The Post-Truth World

Victor Davis Hanson sits down with Epoch Times for a wide-ranging, deeply disturbing analysis of the destruction of America.

Watch the whole interview here.

Epoch Times Exclusive: Victor Davis Hanson on the Assault on Meritocracy, Politicization of the Virus, and the ‘Platonic Noble Lie’

There will be “no safe space, no sanctuary from wokeism until the system starts to erode the safety and the security of the elite that created it,” says classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson.

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In this episode, Hanson breaks down the problems he sees plaguing American society today, from the assault on meritocracy to the “Frankenstein monster” of moral relativism.

Throughout society today, elites justify their control of or manipulation of information as for the good of the people, Hanson says. It’s the “noble lie”: “I’m smarter than you. I’m your platonic guardian. I can lie for your own good…Just don’t dare suggest I’m lying,” Hanson says.

Jan Jekielek: Victor Davis Hanson, so great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek: Victor, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how some people call us living in a post-truth world. Others I’ve spoken with on this show describe it as an epistemic crisis.

I want to talk about this, but I’ve been watching this play out—you and I have both been watching this play out: how this story of the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus has changed over the last year and a bit. It’s pretty fascinating.

Mr. Hanson: Well, remember what happened. The Chinese government said that this was some kind of bat or pangolin jump from nature to human transmission. We had the utmost confidence in the WHO, World Health Organization, and they confirmed that. Dr. Tedros said that it was non-transmissible between humans and it originated in a wet market.

There had been little rumors that there was a Level 4 virology lab in Wuhan, so that was the narrative. Donald Trump, remember, was doing trade deals at the time with China, so he actually accepted all of this.

Dr. [Anthony] Fauci was telling us, as the head of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that we shouldn’t worry and it won’t be a pandemic. For the first January and February, that was the narrative. Then when it started to spread, people started to notice that people in Wuhan had been locked down from other parts of China, but they were perfectly able or maybe encouraged to go to European ports of entry or LAX or JFK.

I think we had about a million people in that 11- or 12-day period when the Chinese communist government said, “Nobody from Wuhan is going to get near us, but you’re all going to go to the United States, if you wish.” So that was starting to break down this narrative that it was just a benign infectious coronavirus, and then suddenly people started to whisper there was a Chinese military presence in the lab.

There were dissident voices who said that the Chinese government was not telling you the truth about the severity or the transmissibility or the infectiousness of the virus, and then there were people, dissident voices who said, “We don’t have an animal species with the virus. We only have the human species, so we’ve got to find the animal.”

Then all of a sudden, this was hit with huge pushback—Dr. [Peter] Daszak, Dr. Fauci, WHO. How dare you try to be such a racist? Then the Chinese communist government was giving us propaganda talking points, which the left eagerly [used].

Then Donald Trump, in late April, excuse me, late March, started to say that was the virus and that thing came from the lab, and they were experimenting on gain-of-function, and he had probably seen intelligence reports. In fact, I think he said he did, and that became taboo because Donald Trump had said something.

This time, it wasn’t just, “There is no Russian collusion,” or “Hydroxychloroquine has efficacy,” but it was, “The Wuhan lab is connected with the origins of the virus.” So anything that Donald Trump said was true had to be false.

It was an election year, after all. Then the scientific community created—we created this word, “the science.” The science says, the genome says, the virologist said. Beneath this entire façade, there were motivations. Dr. Fauci had subsidized Echo Health, Dr. Daszak, with sizable grants who then had rechanneled some of that money into the virology lab to conduct gain-of-function research that was banned in the United States.

So then people reacted accordingly. We would not want American public to think that we encouraged a gain-of-function ability of a virus that was otherwise confined originally to a bat or pangolin, but we took that virus and changed it and it got out of this lab. That was about a year’s narrative.

My interest in all of this is not that it became politically incorrect to question the wet market thesis and to suggest the lab, but if you think about it rationally, a lot of people died. Just think if in January or February, the Chinese government had come out and said, “We were engaged in research, and we are not solely culpable because American public health officials gave us some money, so we’re jointly culpable, and we’ll jointly solve this problem. But this thing is really scary because it’s a gain-of-function, unnatural, engineered virus.”

The whole world would have just panicked, and we would have had lockdowns, and we would have had quarantines early. We might have stopped it.

But instead, anybody who suggested this was demonized, ostracized, canceled. Nobody cared about the truth. The truth was [evaluated by] are the aims or the ends to hurt Donald Trump? If it is, any means necessary are justified.

Mr. Jekielek: This wasn’t just the politicians and the bureaucrats that were holding this line, but there were major scientific periodicals. I’m thinking of “Nature,” one of the preeminent biology journals in the world, at least one of them, that were also very much holding this line, shockingly so, I think.

Mr. Hanson: Yes, I think one of the most egregious examples was “Lancet” in Britain where Dr. Daszak had actually encouraged a group of preeminent virologists and epidemiologists to speak with one voice and condemn anybody who would dare connect the lab with the origins of COVID, even though they were in the same city, very logical connection to be made.

What he didn’t tell us, under the guise of “the science,” was that he was engaged, as we said, in transferring funding to this lab, and more importantly, some of the people that he was organizing to sign that letter had conflicts of interest as well. The letter was not: let’s open a debate and investigation. The letter was that this is anti-scientific, or nonscientific, or how dare you?

Because looming behind all these discussions is the unmentionable, the unfathomable, the thing that terrifies us, and what would that be? That would be that an American preeminent scientist, doctor, medical professional, architect of national health policy—a Dr. Fauci, for example—knowingly channeled gain-of-function research money through a third party to China, and that that had something to do with an enhanced virus that then leaked when that laboratory was under suspicion prior of having lax security measures.

If that were true, then if you reduce it down to its essence, the United States had some culpability and did not tell the world that they had subsidized the creation of this satanic virus.

Mr. Jekielek: So you think this is all a political construct then or is there something deeper here?

Mr. Hanson: The lesson of all of this is multi-faceted. It has shaken the confidence in professionals with letters after their name—so BA, MA, PhD, JD, whatever the particular rubric is. We don’t believe that the World Health Organization is immune from Chinese propaganda.

We don’t believe, after we read the emails from Dr. Fauci, that because he’s an eminent MD and researcher that he deserves utmost respect, especially when he said that he deliberately mislead us about masks, so that people wouldn’t have a run on masks.

He deliberately mislead us about herd immunity so that people would get vaccinated. In other words, he used what we in classics call the Platonic noble lie. I’m smarter than you, I’m your platonic guardian. I can lie for your own good. You, the deplorables, are ignorant. You’ll benefit from my lie. Just don’t dare suggest I’m lying.

It really shook our confidence in that and then all of these organs of liberal expression in the media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Network News. We all thought that they were in the civil liberties tradition. The more light, remember, democracy dies in darkness, so to speak, bring the light out. But they were actually collaborating with the establishment scientific community and the progressive political movement to squash any mention of a lab.

And then they did something that was, I think, unconscionable. When Donald Trump tried to irritate the Chinese, and he called it the Chinese virus, he was doing what we do by calling it the Spanish flu of 1918, or the Ebola virus because, or Lyme disease in Connecticut.

We’re speaking in the San Joaquin Valley. I grew up with something called Valley fever. I went to Stanford University and people say, “You live in the valley? What’s that Valley fever you guys all die of?” The point is that you always have a geographical connotation, and all Trump was doing is trying to needle them or troll them, but he was not being racist.

But then they fabricated this enormous narrative that Donald Trump was a racist, and therefore, nothing he said could be valuable. This would be later on very valuable in this post-truth world to say that even though data showed that overwhelmingly on a per capita basis, African-American male youth were overrepresented, if I can use that term, in attacks on Asians, and these were hate crimes that were not commensurate with their percentages of population, it didn’t matter.

People said, “We’re not going to report that crime,” or “we’re going to get a member of the Asian-American community to say that it’s still white people doing this because Donald Trump created the climate by using the word China or Wuhan virus.” So all of this was not connected with reality. It was not fact-based.

Mr. Jekielek: I think we’ve been talking about this idea that reality, what actually happened in a situation, seems to in past years become a lot less relevant or a lot less important to the general discourse. That of course can be used for political expediency. There’s an ideological bent to this.

Mr. Hanson: Yes. Well, in the Western empirical tradition, the Socratic tradition, the Aristotelian tradition, there were always dissidents. We call them the sophists. Sophist was not a bad word in antiquity. It just meant somebody who was wise like a sophist.

It could be a deprecatory word, but basically they challenged facts and reality. They said, “If I can prove an argument to you that you can be persuaded by words, then it’s true, or otherwise you wouldn’t be able to be persuaded,” and so the sophists began saying that there were things that were relative. You say honey is sweet. That’s only because you think it’s sweet. And then this person doesn’t like honey. Therefore, it’s not sweet—rather than, let’s systematically, empirically, in the inductive mood, get 100 people, poll them, and 99 percent will say, “Honey is sweeter than salt.” Therefore, it’s sweet.

But you see, they always take the exception to destroy the function or the foundation of empiricism. So that wasn’t new.

In the 19th century, Marxism—based on, there was Hegel and Nietzsche who were contributors to it—but it said, “These norms, these traditions, these laws, these canons are artificially constructed, and they’re constructed by a power class, people who inherited wealth or influence or got it through ill-gotten gains.”

And they’ve set up an arbitrary system of rules. They call this shoplifting, so they put you in jail when you go into a store and take something that’s not yours, but who says that they didn’t commit a crime to have the money to have that store?

So it was a method of being relativist and say that every single crime or every single thought, there was a class struggle behind it. Take that idea from Marx, and over the next century, it was going to be translated in the Frankfurt School, but especially by people in Italy like Gramsci and then back here in the United States, by Herbert Marcuse.

I was a student of Norman O. Brown’s at UC Santa Cruz. They said that this relativism is not just Marxist class struggle because after all, we don’t really have a class struggle in the United States. Free market capitalism can make a guy on Monday who’s middle class on Tuesday wealthy, and vice versa.

But they said, “It’s racist,” and race is immutable, it’ll never change. LeBron will be a victim the rest of his life, so will Oprah, so will Meghan Markle. It doesn’t matter how much money they have. This was a very valuable tool for the left because it said, “You don’t have to worry about losing your constituency.” LeBron is always going to be a victim because he’s black, and he’s always suffering from an oppressor class that have set up arbitrary rules, and so now when we look at this woke movement, this anti-empirical movement you’re talking about, CNN, Don Lemon can be a multi-millionaire, it doesn’t matter. He is a victim because he’s black, because the society is systemically racist.

Then notice how the vocabulary came in from the postmodernists. If you can’t see it, and it’s not fact-based, then it’s systemic, it’s insidious, or it’s a micro-aggression. So they had to come up with words to create a reality that otherwise wasn’t observable to the senses, and that was an untruth.

But basically, we’re in a climate that started on campus with academics, and it’s now permeated the larger culture that says crimes, laws, SAT scores, ACTs, GPAs, these are all constructs that are used to discriminate against people that don’t have access to power, and these people in our modern American society are more likely to be oppressed because of race.

We’re speaking in Fresno County. I can go right out my door and find 10 white people that are 20 years old that have no privilege. They’re either without BAs or high school degrees, and they’re working as welders, forklift drivers, long haul truckers. But according to this critical racial theory, they have a privilege that Oprah, the $2 billion worth Oprah, lacks because they’re white, and they exercise that privilege every day when they drive their forklift around.

That’s where we are. It’s like Alice through the looking glass. Everything’s upside down.

Mr. Jekielek: This is something I’ve been thinking about. Why this apparent war on merit, or war on even talent, I suppose?

Mr. Hanson: When you mention talent, you just mentioned a hierarchy. So if I was a sophist of the ancient or modern brand, I would say to you, “Well, what does talent mean? Define talent for me.”

You’re going to say, “Well, Victor, when you want to see if you’re going to be first chair violin, or second chair violin, or third chair in an orchestra. We’re going to put one person behind a wall and the other person behind a wall so you don’t know their identities, and you’re going to listen to the music.”

I’m going to say, “Oh yes,” but one person brought up in a particular cultural environment knows the technique of pleasing a particular violin strain to that particular audience that’s also privileged, and who to say is that strain is not as or more or less engaging than the person who happens to be a person of color?

I’m not making this up. This is now an attack on blind merit, so to speak, and this applies to everything. The danger of it is that there’s no end to it, it’s nihilistic, and it starts to impair the safety of society.

I’ve been to a lot of places in the world, and one of the things I always say to myself: why does the bathroom not work? Why is there trash outside? Why is the bus broken down? Why when somebody pulls out in front of somebody, they get out and fight?

I always come with the same conclusion: because they hire their first cousin. In other words, when I go to the Middle East, it’s a tribal society, and merit is not a criterion that people respect. It’s got a higher cronyism than the United States. We all have that, but it’s the aberration, not the norm.

Once you get rid of merit, and you start to use deductive qualifications, then you’re going to have an insidious decline. You can see it, if you think over the last 50 years in the age of affirmative action. What was the joke that everybody said? I think it was Cassius Clay, later, Muhammad Ali, when he was flying once, he said, “I want to make sure this pilot is of a particular race.” He was trying to say that he didn’t want affirmative action. They used to say nuclear plant operator.

The reason I mention that is that now we know that United Airlines is going to have pilot training that’s going to be based on racial criteria on who is going to be accepted, not prior skills or requisites.

So there will be no sacrosanct, no safe space, no sanctuary from wokeism until the system starts to erode the safety and the security of the elite that created it, and we’re starting to see that a little bit already.

Mr. Jekielek: For example, in Portland, the Antifa protests have turned into a whole lawless sector in the middle of Portland, presumably. So how is it that this just wasn’t dealt with for such a long time?

Mr. Hanson: Well, you remember the mayor, as I recall, of Portland said it was going to be a summer of love, I think. We had all of these mayors—I get them confused—the Seattle mayor, the Portland mayor, and the Minneapolis mayor.

Basically, if I could conflate them, they said that brick and mortar didn’t matter. If you burn down a precinct or a federal courthouse, it didn’t matter because these were symbols of authority that was unearned or ill-gotten, and that this natural exuberance would play itself out if we appeased it.

In other words, the laws of human nature no longer apply, that somebody will do something until there’s a deterrent to stop them. What stops them? What ultimately stops them? Society reaches a critical tipping point when people—the majority of the people, whether they’re vigilantes in San Francisco in 1850, or whether they’re the community of Salem, Massachusetts, when they’re starting to burn witches on charges of witchcraft—at some point, somebody says, “The society can no longer exist if this continues.”

What would be some of the things I’m talking about? If you have areas in Portland, or Seattle, or Minneapolis where the downtown is barricaded, where people have died there, where it’s filthy, then that’s something that people are going to be worried about.

If you go to Venice Beach on the way to Santa Monica, and you see people living like they’re out of the 8th century—feces, poor people, violence, tribalism.

Or if you’re in San Francisco, and you see a video of a person who rides his bike into a Walgreens and then in front of the security guard, fills up a trash bag with things, steals them unapologetically, is let go because he feels that it’s less than $1,000, so the lunatic district attorney will not charge him.

Well, that’s a breakdown in the order of society. We’re not talking about elite squabbles on who gets into Princeton and who doesn’t. We’re talking about getting up in the morning and being able to survive one more day.

When that is questioned—and we’re getting close in the major cities—then you’re going to have a gut check time. People are either going to say, “You know what? It’s lost. I’m heading out toward the rural areas. I’m going to find a community in Utah, or Nevada, or something, or I’m going to stay and fight.”

I don’t have an answer because, as an American, I think this is a collective madness that happened with George Floyd, the pandemic, the scares of the coronavirus, the lockdown, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd protests, the election year, the weird early voting mail-in ballots—all of those were forced multipliers of the madness.

Locked in, people were watching TV or computers and not interacting. I think that’s collective madness. I have to hope it’ll wane now, but maybe the virus is so deeply embedded now, it can’t be exiled.

Mr. Jekielek: What virus exactly are you talking about here?

Mr. Hanson: Well, I’m not talking about the recession virus, all those viruses, or the George Floyd reaction viruses, or the quarantine virus, or the election virus, but the woke virus.

That is the idea that somewhere in this annus horribilis of 2020, we collectively lost our mind, and we said that we’re going to adopt the culture and the code and the values of the Salem Witch Trials, the Reign of Terror in 1793 in France, and the McCarthyite period in the United States, where we’re going to cancel a person out if we find one incorrect thought or utterance. And we’re going to completely reject the civil rights movement and the visions of Martin Luther King, so the color of our skins is a very critical requisite of who we are, and not the content of our character.

That’s where we are, and we know from Iraq, Rwanda, and the Balkans where that leads. It leads to nihilism, deadly nihilism.

Mr. Jekielek: This is interesting. There’s been a lot of discussion about critical race theory. Of course, this is one of the ideologies behind what you’re talking about. There’s this element where the people who are advocates will say, “Well, you don’t really understand what it is,” and so forth.

Mr. Hanson: Well, critical means that it’s critical of the norm, and theory means that it can’t be proved, so it’s not a fact. It’s a suspicion.

It started in—there were elements of Marx in Freud. Think of that. Those are the two pernicious thinkers of the 19th century. Marx said that all of human experience can be defined as oppressor versus oppressed, or victim versus victimizer. There is no middle class. If there is a middle class, it’s only the deluded who think they’re middle class. So there’s this tension. Anybody who has things got them, ill-gotten gains, what we call now under critical race theory, honor and privilege, and then there are the people who have a right to take it from them and redistribute it.

Okay, that was the Marxist end. Then Freud came along and said, “What you and I are doing right now is not who we are. These are just superficial manifestations of deep-seated urges. If we were under psychoanalysis, or we got drunk, the real us would come out. The hang ups that we use to suppress our inner self cannot be taken seriously.” And that was very important because critical theory then adopted the idea that norms are not only to be termed them versus us, but what people say cannot be trusted.

If you say, “I’m not racist, I’ve never said the N-word.” They said, “Yes, but you said colored people instead of people of color. That suggests to me that deep down inside you really wanted to say the N-word. Or you live in a certain way that is systemically racist. You don’t know it, but I’m trained to fathom it.”

So a critical racial theory workshop specialist can, in Freudian fashion, can find your symptoms and say, “Ta da, he’s a racist. It’s insidious, it’s systemic.”

Those were the two fountainheads of critical theory. And then when you add the third necessary component—World War I and World War II, where Europe committed collective suicide—you saw it in painting, poetry. After World War I, they took something like Impressionism, which was a take off on classical reality, and then they went into Dadaism and Surrealism and got into Jackson Pollack.

Well, art never looked like anything the eyes saw. Poetry didn’t rhyme, it had no particular vocabulary. T.S. Eliot had seemed radical, and he would be, what, conservative. He was very soon compared to what was called poetry. You could throw anything on a page, just like you could with paint, and it was a poem. Then there were certain schools that grew up in that general period of depression.

Then this accelerated in World War II. When the French army, the bulwark of the West, with Churchill’s great faith that stopped Nazism, the very country that said, “They shall not pass” collapsed in six weeks in 1940 in May and June, how do you explain that to future generations? You don’t, so you come up with this French post-structuralism, post-modernism that you really either didn’t collapse or that it believed in fake laws or traditions.

You say anything other than what an empiricist would say, “Well, it was inevitable because you were teaching in the 1920s it was illegal to mention Verdun in a positive sense.” You just said it was a nihilistic bloodbath, whether then the French army saved France from Germany. Socialism was deeply embedded, and this is the net logical fruition.

What I’m getting at is that a lot of people, to explain reality that they did not like or they could not accept, took earlier Freudism, Marxism, and then critical theory was born in the Frankfurt School and Gramsci, and then that became critical legal theory.

We saw that in the 1980s in what people said. Originally, there were elements of truth in it. If you snort cocaine and you’re wealthy, you go five years to prison. If you cook it, and it’s crack cocaine, you got 20, because you’re black. Well, there may have been some truth to that.

But they expanded that to all of Western jurisprudence, that you don’t look at the law and you don’t look at the manner in which the law was made. You look at who benefits and who suffers from the law, and then therefore, you adjudicate it—whether it has any moral or legal authority.

And that was very important because the whole sanctuary city movement where you nullify federal laws based on a racist, oppressive, federal immigration law. Notice what was ironic about it was nullification of law was always a right-wing concept, so the left told us. It was what Andrew Jackson tried to fight with South Carolina in 1832. It was what caused the Civil War.

It was what George Wallace said in the door at the University of Alabama when he said, “I don’t have to follow federal law. This is the state’s rights.” Suddenly, state’s rights became great. You can nullify federal law because it’s for a noble purpose, so it was relativism par excellence.

That’s where we are, where every single idea is not factually based. I’m not exaggerating. I’m getting back to that earlier point. So if you have data that, let’s take an example, that non-white minority groups commit hate crimes against whites and each other at higher rates than in their percentages of the population than whites, that’s a data point…..

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