Transcription
[Music] Morning, glory, and evening grace, America. I'm Hugh Huitt. Welcome to hour three of today's program.
I've spent the first two hours talking about Charlie as an individual, a person that I knew well and known since 2012 or 2013 when he was literally just getting started in talking to 10 high school students in a room. And there are lots of people who know Charlie a lot better than me. But there is only one person I think could put this in perspective for us, and it's Victor Davis Hansen. Victor, of course, classicist, historian extraordinaire with Stanford. He is, um, the author of so many wonderful books, including most recently, *The End of Everything*. And I have been listening to *The End of Everything* for about three weeks. And last night, as I flew from the West Coast to the East Coast, I listened again to the beginning and the end and a little bit about the Aztecs because I was just trying to get my mind off it. But Charlie, Victor, welcome. Thank you for joining me. I do want to talk about *The End of Everything*, but I'd like to begin with your reflections on the significance of an assassination of a young political rising star.
Well, I don't like the word irreplaceable, but it applies to him. Uh, I can't think of anybody under the age of 40, either conservative or liberal, that had such a multiplicity of talent. He was an administrator. He created a huge, enormous, um, organization from nothing. He was very instrumental in the 2024, uh, victory of Trump by his massive voter registration of young people. If you look at the statistics compared to 2020 versus 2024, Trump in the key states made sizable gains in the youth vote. Uh, he was a, he could write, he had a podcast, he spoke very easily, extemporaneously. Uh, he, I don't know anybody in the world with one year of college who would weigh into debate at Oxford and Cambridge and do so well. So he, he was just an unusual person, and it, it's not going, I don't think anybody on the conservative side could ever approach that level of talent and, uh, effect and influence. So it's going to be, it's, and I think that was the aim of the assassin, and the assassin grasped that. We are going to find out more about the killer in the next days. I, I'm sure now that we have a picture and a gun, they will capture him unless he takes his own life. And I, I know what was written on the casings. I'm not going to speculate. But it's an assassination. And, and you and I, Victor, can remember Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, George W. Wallace being shot, I think in the '72 election campaign, couple of shots taken at President Ford, and then of course, Butler. But this is, this is one like Robert Kennedy's that worked on a younger figure in the political arena.
Um, what impact does it have on our country beyond sorrow?
Well, we've had, because Charles Kirk was both a political activist, but he was also in the media, in his podcast, his interviews, his columns. So we don't really see that too often in the United States. We see it in Europe and Latin America, Mexico, where groups will go after journalists or media prominent. I mean, we have people who, who have been killed that were journalists, but not that prominent. And so, this, this is sort of, I don't know what you would call it, you crossing the Rubicon, because it's sending a message that there's everyone on the conservative side is fair game. And the reaction of some people on the left, at least, at least the initial reaction, I don't know if they've subdued their emotions, but it shows that they're not unhappy. And we saw the same, the same type of illness after Luigi Manion, where he was be, he was considered a folk hero for killing Brian Thompson. And the same thing happened after Trump. The same things happened with threats to Elon Musk. So I don't, I think this is, this is the beginning of something very dangerous, 'cause I think people on the left, if this person turns out to be the left, will feel that this is a legitimate way to achieve political power that they lack right now. They don't have any political power in the House, the presidency, the top courts, and they're 30-70 on the major issues. And there's a radicalized element that allows this to happen. And I, I think also very quickly, uh, if you continue to call the president of the United States a fascist or Hitler, as we see, or New York puts a cover story where he looks like Hitler with a mustache, or you have your Senate, your House minority leader come with a baseball bat, or you have kickboxing, uh, videos of House representatives are going to fight, and it's all fight in the streets, and what you see at ICE, then that filters down to people and it brings people out of the woodwork who otherwise would stay there. And I think we've created a climate where it's considered that some people on the left feel they're morally superior, they're intellectually superior, they're part of a, a stratum that is superior, and they feel that any means necessary are justified to their noble ends. And that's a very dangerous thing to do.
If you have, Victor, yesterday I, uh, I spent an hour with Justice Amy Coney Barrett talking with her about her new book, *Listening to the Law*, and we did not talk about specifically the portion of her book that dealt with what justices have to deal with now. Uh, the Kavanaugh near assassination, the daily protest, the leaks from the court. We didn't talk about that. I'll talk with her about it when I interview her on air next week, and I'll play the tape of that. But it seems to me the new normal was her security detail was extensive. We were inside of the Dixon Library. You've been there at the Yorba Linda. You know, it's very secure. She had done the Reagan Library the night before, very secure. Do you think we're going to end there, an era where people just don't do events in the open air anymore?
I don't know. But when you mentioned Supreme Court, and I was referencing mainstream politicians lowering the bar, I remember Chuck Schumer got out in front of the court while it was in session, at a, at a throng of anti-pro-life protesters, and then he yelled out by name Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and said they had reaped the wind and they were going to sow the whirlwind, and they were, quote, "They're not going to know what you're not going to know what's going to hit you." And then a few months later, we started to see this very scary phenomenon of people assembling at the, at the homes of justices, and one was a potential assassin, as you know, he was talked out of it by his sister. So, yeah, I think that justices in general, but, um, when you look at the Scaliz, and you look at the two Jewish Americans that were killed in Washington, that the attack on the, um, the Scaliz and the Republican, some of the Republican leadership, and the two against Trump, even Josh Shapiro's, that attack on his home, that person was a radical pro-Palestinian. I get a little bit irritated, you know, when everybody just says this is just a climate of violence. I'm not trying to excuse the people on the right that have employed violence, but in this particular time, in this particular moment, it's mostly, mostly people on the left that justify it, and then they tend to, they be, they tend to be unapologetic about it. They, they just come.
Well, we have a, in, in the law, we have a, a phrase, excited exclamation, which is, uh, sometimes admitted into trial. If it's, if you're making an utterance in the moment of excitement, it's considered probative. I saw the TMZ video yesterday. It's not dispositive for me, but it sounded like people were cheering. I, I read *Blue Sky* on the airplane for a couple of hours last night, and I'm, I'm amazed at how evil people are, or how sick. So, this brings me to the moment we're in. We've talked about President Obama ushering in a revolutionary period in American politics. Donald Trump being the counterrevolution, the attempt to start the counterrevolution through lawfare, the continuation of the counterrevolution. What's this? Is this what the Grockai being murdered by? They were tribunes. Charlie was really a tribune of the people. Is that this?
Yeah. I think because we are in a counterrevolution and we're questioning everything, such as the transgendered idea that it's a normalized third sex, or the DEI, that your superficial appearance is essential rather than incidental to who you are. The Green New Deal has lost traction. I think people on the left feel that that top-down, uh, revolution that was not shared by the majority of the people is now in danger. And it's not just in danger. There's millions of jobs that are in danger, careers, reputations that are in danger, and they feel that they can eliminate key people in that counterrevolution, whether it's Donald Trump or Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk. And, and I think there will be other threats to other people, even lowly people like myself. I mean, I live out in the country, but I had my home swatted where somebody said there was an armed intruder and an armed sheriff showed up. There was nobody here, of course. I went to the local bank that I've known my entire life, and I found that my entire savings and checking had been hacked and completely drained. I asked if it had happened to anybody there in the bank. No. So, and I think that all the people on the conservative side that are somewhat outspoken are going to be questioned. And I, and I think it's going to continue. I really do, because I don't see people on the left, by and large, um, apologizing for it or saying that it was completely wrong. Even when, uh, the MSNBC analyst was fired, if you look at that exchange, Katie Tour, the, uh, the host, really prompted his response, Matthew Dao, because she was the one that first thing she said out of the, out of the, out of the, in this segment was that Charlie Kirk was a divisive person. Was a conditional sentence. If he's, if he was divisive, then you can fill in the blanks. And that the blanks would be the obvious implication that he deserved what he got. And basically, it's interesting about Katie. He's not divisive. He's an actor in politics. He would go onto campuses and engage with young people, and they would do prove me wrong moments. It made for great videos, viral moments. Um, he would give ground occasionally, and he always ended with a smile and a handshake. Charlie was actually joyful. I don't know that this won't darken a generation.
Do you think it will?
Yeah, I think it's, it's sort of a force multiplier. I mean, we're talking on 9/11, and then we had, uh, Irania Zatus Zu, I don't, Zarvatusa, who was murdered. Not just murdered, but in her death rows and bewilderment, facing death and eternity. The guy walks by dripping blood, and I listened to the video very carefully, and I could hear twice, maybe I'm mistaken, if so, correct me, that he said, "Got the white girl," twice. Then the three people across the aisle got up, watched her die, and didn't even lend a finger. And that there, it was all, then the mayor's reaction, and then the circumstances of why car de Carlos Brown were out there, it was just overwhelmingly, uh, the worst. It sort of the culmination of left-wing ideology in so many things. It reminded me of the less toxic, but also lethal Palisades fire. Just a train wreck of leftist ideologies all coming at once to destroy this poor girl's life. And then no one really saying, publicly, why don't you cover this? Why are you suppressing us? Why are you suffocating the story? Why didn't these people help? What was going through his mind? Why was he out as a 14-year-old? That type of thing. And then we have Charl, Charles, Charles Kirk. And it just, I think it, those events, and there was a murder in Auburn as well by a felon who shouldn't have been out. I think it's just overwhelming to people. And I think whatever these, whatever's going on, enough is enough. And the best thing I think for Charl, and I had just done Charlie's show in late August and had a long talk with him. You're absolutely right. And I'd been out, you know, to Phoenix and spent a couple of days with him. And in the past, he was, he wasn't a, he, he wasn't a divisive figure. He always wanted to encounter people and see if he could persuade them. And the statistics show in the 2024 election, they made sizable gains in the swing states because of those efforts along with voter registration. But I think people have just, they're kind of bewildered, but they do have an idea that enough is enough. And the best thing they could do is register in enormous numbers in November and do something historic and, uh, not lose the midterms as most presidents do after two years, win them by a decisive margin. That was something he was really interested in.
Let me ask you, Victor, about autodidacts. Uh, I met Charlie when he was 18 or 19. As I said, he didn't know a lot, but he had a lot of enthusiasm, and he would call and compliment me on, uh, Hillsdale Dialogue with Dr. Arn. He couldn't get enough. You know, autodidacts are often driven to learn more and more and more. And he participated in all the Hillsdale courses. I'm sure he participated with you in that. And he was on a trajectory, I don't know if it was political or not. I don't know that he had ambitions for himself. He certainly could have had any job in the White House that he wanted. The president liked him that much. He didn't want anything. He wanted to build his movement. But are autodidacts unique in your experience in terms of their hunger for knowledge?
Uh, well, you know, in the field that I, a classical philology and classics in general, it's, it's ironic that you ask me that question because the three, I think the great three great achievements in the last 150 years were all autodidacts. We had Heinrich Schliemann, and of course, he made the argument there was a historic Troy and Mycenae. He was a German banker. And then we had Michael Ventris. He was an architect that had cryptography, cryptology experience in World War II. And he proved that Linear B was Greek, and the Mycenaeans were not, uh, non-Greek speakers or Semitic people. They were Greeks. And everybody that were classics, PhDs and formidable scholars, had not been able to decipher it. And then, in some ways, there was, uh, Milman Parry. He had a degree in classics, but he was a maverick, and he went out and lived in Serbo-Croatia and he proved that Homer did not write the, the *Iliad* or the *Odyssey*, that it was a product of oral composition, which exists today in Serbia and the Balkans. So I've always been very sympathetic to, uh, to autodidacts. But I will say this, may be controversial, very quickly, you, I'm more sympathetic now than I was even 20 years ago or 30 years ago because something's happened to the humanities in the university where the people who are trained are not trained well. In my, in my field, they do not know Latin and Greek in the way that we were trained. They don't know classical scholarship. They're theorists. Theory in the humanities has become an excuse not to learn the discipline. So an English PhD will not know Milton, they will not know Shakespeare's plays, they won't know Ben Jonson, uh, they'll just read contemporary theory. They're not well educated. So I think the decline of the university, at least in the humanities, uh, makes the autodidact, in some ways, more important than ever. That's why I think the Hillsdale courses online, uh, matter so much to America and millions of people are taking it.
Victor, I want to transfer now from the tragedy of Charlie's death and the circumstance of what it says about the counterrevolution and the revolution to your book, *The Rare Abrupt End of Civilizations*. And by the way, it's fascinating. I don't know where you found the time to do this. I only knew about Carthage among your four case studies. And I didn't know much about the Third Punic War. I knew about the second and the first. And I didn't know anything about Thebes. I knew Byzantium fell, but I didn't know how decrepit it had become and internally rotten. I didn't know anything about the Aztecs other than, um, they were destroyed. And your argument is a final seizure, invasion that leads to the catastrophic disappearance of a people and a culture is not only not rare, it occurs with a, a certain frequency. You mentioned as well the, the Cherokees, the Jewish Yiddish community of Eastern Europe, that these things can collapse in a hurry. Now, I thought part of the message of your book was, America, wake up. Hypersonic missiles, enemies who are evil, the rapid deployment and distribution of of hypersonic missiles, aircraft carriers being targeted. It could all change in one day, in the way that Israel kind of changed two years ago on 10/1, and we changed 24 years ago on 9/11. Do, do you think that events like the assassination of Charlie pre-age that? Because we've had other political assassinations in my lifetime, Yitzhak Rabin being in Israel, for example, and they didn't pre-age anything other than tragedy. How do those two fit together? The end of everything and then the end of an individual's life as an act of violence?
Well, I, I think we've, we're at the end of everything of the status quo. I think everything is now on the table. And we have a strong element of people who believe that anything, uh, is justified by their noble and superior morality and intellectualism, and that's the left. And so I think that we're going to, I'm afraid that we're going to see more and more of this. And with the, as DEI starts to fade, there's billions of dollars and millions of people invested in it, and they're not going to go down, uh, without a fight. So, yes, I'm worried about that. One of the, the commonalities of those four civilizations that were, uh, destroyed, not just destroyed, but as you point out, were eliminated in toto, is that they didn't think that they would, that would happen. They didn't realize how dangerous the people were outside their walls. They didn't understand that people like Scipio Aemilianus or Alexander the Great or MT II considered themselves intellectuals, men of letters. They, they didn't understand that men of letters are highly sophisticated people can be the most deadly. They didn't understand that you cannot count on outside forces like allies. The Carthaginians thought, well, the Macedonians will come to the rear of the Romans. Or to the very day Constantinople fell, they kept saying, "Surely Western Christendom will come down the Hellespont at the last moment, the Dales will save us." That was, and that didn't. Thebes said, "The Spartans are almost to Corinthianism, they'll be here." That doesn't happen. So you have to be self-reliant. You have to be deterrent. But most importantly, you have to be empirical about what status you are in, what era your own society or civilization is. Is it financially stable? Is it have an adroit military? Does it have a, uh, workable, stable government? All of these things were not, were lacking there. It, the worst thing was that people were, it was very tragic writing that book, because when you look at what the Carthaginians did, they surrendered their arms. They trusted the Romans, and they had no idea what the Romans were up to. They just didn't, couldn't conceive of it. And the same thing is true of Constantine, the last emperor. He had no idea what the ultimate Ottoman objective was. He thought he did, but he really didn't. And neither did the Thebans. And I think sometimes we feel that we're protected by our, by our two oceans or our affluence, our traditions. And we're not. And in the, as you, in the epilogue, I pointed out the things that Mr. Erdogan is saying. He said he's going to send missiles into Athens. He's going to send missiles into, uh, Israel. He said that he has a solution for the Armenians that his grandfathers had. So I, I take him at his word. And I take the same thing of everybody has discounted Putin and all of the oligarchs and the Russian media and said he never used a tactical nuclear weapon. He doesn't want to destroy people. I don't believe that necessarily. I, I think that we're very close to, uh, a NATO-Russian confrontation, as we saw with the, the drones recently.
Oh my goodness. Well, as I was reading again the second time, because Victor and I were originally supposed to talk about *The End of Everything* last week, and then circumstances intervened. So I got a chance to listen to it and I wrote down some, not long unaddressed vulnerabilities. Well, that is us vis-à-vis the Chinese Communist Party and our open borders, long unaddressed vulnerability. We let everyone in. Uh, waning empires, do not want to accept the fact that they are waning. Naivety, hubris, ignorance of or indifference to new military technologies, a retreat into fantasy, and especially gullibility and ignorance about their enemies. I loved your line, Victor, "The cargo of affluence and leisure mark these precipices on which civilizations dance."
Well, if you wanted to describe, I, if we were playing a, a parlor game, people would say, "I got it. I got it. It's America." That would be it. Yeah. Absolutely. And we're $37 trillion in debt. We, Trump is trying to restore the military, but he doesn't have the financial wherewithal, really, to do it yet. We were down 50,000 recruits. They made an amazing effort to get the ranks back to normal size, but we're running a $1.1 trillion deficit. Um, trade deficit, probably. Well, he inherited a 1.9 budget deficit, and we have an open border with 12, 10 to 12 million people came across. We have 60, 70,000 people until recently were dying a year from fentanyl. But, and these things were not being addressed. And, and more importantly, I think, is the attitude of the people. We've got a, a credto you that says it was an amoral, it was a moral thing to let in millions of people and break federal law. But if you dare try to follow the law and return them to their points of origin, then that's amoral. Moral to let them in and break the law and endanger the security of the United States, but amoral to try to correct that and follow the law. And that's where we are. We're also at a place where 50,000 military-age males from the People's Republic of China cross the southern border. 50,000. That is so stunning that people are not alarmed by that. And you mentioned what happened to you at your bank. You know, we have a sponsor, Webroot. I'm telling everyone, you just can't live on the internet unprotected anymore. And it's not because of kids in their basement in their underwear. It's because of rogue criminal cartels in Eastern Europe, the Chaikoms, the Russians, the Iranians, everyone is trying to do this. But our blissful indifference.
Victor, you're neither, people mistake you for being a pessimist. You're not a pessimist. You're something of a scientist of facts. Uh, where do the facts lead here?
Well, the, the saving grace of the United States, it's Western, Westerners in, in general, as Churchill said of democracies, they always do the right thing last. It's a very self-critical and self-healing society. And we saw that. I mean, if we had this conversation two years ago, you and I said, or you said to me, "Don't worry, Victor, uh, six months into 2025, the border will be closed. There will basically be no illegal immigration, and that 40 to 50,000 soldiers that they're missing in the Pentagon, say, and they say due to, you know, drugs or obesity or gang, that's going to be limited, and Iran is not going to have a deliverable nuclear weapon for at least a few years." I would have thought you were crazy. And yet, we did that very quickly. And whatever people say about Donald Trump's, uh, language sometimes, he has done, I, I can't think of another Republican of any stripe who would be able to endure the level of, uh, hostility and still be able to stage this counterrevolution. It's, I've never seen anything like it. It, in, it's everything from DEI to architecture to iconoclasm. Every aspect of our culture, our social structure, our economics, our military, he's trying to address in four years. And he's been, for all of the criticism, he's been very successful. So we can change because most of the four horsemen, so to speak, of the Western apocalypse that we in Europe suffer, and we know that it's, as you said, open borders, it's fertility, 1.4 in Europe, 1.6 here. It's DEI, and it's this crazy, uh, war on fossil fuels and trying to really destroy us by unreliable and and costly wind and solar and other mandates. Those were all self-inflicted. Every one of those. And they can be addressed by simply changing the policy and unleashing the, the, the value and the strength of Western civilization. Empiricism, meritocracy, rationalism, the Judeo-Christian tradition, all of that is still there. We just need to reignite it. And societies are not linear. They're circular. So, we can, we can recover if we have the will.
Matt Continetti wrote in the Free Press today, and I think Matt is one of the brilliant young minds of the rising generation, "Who Will Save Us From This Freefall?" I'm paraphrasing the title. And I thought to myself when I read it, well, there's JD Vance, there's Marco Rubio, there's Tom Cotton, there's Ted Cruz, there's Elise Stefanik. There are a bunch of hard-nosed, serious people coming up. Especially the Vice President speaks passionately and from the heart. And I know the left hates all those people, hates them. But do you think the left might crumble? Uh, Solzhenitsyn said in *The Gulag Archipelago*, "What if it's all papier-mâché?" referring to the Soviet Union. Turned out it was. You could poke a stick through it. That was his phrase. What if the left is all papier-mâché, and Manny and all these other people are slogan piled on slogans that don't work outside of blue jurisdiction, deep blue jurisdiction, and Gavin Newsom and get crushed by, uh, Rubio or Vance or Cotton, whoever we nominate. Uh, I, I really do have hope that the new generation, much younger than you and me, are very, very hard-nosed. What do you think?
I, I do. I agree entirely with you. Uh, we're conservative traditionalism is winning the younger, uh, the younger generation. But the blue ideology, we know it doesn't work. It doesn't allow people to get married and have children and buy a home. It doesn't make them safe. And people know that we're getting four or five million people who are self-selecting a year fleeing these blue states like my own and yours. And in addition to that, uh, you look at the fertility rate in red states, it's almost two. And the top 10 states as far as fertility at 2, 1.9 are all red. And the bottom ones at 1.2, 1 are all blue. So that ideology is nihilistic. It's suicidal. It's inert. It's ossified. And it's not a dynamic. It's let's keep dividing the pie. Never enlarge it. Let's just keep arguing, arguing. It's, it's pre-civilizational racial tribalism. It's radical secularism. Uh, atheism. I, there's nothing in it that's dynamic. And once they gave up the old liberal democratic alternative to conservatism, which was, I didn't, I wasn't an adherent, but I admired many people on that side. That's gone. And they have become nihilistic. And I don't think it's a death cult. It's a suicidal cult. So I don't think.
Last question. Charlie was very, uh, outspokenly evangelical and more so as the years went on. Now, I'm a Roman Catholic Presbyterian, so I, I'm comfort, I can speak both Catholic and Protestant. Charlie spoke evangelical, but with a great deal of sympathy for and encouragement of young people who had rediscovered faith in God. Do you see that as the, the binary here? Those who have a belief in an ultimate purpose better than themselves that are, uh, based in the Creator, like the Declaration of Independence, versus the left, which is based, I don't know, whatever Marx believed in, nothing, actually, nihilism. Do you see the ascendant faith as being?
I, I do. I think people, I think people are are embracing religion and transcendence in the Christian sense. And when they look at the people who are not, and they see what they're doing, uh, in that emptiness of their soul and mind, they're captives of their appetites. So they have all this emphasis on the internet and selfies and high cuisine and the latest kitchen and the latest neat place to go, and it's all empty. And I think young people are saying to themselves, I want to, I don't want to just live anywhere. I want to live somewhere. I want to identify with some place and some people. I want to know my grandparents. I, I want to know, I want them to know my children. I want to go back to what my parents described. And because this world is a cruel world, and part of it, it's an atheistic world that believes that the only, the only existence is here. There is no soul. And you better cash in while you can and satisfy those appetites. And it leads to what we've just seen with Charlie, and on the, on the train in Charlotte, and elsewhere. And I think young people are to be commended because every time I meet them, just by happenstance, in the university classroom or at the airport, I'm always impressed. I really am. Much more so than your last two books. Your last two books, *The Dying Citizen* and *The End of Everything*, must-read reading for everyone. Are you done writing, Victor, or are you still at it? And what's next? Because that's kind of two parts of a trilogy. *The Dying Citizen* and *The End of Everything*. What's the third book?
Well, I just finished, uh, a 130,000-word, uh, it was called *The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump*. And I was interested not as a, not just, you know, pro-Trump book. I was wondering how somebody who had come from the depths, and I tried to historically suggest he had been in worse shape after January 6th than any major political figure in the past who came attempted a comeback, how he came back, what they did to him, how he was able to survive. And the last two chapters, because everything changes every day, or what is this counterrevolution, and will it work? And that should come out by Basic Books, I think, in March. I've had a few health issues, so I'm kind of cutting back, but that book I just finished it, so, uh, I'm waiting for the general edits, and it should be here in March from Basic Books.
It can't get here soon enough. Victor Davis Hanson, your podcast is indispensable. Both those with Jack and those with your, your young friend who's the woman whose name I can't recall, Sammy Wink. Yeah. Yeah. Sammy. She's fabulous. And they're fabulous podcasts. More the better. Thank you for spending a half hour with me today to salute Charlie and describe the end of everything and how we can avoid that. Victor Davis Hanson, always a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you.
Thank you for our quarter-century friendship. You.