Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Is Dragging America Back to the Dark Ages

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Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:38)
I won't even get into Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children and became kind of every woman to the feminist left. At least in the medieval period, they knew that the murderer had done something wrong and was being punished. In the post-medieval period, we are glorifying that murderer.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026 culturally, economically, socially, politically, is that we are in a modern medieval world. Maybe we're progressive regressives, but I don't mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive and they are, but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future and progressing, but the other part is regressing, and regressing at a phenomenal pace back to what I would call the medieval period. Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly 500 AD to around 1300 to 1400 AD, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. Medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it's characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation and urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts. There were open borders. There were national states popped up that couldn't defend themselves. So you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dust to prevent gratuitous crime. But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dante's Inferno, St. Thomas Aquinas with the Summa Theologica. And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate. When you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne, I should remind everybody that around 536, Santa Sophia was created the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. It would be the largest church in Christendom for a thousand years. And everything from the mass production of crossbows to eyeglasses were a product of the medieval period. Even, as I said, the daily lives of most people were wretched. Now, let's switch to the modern period.
All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know past, present, and future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence from the many free platforms.
You can watch movies. You can watch entertainment on satellites.
Anything you want is at your fingertips. The nation itself is exploring space. We're getting close to conquering cancer. I can attest to that.
Computers allow you to speak without right. You can write without even speaking. You can compose, unfortunately, compose a whole term paper or a book with AI. You can make a movie with AI. Yet at the same time that's happening, look at what's going on in Berkeley here in California or Los Angeles. We're seeing outbreaks of medieval diseases that we thought had been conquered years ago given our sophisticated knowledge of sewage and water treatment. We had typhus breakout in Los Angeles. We had leptospirosis, a rat disease in Berkeley. You look at the homeless camps all over our major cities. You see people just out in the open fornicating, urinating, defecating, injecting drugs. There's tons of feces that have to be removed. And it's so strange in this modern medievalism. We have sophisticated researchers that go into a hospital in Chicago, or go to a cancer center in San Francisco, and have to check the bottom of their souls to make sure they don't have feces as they go into their space-age laboratories. It's really funny. In the medieval period, public hangings and beheadings were, you know, sort of public events that people came, flocked out to see. Is that any different than our glorification of murders?
There is a difference. Luigi Mangione, they named an opera after him in California. The killer of Charlie Kirk brought people jubilation.