Exclusive: Victor Davis Hanson on the Assault on Meritocracy, Politicization of the Virus, and the ‘Platonic Noble Lie’
June 26, 2021
AMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS

VIDEO AT WEB PAGE

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.

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.


Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from June 26, 2021. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Yan 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 what 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 in this, how the 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 nontransmissible between humans and it originated in a wet market.

There had been little rumors that there was a level four 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. 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, and 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 a animal species with the virus. We only have human species, so we’ve got to find the animal.”

All of a sudden, this was hit with huge pushback, Dr. 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 …

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’d 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. 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.

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