Victor Davis Hanson warned Tuesday that America is declining as a society into a danger zone, and one of the main culprits is a refusal to prosecute crime and equally execute the nation's laws.
Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, chided "woke" ideology and said that it needs to be redefined as an "evil" and "cruel" ideology in order to fight its spread on "Fox News Primetime."
"It's a very evil ideology because it's cruel. It's mean-spirited. And we haven't talked about that. But if that's what it is and it won't end until the people start identifying it like that … It's cruelty because it has a history throughout the centuries, and it doesn't end well."
He specifically addressed the thefts from train cars that are occurring in Los Angeles, which are leaving scattered packaging all over the train tracks. "It's all unwinding," he said. "When you look at those train tracks and that trash, you say this is not a third-world country, but it is."
"Academics ... call this 'systems collapse,' where all of a sudden a successful society suddenly doesn't follow its tradition and rules and things happen that people cannot believe, such as empty shelves or you're not able to buy meat or you go to fill up your car, and it's a hundred dollars … or people getting shot in the street … And all of these things start to unwind the society. So the point is that it can't continue," Hanson told host Pete Hegseth.
Hanson said that the refusal to take criminals to task, among other injustices, is causing the American people to lose faith in institutions that were once held in high esteem. The distrust is part of what is causing the American way of life to "unwind," according to Hanson.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: OUR NEW WOKE PENTAGON IS HELL-BENT ON LOSING AMERICA'S TRUST – AND WARS
"We fear the government and so the government's lost credibility, morality, and we've got to restore it by all of these DA's [re-starting to] prosecute crimes. You have to be arrested. You have to be indicted if you're guilty. You have to serve your time to regain confidence and make it safe to be a human again," Hanson said. "When you look at the career of a Fauci, a Milley, …a Comey, a McCabe … These aren't the people that we trust."
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"I think finally, we really have to redefine this whole woke ideology. We think it's kind of cute or it's incompetent or it's left-wing or it's Marxist. [But] it's cruel, it's mean. It tells you, me, every citizen: If you get hurt, you get shot, we're not going to worry about you. And the person who did that to you is probably going to be out without bail or not prosecuted for an earlier crime. It tells a young child: you in the present are going to learn good racism because there was bad racism in the past. It tells the old guy that is 68 like me, if you need treatment, you may be the wrong color – you wait in line."