This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Dexter with Victor Davis Hansen, professor, classicist, Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the author of The Dying Citizen.

Victor wrote this book, as he says in a footnote, between 2018 and 2020, just as the pandemic was striking and then he updated it as

best he could in 21.

We know a little, we know a deal more about the pandemic now.

And Victor, you're careful in your epilogue to say, as of 2021, the pandemic set back all of these

challenges, the middle class, borders borders certainly, leaning towards tribalism.

Certainly the unelected were empowered, empowered during the pandemic.

And then we come to the globalization, the changing of the constitution, the nullifying

of pieces of the constitution, such as keeping public order in cities

during the troubles of the summer of 2020. I was in New York, they were right next to Macy's.

I saw it. I walked through it. You understand the disruption. It was the pandemic that did this.

Yes. And then the globalization today after the pandemic.

We can't settle.

We can say Wuhan and we don't have everything.

But Victor, how did the pandemic set the middle class back?

Let's begin there.

Well, it had this idea that we were going to give to the unelected based on what the CDC or the National

Institute for Allergy Infectious Diseases under Anthony Fauci said was important or was imperative

to save us from this pandemic.

And how that filtered out, John, was that if you were in my local town and you

sold shoes in a mom and pop store or you had roses in a flower shop, they shut you down

because they did not want people coming to your store and spreading it. But if you went a mile

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