Victor Hanson on Israel, immigration and the demonisation of masculinity

Three months after the October 7th massacre that shook Israel to the core, I put six burning questions before noted military historian, author and Hoover Institute fellow Victor Davis Hanson. I ask about Right-leaning luminaries who failed to condemn the atrocities, the Left’s rude awakening,  the immigration crisis, Western civilisation’s demise, the boy crisis and the demonisation of masculinity.

Victor Davis Hanson. Photo courtesy of Victor Hanson

I put it to Hanson that the massacres themselves have led to a brutal, red-pilling awakening throughout the West, but given the number of unassimilated Muslims currently living in European states, does it really matter? As pointed out by Dr Mordechai Kedar –  the values of the West contradict these of Islam so for Muslims, a full-on citizenship within a Western state, is not a possibility.

VDH Yes, I am aware of the growing unassimilated populations from the Islamic world in Europe, and the belated but now sudden European worry that is slowly translating into some action. The immigrant population is at a crossroads and I’m not sure it understands the dangers that it is precipitating given prior coddling and appeasement: if Muslim immigrants pull back from tribalism and hostility to the West, and emphasize integration and assimilation within the country they chose—they were, after all not coerced to immigrate—to migrate to, then the melting pot, albeit slower than in the US, will eventually work–but only if new illegal immigration is halted. 

But if these populations continue to self-segregate and separate, and not just resist assimilation, but attack the institutions and customs of their generous hosts, then at some point not far away, even the Europeans will be forced to close their borders, deport residents who are not citizens, and perhaps even naturalized citizens who commit felonies or engage in terrorist acts. It is simply becoming a question of civilisational survival and I have to believe even utopian Europeans will not willingly commit collective suicide.

HG Thomas Sowell argues that open-border policy advocates, wrongly treat immigration as a single item/entity. Different immigrant groups are fundamentally different in their culture, personal history, religion and work ethics.

VDH The attitude of Western hosts should be ignoring or, better, no tolerance for the tribal chauvinism and separatism among immigrants and perceived calls for particular exemption. The rule instead should, and I think soon will, be: anyone of any religion, race, or national origin who chooses to come legally to a particular Western country will have to learn the language, be self-supporting, integrate, and accept the traditions and customs of the host.

And any who resist that, or openly oppose such conditions to the extent of breaking the law, will either fail to enter the country, or have their trial residences revoked. I think all that is pretty much the subtext of the emerging new anti-open-borders politicians in Europe. Or to put it differently, I don’t know any Western leader—with the exception of Joe Biden or whoever is in fact controlling his policies, such as the Obamas—who still advocates or tolerates open borders and tribal and religious chauvinism in immigrant communities.

The tipping point of 25-30 percent of a host population being comprised of immigrants, both unassimilated and often those of illegal status, is nearing, so action is needed quickly—and this is particularly true of Islamic immigrants from the Middle East whose intolerant leaders pled that assimilation with their hosts is some sort of religious and tribal betrayal.

HG Are you not troubled by fellow luminaries not condemning the October 7 atrocities? By this I refer to making a bold statement as did Douglas Murray for example, many leading ’thinkers’ remained silent.

VDH Of course, I expected silence about or even criticism of Israel from the Democratic Party Left that to be truthful is now controlled by the socialist/DEI/woke activists. They conflate Israel with “whiteness” and feel, as self-declared victims, they are exempt from charges of anti-Semitism and racism, even though most are quite privileged and the beneficiaries of asymmetrical government and private largess and exemptions. 

I do think their Pavlovian glee after October 7 has at last revealed their moral bankruptcy and general ignorance. One could see all that with the humiliating performance of the three Ivy League campus presidents before Congress on December 5th—obviously terrified of offending their own unhinged activist faculty and students back on campus who are openly pro-Hamas and “River to the Sea” anti-Semites.

There are some on the Right who were too quiet about October 7. A few subscribe to anti-Semitism. Others among the Right nationalist minority, see Israel as a liability that puts the U.S. in strategic jeopardy more optional interventions in the Middle East. They are not pro-Arab, but perhaps more anti-Middle East. And that neo-isolationism unfortunately for some of the more blinkered, translates into anti-Israelism as well. But for the most part anti-Israelism/anti-Semitism is the domain of the Left and very insidious given the moral preening that comes from the DEI lobby, as for our example our Squad in Congress . 

As for still others who support Israel and grasp the new anti-Semitism makes no pretension about hating Jews and Israel, and yet remain quiet (mostly I think old-time liberal Democrats), I suppose they follow their own careerist calculus. Thus, they see that the forces of woke control our institutions and parcel out rewards and punishments accordingly, and so they make the necessary self-interested adjustments in what they say and do.

HG Is father absence the biggest crisis of our time? Thomas Sowell speaks of father absence as the destroyer of the black family but it is not just the black family – dad deprivation is the leading cause of the boy crisis within all developed states. The evidence to this is staggering – boys are falling behind in every sphere of life, there has been a 700% increase in prison population since 1972 – prisons are centres for dad deprived boys, in the UK suicide is the number one killer of men under 45,  the last century has seen a 400% increase in the gap between men and women life expectancy, dropping testosterone levels and sperm counts, declining number of male university graduates and more. Politicians are becoming more aware of this, Nick Fletcher MP is calling for a ministry for men,  Josh Hawley among others highlighted the plight of boys and men, Warren Farrell was speaking with Trump about a White House council for men/boys..

Do you agree that the boy crisis is a human crisis?

VDH We are seeing that growing phenomenon in the U.S. where boyhood, manhood, and masculinity have been demonized by our schools of education and increasingly our K-12 teachers. As a result, millions of young men 18-40 are not marrying, not raising children, not buying homes, and often living at home, or on some sort of parental or government subsidy. 

There are many reasons why women now make up nearly 55-60 percent of college enrollments in many campuses and, comparatively, men are becoming less educated as a sex. We bought into the quite destructive idea that everyone must go into years of student loan debt to obtain a BA degree, even in pseudo-studies, therapeutic, and gut-sociological majors—as opposed to being highly skilled and compensated in a critical trade, such as construction and assembly, or as in-demand electricians, plumbers, and carpenters.

Culturally, there is also now no shame in being dependent and no cultural consequence for failing to what our grandparents would call “take charge”, “step up”, “grow up”, and “assume responsibility”. 

Radical feminism and its tired attacks on “toxic masculinity” have filtered down to the general population, in the sense that males do not feel any responsibility to formally date, or to assume some commitment and obligation in sexual liaisons, or even to show deference in the sense of showing some compassion, honor, and respect for women. 

Chivalry is written off as a despised and ossified concept—ostensibly by feminist leaders. Perhaps women will wake up and see that serial sexual relations without any commitment, shameless male prolonged adolescence, and complete detachment from all dependency on males have proven a godsend for men of little character and a disaster for a great number of women, to seek male companionship in the tradition of marriage, the nuclear family, child-raising, and partnership. 

In the case of white males, there is a force multiplying effect in which from an early age they are demagogued in schools that their demographic is responsible for the world’s ills. And they see that boilerplate and tired bias confirmed in affirmative action/DEI policies that discriminate openly and enthusiastically against white males, the majority of whom are not privileged. Indeed, is it any surprise, then, that in the US they now suffer higher rates of suicide, of declining life expectancy, and of toxic substance abuse than either women or minorities?

HG Is ours a civilisation in decline?  Thomas Sowell points to the 60’s as ‘the beginning of the end’, highlighting stark similarities between the fall of Rome and America today.

VDH  Well, don’t take it from me; just read Roman literature from the crisis years of the early principate and the end of Italian, agrarian-dominate republicanism. Over a century and a half (50 BC-AD 100), there reappear the same themes in Petronius’s Satyricon, Suetonius’s 12 Caesars, Tacitus’s Annals, Juvenal’s Satires, Catullus’s Poems. etc. of sudden imperial, globalized wealth creating luxus, or excess/decadence, as a bitter dividend of Mediterranean globalism. 

The ensuing symptoms in these contemporary poems, histories, satires, biographies, and novels are eerily similar to our own: transient foppish males with no visible means of support, gratuitous violence, rapid decline in fertility, mockery of past customs and traditions, disdain for the military, cultural and fringe religious cults, materialism and lifestyle decadence, financial and political corruption, money-obsessions, glorification of materialism, commonplace if not serial divorce, sexual promiscuity and perversity, gratuitous cruelty, sexual ambiguity, transgenderism, and transvestism, pornography, sexuality fused with masochism and sadism, gluttony, obesity, and obsessions with exotic food and entertainment. Dylan Mulvaney is the twin of Petronius’s Giton; Hunter Biden is Neronian. The Kardashians rival Messalina.