Victor Davis Hanson: Why Common Sense Is Branded Conservative & The Privileged Left

Adam Carolla Show

Historian Victor Davis Hanson joins Adam Carolla to discuss the cultural and political friction in modern America, specifically focusing on

Key takeaways

• Victor Davis Hanson argues that the Obama era fundamentally redefined race by decoupling it from economic class and attaching it strictly to a binary of victimhood.
• The concept of 'sophistry' is used as a historical parallel to modern political rhetoric that uses linguistic manipulation to present subjective arguments as truth.

Main topics

• Identity Politics and DEI
• The Trump Counter-Revolution

Notable quotes

I would call him the white Thomas Sowell in a weird way, just a guy who makes sense all the time.

Conclusion

The episode provides a deep-dive analysis of the structural tensions b

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) Victor Davis Hanson, one of the smartest guys you'll listen to all week. He's on. Also, we'll do the news with Andrew as well. Speaker 2 (0:09) Hello and welcome to Pluto Phone. If you know the name of the movie you'd like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto TV, where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch Anchorman, The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Speaker 3 (0:22) Fantastic. Speaker 2 (0:23) The Matrix Trilogy. Welcome to the real world. Speaker 1 (0:27) Shut up! Speaker 2 (0:28) Titanic! I'm the king of the world! And so much more! For showtimes, press nothing. They're free 24-7. That is Speaker 8 (0:35) so fetch. Speaker 2 (0:36) On Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never. Speaker 5 (0:47) From Corolla One Studios in Glendale, California, this is The Adam Corolla Show. Adam's guest today, political commentator, historian, and author Victor Davis Hanson. Plus the news with Andrew Hobson. And now, Adam Speaker 6 (1:02) Corolla. Speaker 5 (1:03) Victor Speaker 6 (1:03) Davis Hanson has joined me. He's a historian. He's an author. He's a clear thinker. He's kind of, I don't know, I would call him the white. Thomas Sowell in a weird way, just a guy who makes sense all the time. You see him popping up on Fox all the time. I don't know, Victor, do you get invited to go to CNN or any other of those types of outlets ever? Speaker 3 (1:28) Once in a while, but they haven't turned out well, put it that way. So I think I usually say no. But you know how the New York people like the New York Times, they'll call conservatives and they'll want. They'll want you to object to something a conservative has done and then they'll sensationalize it. So I don't talk to them or the Washington Post. CNN I've gone on a couple of times and it's been an ambush. So I don't, yeah, it's not Speaker 6 (1:58) worth it. You know, it's interesting. I'm a fan of yours. I really enjoy logic and practicality and common sense. And I was just thinking, you know, people like you and myself and others, we get sort of painted into this sort of conservative mouthpiece, you know, Trump talking points or something. But I've always just thought of myself as wildly pragmatic and, you know, reality on reality's terms. I think of you that way. But also, if you go back and you think about the stoicism and the stoics and the folks and the philosophers that came 2,000 years ago, were they called something other than philosophers? Were they associated with a party? Were they called, you know, far right? Well, if they Speaker 3 (2:44) didn't like them, yeah, they created that word, sophistes, they were sophists. So some of them were, you know, they weren't all sophists. Protagoras was called a sophist, and Gorgias was called a sophist. But at the time, their supporters thought they were philosophers. Socrates was called a sophist by his opponents. Speaker 6 (3:06) What is the definition of a sophist? Speaker 3 (3:09) A sophist is, it comes from sophos, wise. It's kind of, in Greek you put I-S-T-E as an istic, so it's wisistic. So he's a wise guy. He thinks he's wise, but he's only clever with words. Or he feels if he can make an argument that can convince you, then it must be true. Right. By the power of his vocabulary or syntax. It's a pejorative term in English now. Speaker 6 (3:37) Right. So they did do a version of what we do now. Yes, they did. Absolutely. Speaker 3 (3:42) They did. Speaker 6 (3:44) And I guess because it's humans and it's human nature and it's human beings, and why wouldn't we just do what they did? And why wouldn't they? You know, they'll do this 2,000 years from now, I'm sure. But it can be a little frustrating, I think. At least it is for me sometimes when I'm like, I'm just a pragmatic guy. Speaker 3 (4:04) It is. I had lunch with Tom twice a month for 15 years. He's a little older now and can't do it. And when he would have a book out, I'd say this is he'd always send it to me and we'd meet for lunch. I discuss it. And he'd say it's going to be. It's going to be attacked by all these people. And many of them weren't even political. You know what I mean? Some were, but most of them were just common sense economics, common sense decision making on government, common sense on things like autism, everything. He wrote about everything. And he was very stoic about it and just said, he just accepted it. He got to the point where he said, I don't even get mad anymore. If I don't see their saying this about me. I'm an Uncle Tom or I'm a black sellout. It was very good. I felt bad because I had been going through a lot of stuff. He had attacks, but not to the same degree. And he was, of all the people I met at the Hoover over the last 20 years, it's kind of ironic. He and Shelby Steele were probably the brightest. And so you'd think the black community would, or the white community would appreciate that, but they hated them for that. And they made their life miserable. Yeah, Speaker 6 (5:24) right. Well, there's nothing worse to them than a black, actually a black female who, you know, has a different message than they do. It angers them the most. Always funny to me that they don't even really count them as black anymore once they hook up, you know, or gay, you know, like they'll go, look at. you know, the Trump administration and you go, well, what about this black guy or that gay guy or that Asian guy? And it's like, ah, it doesn't count anymore. It's like their terms are, you can only be black or Hispanic or gay if you're a Democrat. And if you cease to be a Democrat, then you kind of cease to be black. Speaker 3 (6:10) You're not a, yeah, you're not authentic. You're a sellout or you're suffering from false consciousness. Right. But, uh, That was one thing Obama did, and I mention it in the book. He took affirmative action in that 12%, 11 % black and the historic tension with whites and, you know, slavery, Jim Crow and the efforts of the great society. And he thought, you know, that's too small a victim class. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say that anybody who isn't white. regardless of money, regardless of history, regardless if they've just set foot in the nation a day ago, they are a victim by their color. And all of a sudden we had 30%. You could be an Indian from India, an aristocrat. You can be an Argentina guy with red hair and blue eyes, but Trill is ours. I had all my neighbors were Punjabis and they were always complaining that they were dark and their kids couldn't get in under affirmative action. And they'd say to me, All these Pujama farmers would say, my kids, I'm darker than Hispanics. I'm darker than blacks. And they get nothing. And I said, well, you're all very wealthy. And they said, that doesn't matter. And now they're delighted. They said, oh, I'm diverse. I'm DEI. This is great. And I think that was a very subtle change he made. He just sort of redefined race as anybody who's not white is a victim and oppressed on that Marxist binary. And that was really the cause of a lot of our problems because. When you look at the oppressed today, it's nothing to do with class. Mondami is very wealthy. He was from a settler colonial family in Uganda. Hassan Piker drives a $200,000 Porsche. Ro Khanna now thinks he's a big socialist. He's worth, I guess his in-laws are worth a quarter billion dollars. They're all very, I don't know if it's true, but Ilyan Omar said she was worth 30 million. So, but they're all victims. by just one common link, that they're not white. And I think we can attribute that to Obama. He was the one that started that. Speaker 6 (8:15) Well, he also perpetuated it. for other reasons that don't really involve his actions. But I've always had this feeling and Obama, it sort of saddens me that him, I shouldn't say Obama, I should say the Obamas. It saddens me that both of them sort of turned out. the way they did, because it would have been so nice if they went a different direction. I just think it could have helped so much Speaker 3 (8:44) instead. Oh, it would have. If the first president of the United States had been black and conservative or centrist, it would have made a big difference. Speaker 6 (8:53) Yeah, and she turned out to be more of a race hustler than him. And probably, I will say, look, I don't know what to say when I say, you know, she hates this country, but... She doesn't speak glowingly of this country. I don't know if she hates this country, but she doesn't. She's not complimentary. If this country was her spouse, you would assume she doesn't like her spouse. But I will make this point to you and you can tell me what you think of it. Speaker 6 (9:27) We always said racism will be over when we elect a black president. That was sort of the it was a conceit. It wasn't an actual yardstick to measure racism. It was just like the conceit will be when we get to the point where we're able to elect a black president. That will sort of be what we perceive as the end of racism in this country. Speaker 6 (9:56) He used to be comedians used to joke about it a lot, like in the 80s and the 90s and talking about having a black, you know, that that was the future. The utopian future was we've elected a black president. Thus, racism is over. And we elected a black president to two terms. So that if we're making a movie about a country, that would be the end of the movie where racism was over. cured, whatever you want to call it. But... Because so many people are invested in racism, including the Obamas and everyone on the left, that was just their signal to double down. They realized that they had to overcompensate and undo this thing that declared racism over. And if you notice, that's when the hoaxes and the bending over backwards and finding systemic racism and finding basically, you know. systemic bias or like implicit bias and stuff. That's when they had all Speaker 3 (11:02) these new adjectives. Right, right. That's the beginning. You couldn't just say racism, insidious, implicit, Speaker 6 (11:07) systemic. Well, that's, sorry, that's when they had to start finding invisible racism. Yes. So you would say, name me a law that's racist. Name me, give me a policy. No, no, no, no. That's not what it is. You have bias and you don't even know of it. Which now can never be disproven because, you know, who who knows what invisibly lurks inside of a man's heart. But I felt like Obama being elected is what made all the hustlers, the Jesse Jacksons and the Al Sharptons and CNNs. And they all went into overdrive to bring back racism. Speaker 3 (11:49) They did. And again. One of the key things he did was, though, we had always said that oppression against blacks could be measured in economic terms. They were statistically poor, or blacks, and that once they had an equal opportunity, EOC and all that stuff, then they would achieve parity. And they were getting close to parity. And the same thing was true of women. 57 % of college students are women now. Speaker 3 (12:21) Black wealth is greater. For people who identify as Black, their wealth is greater than any majority Black nation in the world. And we have Black billionaires, et cetera. But what they did, again, I think it's really important that Obama, Eric Holder, Oprah, all these people saw that because of their wealth and their privilege, and now we're in the second generation of it, the Obama kids, they were no longer. They could no longer be victims unless they separated that. And they said, it does not matter how wealthy you are, how privileged you are, it's your skin color. And that's what Obama did. He said, your diversity, it's diversity. And it's not based on past oppression. So Mondami can come over here and he's a victim. He's part of a minority group. And all Ro Khanna, as I said, he's a millionaire. Hassan, they're all. kind of, you know, fakers and operators, but at least in the past, you could say there's a correlation between being non-white and not having as much. But when you look at ethnic majorities. Speaker 3 (13:29) who identify as ethnic minorities, 17 of them are higher than whites. Arab Americans, Indian Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans. And it was kind of funny when Amandami said he wanted to go after whiter, richer neighborhoods. I thought, well, he's going to go after the Indian community because they're the richest neighborhood in the world, you know, in the United States. So that was really important. And he pulled that off with no controversy. And now we have this 37 binary and it warps everything. What DEI did was it said you get exemption. You get exemption, not just preference to get into college or promoted or retained. But when you do bad things, it's all contingent on your gender or your race. And we don't apply the full measure of the law to you. And that's undermined. and meritocracy had undermined it. So we're in a tailspin. Then you get Donald Trump. What was weird about Donald Trump... He didn't care about this. That's the only politician I've ever met that did not care. When he said that about Kamala Harris, he goes, they ask her about, are you, you're going into some black journalist and, and what do you think about the, he said, I don't know what she is. If she wants to be black, she can be black, but I don't think maybe she's Asian. I don't know. I don't care. And everybody went crazy about that, but he never, he never apologized. He never backtracked. And I think everybody, all the never Trumpers said he's going to lose the minority vote. Maybe he will in the next, in the midterms, but 56 % of black males voted for him. I mean, Hispanic males and about 24 % of black male. That was a record for male minorities. And I think it was the authenticity that they felt. He didn't try to pander. He didn't try to change his accent. He wasn't Hillary, I'm so tired or Obama modulating the accent. Speaker 6 (15:28) Yes. Speaker 3 (15:29) Or Joe Biden put you all, I'm going to put you all in chains. You got, you know, all that stuff. Pack and chains. That was new. I see a little improvement, a little bit, not much. But I think it's mostly fatigue that people just say, racist? Oh, yeah. You know, it just rolls off your back now. It doesn't mean much. Oh, I've Speaker 6 (15:49) said for 10 years, there's never been a better time to be an actual racist because you just get lumped in with Sean Hannity. And Trump and Victor David Hanson and Adam Carolla and everyone else. Anyone who's ever been on the Jesse Waters show or Greg. You'd be lumped in with Greg Gutfeld. So you could hide in plain sight. Yeah, I think there's a bit of a saturation level. It is kind of insane that in 2026 they keep going back to the rate. What they do is they sort of they do the racism thing for a while and then they stop and then they do some sort of homophobic thing for a while. And then that gets tiresome. And at some point they might jump to something international, Speaker 3 (16:42) Iran or something like that. Trans helped them, you know, Adam. I didn't even know what trans was until I mean, as a historian, I knew there were passages in ancient literature about transvestism and transsexualism. where people thought they were, was very rare. And then I would, when that whole trans thing, I looked at some of the classical sexologists have a lot, they had it all documented in the fifties, forties that turned, it was about zero, zero, 1 % of the population. And all of a sudden they were 30 % of undergraduates at Brown or somewhere saying they were considering transitioning. Speaker 7 (17:18) They Speaker 3 (17:18) made it into a new civil rights movement because they were, the other ones had been exhausted and they invented it. Speaker 6 (17:24) Yeah. Speaker 3 (17:25) And I don't know what's next. They still will circle back to racism. Speaker 6 (17:30) They always find their way back to racism. It'll die down never more than five, six months, but it'll die down for a little bit. And then they'll come back and find it with these lynchings. Yes. Speaker 3 (17:43) Don't you think there's so much intersectionality? So when that Gayle King was talking about the juror and one of the white. Lady jurors and the Clancy trials. He said, well, there's this holdout and holdout. And she said, well, who was he? And he said, well, he was a male. And her eyes got big. We're sisters now. And these males are cheering the misfortunes. And then all of a sudden, well, did you know anything about his right? Well, yes, he was black. She just stunned. She said, I've got to take a breath with that. I've got to stop. Because her mind was going, women, black. solidarity, but black person opposed feminist women that I'm for, but the feminist women I also don't like if they're white. So this black guy is a victim and she couldn't figure it out. Her head was exploding about where her allegiance are in that hierarchy of victimhood. Speaker 6 (18:37) Yeah. It's, it's very, it, I find it mostly pathetic when I hear the speech is like, as a black woman growing up in America, I under, like, I, I find it. very narcissistic, but I also find it super narcissistic, but also kind of sad and... And I'll tell you what I'm saying. It's like I'm Italian, but if I just dressed like a gondolier and every time I said, you know, my great-grandfather Giuseppe would tell me when he was a gondolier, he was an organ grinder. I'd just be like, give it a rest, Adam. Just get on with something else. Have a life. It's not all about being a nationality. And Speaker 3 (19:21) I know I taught for 20 years at Cal State Fresno, where most of my students were minority. I would see these guys that come in and they were obviously Hispanic, but they had a white father. Right. And their name was Jorge Smith or something. But they didn't. Everybody treated them as white because of the name. And then I knew other people who were one quarter. or one eighth Mexican, but it was always on the male side. So they got that last name. And then all of a sudden in the eighties, when I was started teaching there, if it was Joe Ramirez and he was blonde hair and blue eyed because his great grandfather was Ramirez and the father, and all of a sudden he started, he literally in my class, he would put accent marks. Then he was Jorge. And it was all it. It was this search. It was a search for an edge. It was kind of a con. I need some edge. And this minority thing is going to. And it was really funny. It wasn't. I was teaching the Odyssey one year and I had a Hispanic Mexican-American girl. Every time she opened her mouth, she said, as a Latina. Right, right. I can't relate to this, Professor Hanson. As a Latina, this doesn't mean. I said, if you keep, please don't do that. This literature is universal, appears to. It appeals to the human spirit. I don't think so as a Latina. So I said, I'm going to identify every time. So she'd say, I'd say. Speaker 3 (20:53) Hortensia, would you please translate or can you tell me your views on this particular passage on the underworld scene? As a Latina, I said, well, as a white male, I can't relate to you. And I did that the whole class. Every time I said, and then she called the dean who was, his name was Dean Costa, but he was from Spain and he hated affirmative action. So he just said, what the? Blank, are you doing, Victor? You know this. You're giving me a headache. This is a joke. We all know it's a joke. Why are you teasing these students? I have to do something to you. I tell you what, for the rest of the week, just stay on your farm and relax. Skip three classes and I'll tell everybody I put you on hold. Right. Take a vacation. But it's all cynical. At Stanford, we have theme houses instead of racially segregated dorms. If we have racially segregated graduations, they're adjacent graduations, adjacent. And everybody knows what it is. If a white guy walks into the black dorm, then he's not going to be welcome. He's not going to feel welcome. Speaker 6 (22:03) And so they have euphemistic titles for things that are basically just segregation. Yeah, I think Speaker 3 (22:10) that's what the left does. If you were to sum up the left, it's basically how to lie about what they're for, how to distort what they're really doing. It's a big, it's a line incorporated, the whole movement is. Well, I see it. Speaker 6 (22:31) So here's where I come at all this stuff. The human wiring is we're wired for a shortcut in a life hack, no matter what. We're just wired for it. We're literally saying, you know, if the well is three miles that direction and someone goes, I got a shortcut to the well, it's only two miles, then everyone goes, where's the shortcut? Speaker 4 (23:00) It's just Speaker 6 (23:00) how we're wired. And so everything you do in life is a sort of a hack. It's like, well, my son moved out and now I have an open room. Well, if you call that room your office, then you can write it off as a business expense and everyone does it. Because why wouldn't you? And so when we start offering a lot of these things, such as, you know, if you say your daughter's on the spectrum, you can get an extra $1,400 a month from the government because your daughter's on the spectrum. And then you go, what is the spectrum? It's like, it's murky. It's not really, it's hard to. It's kind of hard to define. It's like a service dog at the airport. What is it? I just want to travel with my dog. Well, then we'll call it a service dog, and then you can travel with your dog. Everything we're wired for is sort of hacks and shortcuts. And it's not even a bad thing. It's just sort of how we're wired. So if you're going to offer things up, such as you can get into this college with a lower GPA and a lower test score, a lower SAT, if we find out that you have some Hispanic blood or American Indian blood or African American blood, if we can find that out, well, then everyone's going to do it if we offer it. If we offer it. A huge scale. I think it was at Stanford. How many students were saying that they had a disability so that they could get an extra day to take a test? It's a lot. OK, is it their fault? And my answer is it's not their fault. It's what people do. It's human nature. And what the Democrats are asking is that we go against human nature and it Speaker 3 (24:50) never works. It never works. And it all it's all contingent. that The people who express that instinctual edge or advantage or self-interest, the full expression of it has to be the minority group of the society because the society won't function if every single person does it all the time. So when you say, like, before affirmative action, it was the old white boy neck. If you wanted to get into Stanford or Harvard, you called your dad who called the dean. And that worked if a lot of people didn't do that, or you at least had pretty good grades. But when everybody starts to do it, and at Stanford the last four years, I'm only mentioning that because that's where I work and I know a little bit about it, 8 % were white males. So no SAT. Speaker 3 (25:44) 30 to 40 % were Black, Hispanic, gay, etc. Speaker 3 (25:52) The result was that the faculty was very left wing. So they would say to you, I have three choices. If I grade honestly and I have the same work requirement, I will come up statistically as giving lower grades to minorities. So I either have to give A's, 80