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The Classicist Podcast with Victor Davis Hanson: “The New Dark-Age Mind”
As promised yesterday, here’s the second installment of the Hoover Institution’s new The Classicist podcast with Victor Davis Hanson (don’t get used to this pace — from here on out we’ll be releasing one new episode per week). Fair warning: this episode should probably be accompanied by a tumbler of scotch. Our topic: Victor’s thesis that the West is beginning the descent into a new intellectual dark age — something that he sees signs of everywhere from Ferguson to college campuses to the halls of power in California. Listen in below:
Published in Culture
TS – this new podcast is great but can you give us more that 15 minutes? You get us all hooked and, before you know it, the thing is over. If you and VDH are short on time maybe you could record the thing while he is shaving or grocery shopping or something. Multi-task! Thanks!
It’s a difference in the model of the parent institution. With the exception of The Bookmonger, Ricochet generally produces long-form (30-60 minute) podcasts. For the shows that Hoover produces, however (just to be clear, Ricochet has nothing to do with producing The Classicist, The Libertarian, etc. — we just post them here), they’re looking for shorter hits, which seems to be standard practice for think tanks. I’m sure we’ll occasionally do longer specials, however, like the Libertarian episode we did with Epstein and Yuval Levin earlier this year.
Troy, keep ’em coming. We can’t get enough VDH.
Source: Cardinal Manning The Pope & The Antichrist, 1861
The introductory music was taken from a film about a young African being oppressed by a myna bird. It’s racist.
VDH could well have included Matthew Shepard in his list of faux martyrs.
Troy,
Again the VDH take on things is at a different higher level. His argument brings to mind for me an old Ayn Rand anthology of essays “The Return of the Primitive”.
In it Rand goes through the greatest absurdities of the New Left of the 60s and 70s. The new modern left have regularized these ridiculous beliefs down to a science and instituted them formally with university positions, curriculum, administrators, and of course federal law to back it all up.
Only reality can effectively argue with them. The dark comedy of the California water supply and the gross mismanagement thereof caused by environmental obsessives is just the perfect foil. The reality of natures water supply just doesn’t want to conform to the idiocy of left wing ideology.
Maybe standing back and laughing at them is not just enjoyable but the best thing we can do.
Regards,
Jim
-Codevilla, The Character of Nations, p. 114-115.
link to rss feed please
seconded
Excellent post, Troy–you’re on fire!