Victor Davis Hanson: The Civilizational Crisis No One Expects

World-class historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson joins Jillian for a masterclass on how crony capitalism, socialism, communism, and religion are intertwined — and why the stakes right now could not be higher.

A renowned classicist who has spent his life studying war, empires, and the rise and fall of civilizations takes us inside the mind of Karl Marx — who he was, what he believed, and how his theories morphed into the socialist and communist movements that reshaped the world and still haunt us today. We examine the deadly pendulum swing between crony capitalism and communism: how unrestrained, corrupt capitalism breeds the resentment that fuels Marxist revolutions, and how those revolutions inevitably give rise to regimes just as oppressive — if not worse.

Victor then takes us back to the teachings of Christ and the religious roots of Western morality to reveal how our concepts of justice, equality, the individual, and the state all began as religious ideals — and how religion itself has been weaponized throughout history for both extraordinary good and staggering harm. From the early church to medieval Europe… from the French and Russian Revolutions, to Mao, the Cold War, Mamdani and the cultural battles of today… Victor walks us through the entire arc of history to explain how we arrived at this moment: a West that is exhausted, divided, and once again flirting with ideologies that have already burned the world down.

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