem is that we're culturally arrogant and we're full of youguists.

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And we think everybody wants to be like us.

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A lot of people look at this and they say,

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well, we don't see any connection from your wealth and your power with your values.

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So we reject your values.

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And there is a connection between democracy and freedom and technology and success,

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but they don't see that.

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And the more that we try to appease them and say to them,

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we're Americans and we want to help you, that doesn't appeal to them.

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They interpret that magnanimity as weakness to be exploited rather than kindness to be reciprocated.

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And they don't like the West.

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They feel that, well, you didn't earn it.

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As society gets weaker and starts to decline, they put more interest in,

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and I know this is counterintuitive, but they want to have more allies.

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So let's say, take Constantinople and the Byzantines.

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The more they were unable to hold back Mehmet and the Sultan

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and his announced plan to destroy Constantinople, take it over,

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the more they said the Genovese are going to come.

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The Venetians will sail up the Dardanelles and save us.

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The Florentines have always liked us.

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Maybe we can unite with Western Christianity,

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but nobody will allow the greatest city in Christendom to fall.

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And that never happens.

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And the Thebes, the Thebans kept saying,

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well, we revolted, where are the Spartans?

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I hear they're marching up for the, they marched up to the Peloponnesian,

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up the Peloponnesian when they saw the actual disparity in forces

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and the nature of Alexander VIII.

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They just turned around and went home.

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And so I think in the case of the United States, we keep talking.

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I mean, it's very important to have allies,

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but we keep talking about NATO this and NATO that and our allies.

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But in some ways it's an admission that the United States is no longer preeminent

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and will not lead.

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And what we should be saying is we want all the allies we can,

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but if we don't have the allies, we still have the power to fulfill our foreign policy agendas.

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We've got the best military, the best economy in the world, the best tech.

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But as you start to weaken, you keep talking about coalitions and that they never,

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they never pan out.

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Well, it had been conventional wisdom that the salvation of the United States

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was the Federalist system.

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The idea that we were not America, we were the United States.

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And that we had a system, and the left, of course, hates that system,

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where the House was popularly elected and represented the people,

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and the Senate represented the states.

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So that, you know, they had six years of term.

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They had to be older.

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And, you know, Wyoming, every senator represents 250,000.

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California, it's 20 million.

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And that was okay because the senators represented the state

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and their congressional representatives represented the people.

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And that would allow the states, if you didn't like something in one state,

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you could go to another state.

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There was commonalities, but there was enough respect for state autonomy

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that each state was experimenting in various degrees with consensual government,

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more freedom, less freedom, less taxes, more regulation, et cetera, et cetera.

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And then that was a safety valve so that the nation didn't explode.

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However, the problem with federalism is that when people conglomerate in one geographical area,

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that becomes a force multiplier, and you create two alternative systems.

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We saw that in the 1850s with the rise of the idea that even though 1% of the southern population owned slaves,

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the other people, and most people suffered from it, both black and white.

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Black certainly, but also white, poor.

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Nevertheless, there was a larger paradigm that they accepted,

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that the holy ground of the Confederacy, we don't want to pay for internal improvements,

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tariffs or killings, all of that stuff.

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And they created a subculture, the red states, Mason-Dixon, south of it.

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And that was the only time that had really happened.

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But today, when we look at things, everybody is self-selecting.

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And so I think 10, I saw the statistics, 10 to 12 million Californians have left in the last 30 years.

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Yep, one right here.

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And they go to places that are, yes, they go to Nevada, they go to Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas.

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Even now, we've got a lot of people going to Alabama.

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And they do that because the societies work.

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They don't have deficits. They don't have huge pension programs.

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The police are trying to fight crime.

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There's a lot more liberty as far as opening a business, less regulations, etc.

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And the blue paradigm is not working and it's collapsing.

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And yet, it inherited the bi-coastal media, the bi-coastal universities.

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It has a lot of the CEOs and corporate headquarters.

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And so, when you ask that question, it's kind of scary because under our federal system, it only happened once.

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But we're starting to see two different societies.

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When I go to Florida or Tennessee or Texas and I come back to California or Washington, it's a very different place.

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I mean, you say to somebody in, I don't know, Arizona, do you watch the NBA?

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Nope.

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Do you watch the Oscars?

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Never heard of it.

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Do you ever watch the Tonys?

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Nope.

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Do you watch NBC, ABC, Network Nerves?

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Nope.

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Do you go to a first-run Hollywood movie?

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Nope.

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Do you watch late-night comedy on TV?

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Nope.

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It's just a monastery of the mind where a whole half of the country is culturally, socially disconnecting.

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And the thing is that the North always, from the Civil War days, had all of the advantages.

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They had the industry, they had the capital, they had Wall Street, they had Harvard and Yale, and then they had the West Coast and Oregon.

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And so you thought that that wouldn't be possible.

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And yet, what's happening is, you're seeing a red state antithesis that is draining the blue states of all the talent and using the old blue state model in red states.

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And the red states, in some way, are more like the north of the 1850s, and the blue states are more like the Confederacy in the sense they're obsessed with one-drop racism in the wokeness.

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They love to nullify federal laws, like sanctuary cities.

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They hate the Supreme Court.

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And I'm very worried about it because all these are force multipliers of differences.

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And I don't know what, so far, we have these common military, common media and some, but even that is bifurcating.

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And I can see a point, and if something doesn't done, the white male rural soldier will not join the military anymore.

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And if something is not done, there will be two entirely separate medias.

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There will be no intersection between them at all.

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And if something is not done, I think there's going to be an implosion of Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York.

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They're not sustainable in the present.

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So, yes, we're going to be in a very dangerous position unless we get a unifying type of administration in Congress.

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Barack Obama redefined diversity as everybody who is not purportedly white.

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And that brought the population that was non-white or oppressed to 30% of the population rather than just 12.

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We're supposed to believe that LeBron James is a victim.

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He's a multi-billionaire.

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And every once in a while, Barack Obama ventures out from his Colorado mansion or his Martha's Vineyard mansion or his new Wahoo mansion to lecture us on our illiberalities because he's a victim.

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Is it possible that the focus on race over class in today's woke ideology could undermine the foundational values of American society?

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In this video, Victor Davis Hanson explores this contentious issue, analyzing the shift in focus from class-based to race-based oppression.

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He criticizes this emphasis on superficial appearance, warning that it undermines the American values of common ground based on shared ideas, traditions, and customs.

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In summary, Hanson's video critically examines the implications of woke ideology's race-based focus, its impact on meritocracy, and the potential historical dangers.

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He urges viewers to consider the long-term consequences and the importance of a society based on shared values rather than superficial characteristics.

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And then he did something quite differently. This was the foundations of woke.

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He separated oppression by class for race.

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So he said that class is not really the barometer.

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If you're in East Palestine, Ohio, and you have nothing, you're still an oppressor because you're white.

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If you're in Bakersfield, California, I was there not too long ago, and you see people who...

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There hasn't been one person in their entire family that's ever gone to college, but they're oppressors by the nature of their skin color.

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So then race becomes the barometer, and that's very helpful for the Marxist interpretation because it's immutable.

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Whereas Marxism always failed in the United States because of class mobility.

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Some of your parents are very wealthy. You may not be wealthy.

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Some of your parents are very poor. You may be upper middle class or wealthy.

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And so that fluidity meant it was very hard to get a static, permanent underclass.

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But when you introduce race into it, and unlike gender, you say you can't construct the race.

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It's permanent, and therefore you're a permanent victim.

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Then it's a much more powerful idea that we have to use the state to make a quality of result, primarily, but not exclusively on race.

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And then you get these idiosyncratic, strange things. That's why I think it's a strange case of woke.

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In the old days, under the old paradigms, because of a history of racism, people who were not white might have had a larger percentage that were poor.

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That's no longer necessarily true. If you look at 17 ethnic groups have higher incomes than so-called whites do.

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And that, you know, Indian Americans, Japanese Americans, Arab Americans, Nigerian Americans.

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So it was really a substitution of race for class, and it was very effective.

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And so now we're sort of polarized, and we're trying to make everybody equal, and we do that in a variety of ways.

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We do it with admissions, we do it with hiring, we do it with exposure on culture.

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And ultimately, whether we like it or not, it's at war with meritocracy, because meritocracy is blind, supposedly.

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Not that it always is that way in practicality, but ultimately it's going to take a toll because it substitutes something.

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And that's something that's not necessarily merit.

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So this idea that an American can be defined by anybody's looks, but, and then defined by a cohesion of ideas.

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You're an American because you have a common ground, you believe in the Constitution, you believe in these traditions and customs and self-improvement, self-critique.

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That's what makes what we're doing. So this is a very reactionary pre-civilizational idea that we're going to go back and start judging people by their superficial appearance that should be incidental, not essential to who we are.

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But when you make tribalism essentialism, then history is going to say, if you go down that road, you're going to share a lot of things with the status of Corsair and Thucydides history.

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You're going to see a lot of things that went on in the Balkans over a thousand years.

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You're going to see things that went on in Rwanda and Iraq. So be warned.

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Woke was focused more on race than any type of ideology that we've seen in a long time.

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It was the idea that you are permanently identified by your superficial appearances and you cannot change that.

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And therefore, that will be the barometer of success or failure in this country.

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And we're going to start talking to people in collectives.

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So, yes, there may be individual exceptions, but we can use, if we say white, we can say white rage, white supremacy, white privilege.

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And we mean all white people or we wouldn't collectivize it.

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And that's something that has a bad history in civilization.

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You can't look at woke in the present without a historical context.

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So we have precedents for what they're doing, taking classics of literature or music or statuary or art and recalibrating them for contemporary political purposes.

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And in Rome, great statues of Roman Empire, of emperors would be there.

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And then they called it damnatio memori.

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When he became unpopular, you could save money by erasing his face and just putting the next emperor's face on the old emperor's body.

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So all these woke people think they have reached the end of history.

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They have moral superiority that's never been seen before.

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They have an intellect that is just superior to everyone.

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And they never think that, well, wait a minute.

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Once we set this model that each generation gets to tear down statues, rename names, why do we think it's going to be static?

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So it's conceivable that 50 years we might have a conservative reactionary nutty regime that says, I can't believe you people.

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so experience my innocence ago.

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Let me move this around again and reevaluate into the next generation.

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Let me see you'll find me.

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Next slide!

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