The By-Gone Era: Free Felons, Sanctuary Cities, and University Protestors

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm William Googe, a Vuri collaborating professional ultra runner from the UK. I love to tackle endurance runs around the world, including a 55-day, 3,064-mile run across the US.

Speaker 1 So, I know a thing or two about performance wear. My go-to daily short is the core short from View.

Speaker 1 It's perfect for my daily run in the gym, strength training, or even when I'm taking a day off, relaxing, doing some stretching, and recovering the best way I can.

Speaker 1 Check them out by visiting viewery.com/slash William.

Speaker 1 that's vuori.com slash William, where new customers can receive 20% off their first order, plus enjoy free shipping in the US on orders over $75 and free returns.

Speaker 1 If screwings apply, visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Speaker 2 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. I am Jack Fowler, the host.

Speaker 2 You are here to glean wisdom from the great Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 Victor is a best-selling author, a columnist, a

Speaker 2 farmer, a military historian, a classicist. I don't know what you are, Victor.

Speaker 2 Everything. Nothing.

Speaker 2 My name is No Man.

Speaker 2 Udin.

Speaker 2 Okay, Mr. No Man.
He's got

Speaker 2 a no man has a.

Speaker 2 And they yelled at Cyclops, who's killing you, Cyclops? He said, Udin, nobody.

Speaker 2 Odysseus said, when they ask you, Cyclops, Polythemius, who did this to you, you say that it was I, Udin. Udin.
And he said, Udin did it. He said, nobody.
That's Greek for nothing, nobody.

Speaker 2 Well, Udin has replaced Eoen. Udes is actually the masculine.
Uden is the neuter.

Speaker 2 If there's going to be any Udin around here, it's me, Victor. So

Speaker 2 he's got a website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com. Later on in this podcast, I'll tell you why.
I believe you should be subscribing.

Speaker 2 We are recording on Sunday, the 16th of February, and this particular episode will be up on Thursday, February 20th. A lot of interesting topics to talk about, to get Victor's wisdom on.

Speaker 2 I think the first one I'm interested in is new Attorney General Pam Bondi and Victor's take on her in her role. And we'll get that, Victor's views on that.

Speaker 2 Maybe link that up to some of the stuff going on at Bowdoin College and anti-DEI stuff. Obama's library is having trouble.
Woo-hoo.

Speaker 2 D.C. home prices are crashing because the bureaucracy is,

Speaker 2 many of them are finding themselves jobless. Lee Zeldin, EPA, all kinds of stuff to get Victor's wisdom on.
And we will start when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Victor, I like this Pam Bondi.

Speaker 2 What are your thoughts on her so far?

Speaker 2 Maybe a week, week and a half into off. There's one thing I don't understand.

Speaker 2 Why wasn't she nominated first and Matt Gaetz ⁇ I mean, if you look at their careers in comparison, she was eight years as the Attorney General of Florida. She's very conservative.

Speaker 2 And Matt Gaetz had this ⁇ the only thing I can think of is a conspiratorial exegesis that Matt Gates, A, was a sacrificial pawn.

Speaker 2 So they threw him out into the lion's den where they devoured him, and then they got their fill. And then Trump thought they were all satiated, so they would be too full of Matt Gates'

Speaker 2 meal to go after other people, or they would distract, or

Speaker 2 there was an incriminating report about Max Gates, these alleged responses about him,

Speaker 2 accusations, et cetera, about his personal life, and that was going to be damning. And if he got out of Congress ahead of the sheriff, it would be good.

Speaker 2 Or that he had a conservative seat, so it wouldn't matter. And in three or four months, he'd get a replacement.
There were all these different scenarios, but they all had one thing in common.

Speaker 2 Pam Bondi, if you wanted a conservative, dynamic,

Speaker 2 you know, charismatic person, she was obviously a superior choice to Matt Gates. So it worked out all in the end.
Everybody got confirmed.

Speaker 2 I think Cash will be, as we speak, by the time people are listening to us, he will be confirmed. And she's doing a wonderful job.

Speaker 2 The only thing she's going to have to her biggest challenge right now is that there were people in the prior administration who committed felonies. But

Speaker 2 you have to, you can't go out.

Speaker 2 Here's what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 2 You have to make sure that the felony is what you're going after and unusual. So if they committed a felony and you usually go after those felonies, then you've got to go prosecute them.

Speaker 2 But you don't prosecute them for the felonies that mostly you find unprosecutable.

Speaker 2 You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 So, what I'm saying is, if Donald Trump, if it hadn't been for Donald Trump, nobody would have gone after him for overvaluing, and he didn't overvalue his real estate portfolio.

Speaker 2 So, when she goes after these people and the FBI or whatever they are, make sure that you're going after them in a symmetrical way, that anybody, not just the people who tried to destroy Trump, are guilty of that type of crime.

Speaker 2 But I think she's doing a good job. I really do.
I think it's - I never understood why we - this neo-Confederate idea of sanctuary cities and um state nullification of federal law,

Speaker 2 how AOC can give a seminar, a webinar on how to resist federal law. That's a felony to harbor an illegal alien.
I know that is. There's a statute, federal statute for that.

Speaker 2 So when you had the governor, wasn't it New Jersey, was boasting that he was going to have an illegal alien in his garage and he backed down.

Speaker 2 But they really need to tell people, if you try to aid and abet somebody to commit a felony,

Speaker 2 you're guilty and we're going to go after you. And I think that would stop it.
In all these cases, you don't have to go after everybody. It's that encourage the others

Speaker 2 attitude.

Speaker 2 Hang one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the British only had to hang one admiral and everybody straightened out.

Speaker 2 I had a little note here, Boston, How Depraved Our Big City Mayors. And this is the headline.

Speaker 2 I forget where this story was from, but ICE

Speaker 2 Boston has arrested a Guatemalan illegal alien charged with multiple counts of aggravated and forcible child rape in Massachusetts after ICE says their detainer request was ignored by the Essex County Superior Court due to sanctuary policy, and he was released.

Speaker 2 So, to me,

Speaker 2 this is the

Speaker 2 depravity of and the consequence of the depravity and a target for her or the federal government to prosecute these people who are allowing magic into our streets. It's terrible.

Speaker 2 The subtext of all that is when a judge does that

Speaker 2 or a prosecutor doesn't charge them

Speaker 2 or the city council or the mayor pass or they have laws that protect them. It's these people will not prey on us.

Speaker 2 We live in zip codes and we have security and we have mechanisms to insulate us from the consequences of our own ideology. So they're going to go out in the inner city.

Speaker 2 They'll kill some poor white guy, some poor Hispanic guy, some poor black guy, but they won't hurt us. They never do.

Speaker 2 So we'll feel good about ourselves, and the rest will be out of mind, out of sight, out of sight, out of mind. That's about how they think.

Speaker 2 And if they did, if the ramification ⁇ the problem in a place like California is that the forces of de-civilization are such it's very hard to shield yourself as people in San Francisco are learning.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 what's the problem? It's de-civilization.

Speaker 2 Their new mayor is. Yeah, they have a new mayor, but

Speaker 2 he's got public opinion behind him, but he's got a defunded police. He's got people who got 30% vacancy rate.
He's got falling home prices.

Speaker 2 He's got people who don't want to live there because they're afraid of crime. He doesn't know what to do with the homeless people.

Speaker 2 Essentially, he's got the people who are angry at what they voted for, but they don't they're not angry enough not to vote for it.

Speaker 2 So they vote for these people, like in Los Angeles, and then they get this stuff, what you'd expect, and then they you say, well, Well, why did you vote for it?

Speaker 2 And then, well, my parents did, or I don't know, or maybe it's not that bad, or maybe it won't happen again. Why would anybody vote for the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Illinois?

Speaker 2 Kathy Hochl in New York. Yeah.
But they do it.

Speaker 2 And the whole blue state model of high taxes, pension obligations, unfunded pension and the billions of dollars, defunding the police, homeless people on the street, abandoned business, chastising small, driving out businesses.

Speaker 2 It doesn't work. Unionized schools, it's all a decivilizational project, and yet people still vote for it.

Speaker 2 They don't have a. It's not going to change.
There's a lot of racism in that, and that people will not vote for a white male reformer in the inner city, in all those big cities.

Speaker 2 Once in a while, they do, and the only time they do vote for a white male, they're not reformers.

Speaker 2 They're part of the problem is that Portland crazy mayor, that Minneapolis crazy mayor.

Speaker 2 I don't mean just male or white.

Speaker 2 I'm just taking somebody that, because of their race or gender, they're not going to be favored by the left, whether it's gays or trans or minorities or women or whatever.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 they need some ⁇

Speaker 2 if that is true, that allegation I made, then you need a conservative Hispanic, conservative gay, conservative Latino, conservative woman who they can't the voter then can't be accused of being a sellout.

Speaker 2 That the person will be a technocrat. Sort of like the mayor of Detroit.
He's doing a good job.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 Victor, you mentioned

Speaker 2 since you're mentioning California, and I'm trying to find my note. Oh, Gavin Newsome, yeah.
I want to, maybe I should just throw this out there about Gavin Newsome.

Speaker 2 Is he folding?

Speaker 2 I don't know. Sometimes he seems like he's genuicing, scared.
And then he goes back to Gavin Newsom. Here's a headline from

Speaker 2 the Daily Mail. Gavin Newsom finally falls in line with Trump as he makes shock migrant moved after A.G.
Pambondi's threat to sanctuary cities. The first couple lines of this article.

Speaker 2 California Governor Gavin Newsom has taken the first step toward falling in line with President Donald Trump's immigration policy just days after sanctuary cities are put on notice.

Speaker 2 The Democrat will veto a bill, may have happened, by the way, by the time this episode airs, from woke politicians in his own party who have sought to limit state prisons' cooperation with immigration agents as ICE carries out Trump's mass deportation scheme.

Speaker 2 Newsom has long boasted about the migrant protections offered under California sanctuary city laws.

Speaker 2 We're not at the beginning of the end. We're at the end of the beginning, as Churchill said.

Speaker 2 Here in California, to take the Hispanic community, they know that the typical profile of a Democratic, Latino,

Speaker 2 popular candidate usually is they went to a UC campus, they were a staffer in Washington, they imbued all of the trans, gay, green energy, new Green Deal,

Speaker 2 DEI woke stuff. And then they came back and said that I am a they played up their

Speaker 2 La Raza credentials and they got everybody to vote for them because they were Democrats. And now they don't

Speaker 2 at the end of that and people understand that they don't represent what the Hispanic community wants.

Speaker 2 And what they want is low inflation, affordable gas, affordable housing, plenty of water in the state, affordable electricity prices.

Speaker 2 We've doubled the price of PGE electricity in the last eight years. We want our reservoirs full.
We want more reservoirs. They want that.
They don't believe in high-speed rail and all that crap.

Speaker 2 They want good freeways, you know, three lanes in every direction. And they're not getting it.
So we'll see if they can rebel, but otherwise,

Speaker 2 it's not going to change until it gets worse. Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 2 The thing about all this, they know what they're doing. When J.D.
Bance addressed the Europeans, Jack, I looked at their faces.

Speaker 2 They were angry, not because of what they were doing, but because he knew what they were doing, and they knew that he knew they knew.

Speaker 2 So they were basically saying, okay, you're telling me the gig is up? You mean we can't run up big

Speaker 2 trade surpluses, get subsidized defense from you, not meet our NATO obligations, have our open borders? We can't do that.

Speaker 2 We can't be anti-American anymore in theory, and then in fact, always call you in when you need you. But why not? We know what we're getting away with.
Why are you caught us?

Speaker 2 But what's wrong with getting what we're doing? And then they get angry. And the same thing here with the Blue States.
They know what they're doing. They know that the homeless thing is a mess.

Speaker 2 They know that deficit spending doesn't work. They know you can't let water out to the ocean.
They know you can't have anybody like Karen Bass in charge of anything.

Speaker 2 They know that you can't have the water and power person making $700,000 and draining the lake on top of Pacific Palisade. They know all that.
But they get angry when people point it out to them.

Speaker 2 Gavin Newsom, everybody knows what he's doing. He was brought up as a child

Speaker 2 privilege in an old liberal Democratic household. with privilege and wealthy friends that subsidized him.
But he knows deep down inside that this left-wing paradigm doesn't work.

Speaker 2 But he knows that he has to say that to get elected. And now he's worried that Trump is ⁇ he thinks Trump is crazy.
He really does. And he's afraid of him.
And he thinks that Trump just might

Speaker 2 just say, if you're going to break federal law, you're not going to get federal funds.

Speaker 2 Or if you're not going, you're going to let water out to the ocean, I'm not going to give you federal disaster relief.

Speaker 2 As I say, I drive over every week and I see the San Luis Reservoir and it's slowly emptying up.

Speaker 2 He said it was fill. All the reservoirs, Jack, are full in California.
No, it was only about 65% full. And now I went by it the other day.
It's about 80%.

Speaker 2 So Gavin's doing his best to tell the environmentalists, sort of kind of maybe we're not going to give you 90% of all the water. We'll let you have 80%,

Speaker 2 70%.

Speaker 2 Victor, I just want to take a moment for our sponsor, Quince.

Speaker 2 Quince has all the must-haves like Mongolian, cashmere, crew neck sweaters from $50, iconic, 100% leather jackets, and versatile flow-knit activewear.

Speaker 2 The best part, all Quince items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And by partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes on the savings to us.

Speaker 2 And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices, along with premium fabrics and finishes. I love that.

Speaker 2 You should love that. Indulge in affordable luxury.
Go to quince.com slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

Speaker 2 That's quince q-u-i-n-ce-e dot com slash victor to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com/slash victor, and we thank the good people from Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Speaker 2 Victor,

Speaker 2 do you I know you've talked about some of this with

Speaker 2 the great Sammy Wink, and by the way, I want to

Speaker 2 stay in Pambondi land and mention environmental. We're going to talk about Lee Zeldon a little bit and green money.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 has the initial results of Doge

Speaker 2 clarified for

Speaker 2 a nation that probably believed government was

Speaker 2 getting its beak wet, taking its 10% off the top, whatever you want to call it, that it's really much deeper than that, and that government itself may be

Speaker 2 completely a shakedown of the taxpayers' money to fund. I mean, I just get this sense that, like, the enormity of

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 misappropriation of the money.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think everybody who's listening is like all of us, we're kind of bewildered. What is the theme? What is the

Speaker 2 holistic exegesis that explains all this?

Speaker 2 And I think the closest we can come to that answer is there is a lot of left-wing theories in the world that don't work, and they would never survive in the private marketplace.

Speaker 2 So then, government becomes a receptacle of all these failed ideas and failed people.

Speaker 2 So, if you really do believe you want to put trans agendas in traditional Islamic societies or Sesame Street in Syria or you want to give, as I said, $40 million

Speaker 2 to the Wuhan Lab, nothing that anybody, if they were to learn about, would ever support,

Speaker 2 then you have these programs and these people, and they function like the foundations and academia. They try to

Speaker 2 transmit the hard-left message that otherwise would not sustain itself. That's one thing.
The other thing is kind of more pernicious: that the more money they spend,

Speaker 2 they don't care what they do. They don't care if it's bad.
They don't care if it's good. They don't care if the program is inane or it's relevant, useful, or not.

Speaker 2 They just know that it costs money, and therefore somebody is going to have to pay for it, and that somebody is too wealthy for their own good, and they're going to raise taxes.

Speaker 2 They would look at that $37 trillion.

Speaker 2 You listen to Bernie Sanders or Warren and any of those speakers. They always say this, millionaires and billionaires.
They're doing it.

Speaker 2 They're going to cut the people for millionaires and billionaires. That's all they can.
But it's really the taxes are on the upper, middle, and middle classes.

Speaker 2 So they believe, like Barack Obama said, you know, to Joe the Plumber, I believed in spread the wealth. That's what they believe.

Speaker 2 They think that if you gorge the beast, then people have to pay for it. And they don't want to cut it because then they think you can't raise taxes.

Speaker 2 And what they don't understand is at a 38% tax rate in a blue state where you have 13.3 like California, and then you have Medicare taxes and payroll taxes, and you have penalties on certain levels of income, you can easily get up very quickly to 60% of your income and not make a lot of money, or at least it makes some money.

Speaker 2 But in California, when you have $2 million for a coastal house of 1,200 square feet, it's nothing. So

Speaker 2 it's a way to advance a progressive view, view, put a pride flag on the embassy or George Floyd Mural or gender studies program at Kabul that no one in their right mind would ever do, whether in Afghanistan or here, they would not do it.

Speaker 2 Or give money to Hamas. No one would ever do that.
No one would ever do that. Or charge

Speaker 2 60% overhead as Stanford University did for an NIH grant where the guy's probably working at home on his computer for his grant from the NIH and then go out and solicit the money from the Bill Gates Foundation and say, oh, we only, yeah, yeah, we only take 15% overhead.

Speaker 2 But for the government, we'll take 40%, 50%, 60%.

Speaker 2 And then when you take it back and say, you know what? You're going to have to get 15% just like you get from private organizations. Oh, you're going to kill.
People are going to die, Jack.

Speaker 2 They're going to die.

Speaker 2 Privately, you talk to anybody in the medical school or anybody to take that topic at Stanford, they'll tell you that it's a con, and they're happy that

Speaker 2 they're going to go back to 15% or 20% or something like that overhead.

Speaker 2 But what I'm getting at is it's a way to keep a lot of people on the left employed.

Speaker 2 90% of all this money, the 6,000 journalists that was going to cost a quarter of a billion dollars, Reporters Without Borders,

Speaker 2 they're all left-wing. 8% of the budget of the BBC, that's all left-wing.
Even Voice of America, I mean, I know that Kerry Lake is there now, but most of those people are left-wing.

Speaker 2 I listen to Voice in America sometimes. It's left-wing.

Speaker 2 Well, our friend Brent Bozell may be taking over there.

Speaker 2 The parent

Speaker 2 forgets. Yeah, he's a head.

Speaker 2 Is he in charge of Kerry Lake? Are they a co-equal?

Speaker 2 He would be in charge.

Speaker 2 Does he have the job that Michael Pack used to have in the first place?

Speaker 2 Michael Pack was the head of something

Speaker 2 PBS, maybe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no,

Speaker 2 this is the parent of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty,

Speaker 2 Radio China,

Speaker 2 those kind of officials. These people are very ignorant.
I mean, Rachel Maddow said the other day on the air that

Speaker 2 the $400 billion cyber truck armored

Speaker 2 contract that supposedly Trump quid pro quo gave to Elon Musk, and she was ranning, and of course

Speaker 2 she doesn't even make a rudimentary effort to check the facts. That was approved by Biden.
Same thing about inflation.

Speaker 2 They're all giddy and saying, 21 days, and Trump hasn't reduced inflation when the 20 days of the last inflation report, not the 10 days, but 20 days were Biden.

Speaker 2 So it's kind of pathetic.

Speaker 2 And then I saw the actress Cheryl Crowe said that she sold her Tesla, gave it away, and she's going to take the money and give it to

Speaker 2 national public radio. But if you're against federal subsidies of a politicized group like Musk, why would you give money to a politicized group like NPR and PBS?

Speaker 2 It's so damn important. Let these

Speaker 2 big lefty endowments, I think the top 20 foundations in America

Speaker 2 leftist one of the most

Speaker 2 sobering moments. I've been on the Bradley Foundation Board, which is one of the largest conservative, along with a SCAFE board, philanthropic foundations.

Speaker 2 And at one point, I think with the Bradley Impact Fund, our public disclosure show, we have about $1.3 billion.

Speaker 2 And we, you know, if you get an average return of seven, and you put three in for inflation or something, you get 4% you can spend. So it's 40 or 50 million.

Speaker 2 But my point is, we thought we were something. And then we had a presentation

Speaker 2 by the wonderful Pleta Mitchell, and she showed us, it wasn't the top 20, Jack, it was the top 30 or 40. We were were like, I don't know,

Speaker 2 70 in foundation endowments. I mean, the Tides Foundation, the Rockefeller, the Ford, the Gates Foundation, the Sorrels Foundation.
You're talking $20, $30 billion, some of them.

Speaker 2 Huge.

Speaker 2 It's like all that foundational money.

Speaker 2 It's like

Speaker 2 with endowed universities, the money is there. Why don't you spend the money now for what you need?

Speaker 2 But the priority of the grant-making foundations, and I'm not saying this applies to Bradley, but I know it applies to the lefty ones, where they're supposed to spend a minimum of 5% of their assets, including administrative costs, and they actually spend less than 5%

Speaker 2 in grant-making, and yet they're making 8% interest on their corpus, so they're growing every year. And that's

Speaker 2 a priority to grow. Aaron Ross Powell, when we're at the Bradley Foundation, about every year, our director, Rick Graeber, great guy, says, we're going to follow the mission statement.

Speaker 2 So this is what the Bradley two brothers wrote that they wanted to envision by this foundation. And then we read it again.
And then he says, now everybody examine your role and the people around you.

Speaker 2 And are you, and in the next meeting, are we following the mission statement? Next thing, are we following donor intent for the Bradley Impact Fund? Donor,

Speaker 2 somebody gives money to the Bradley Impact Fund, does the money get dispersed in a way that reflects his ideology and intent?

Speaker 2 And then we say to ourselves, are we spending, I've been on the finance committee, are we spending exactly legally what we were obligated to as a proportion? of our endowment.

Speaker 2 So it's all transparent and it's all legal.

Speaker 2 and every time

Speaker 2 I get a letter and somebody donates to the Hoover Foundation

Speaker 2 and sometimes they call me, sometimes I write them a letter back, I always say we're going to do two things. We're going to honor donor intent.
And the donor intent will reflect the mission statement.

Speaker 2 The mission statement is smaller government,

Speaker 2 smaller government, individual liberty. free markets in the context of war, revolution, and peace.
And we will advance that broadly.

Speaker 2 And then the second thing is: anytime you want to find out where the money is going and how it is spent, you call me and I will give you a complete transparent

Speaker 2 this. If you give me $1,000, I say, well, this was airfare for this particular participant in a meeting.
This was $250 honorarium for a particular essay in Strategica.

Speaker 2 This was the help pay the benefits of a secretary. I will tell you that.
And if you do that, then the donors will have trust in you.

Speaker 2 But if you treat them as silly, or they're usually, put it this way, I'm not being reductionist, but if a person makes a lot of money and they didn't necessarily inherit it all, they're not dumb.

Speaker 2 They're pretty smart. Now, you can object that they use their intelligence to make money.
I don't object. I kind of think that's good.
But

Speaker 2 the idea that an academic would be condescending or try to subvert the donor intent, like like what they're doing with the Ford Rockefeller Foundation, it's a crime.

Speaker 2 It really is, what they're doing and how they're spending that money on illegal immigration and everything else.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and has been for a decade.

Speaker 2 Ford, Pugh, MacArthur, the major foundations. Every one of them is contrary to what the original donors envisioned their money.
Pugh is

Speaker 2 on the

Speaker 2 back page of the first ever issue of National Review. Good luck.
Go get another hardcore conservative.

Speaker 2 One good thing was, remember the Olin Foundation, Jim Pearson, I think, was the director. Yeah.
And I think he was,

Speaker 2 they were designed to go out of business, right? To spend all of them. And they had to go out of business.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Because John Olin himself saw what had happened to Ford.

Speaker 2 And Bill Simon, the Simon Foundation, also

Speaker 2 sunset.

Speaker 2 And that's a good idea.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a good philosophical reasons for sunset. Everybody should remember what the left mentality is.
They get PhDs or JDs or MDs or MBAs and they think they're in a professional class.

Speaker 2 They live in a particular zip code. They have a particular car.
They have particular refined tastes. They go to Europe.

Speaker 2 And out of that matrix, they make a lot of money, and they think they're smarter than everybody. So when they get on a foundation board, they think to themselves, this guy was a capitalist.

Speaker 2 He didn't even know what he was doing. He was just a money grubber.
So then he did a tax break and gave us all this money, but he wasn't enlightened. I am enlightened.

Speaker 2 I will use the money in the way that he didn't even envision, or if he had been smarter, he would have agreed with me. That's how they think.
Because I've talked to them before.

Speaker 2 Well, they are just a lot of people. They have contempt for the

Speaker 2 donor class. I can see it every day at places I work.
I see this contempt for the donor class. You should never do that.
You should honor their intent or don't take the money.

Speaker 2 Somebody gives you something for a conservative foundation or think tank or project, don't try to outsmart them. Just say, this is what you want.
This is what we can do.

Speaker 2 If you think that is what you want, then give us the money. If you think it's not what you want, don't give us the money.
And then when you get it, don't try to play games with it like USAID did.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 Well, let's talk a little more about that: the taxpayer being the ATM machine for all these lunatics. And we'll do that, Victor,

Speaker 2 talk about Lee Zeldon and some green money and an interesting take on the media when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, reminding our listeners and informing our new listeners, which we do have, and thank you.

Speaker 2 That Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, you'll find it at VictorHanson.com, is a place you should be visiting frequently and even subscribing to.

Speaker 2 Victor writes two exclusive pieces for the Blade of Perseus every week, and he does one video exclusive for the Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 2 Plus, there's a ton of other things there, archives of these podcasts, links to other articles. Victor writes for American Greatness Syndicate column, some other appearances.

Speaker 2 So, if you're a fan of VDH, you need to be checking this out. You need to subscribe.
It's $65

Speaker 2 for the full year, which is discounted from the $6.50 a month, otherwise, to pay. So do subscribe, do check it out.
ThebladerPerseusVictorHanson.com. Victor, I want to start off here in this

Speaker 2 segment of the show with, and we'll talk about Lise Elden and some of this green money, but this

Speaker 2 bouncing off the comments about the media, I saw a very interesting post on X by Lane Smith Scott,

Speaker 2 and it was a take on how the media is a diminished economic field, but it wants the money. It needs the money.

Speaker 2 So Lane Scott writes, the first step to understanding the left, funding media outlets, et cetera, with taxpayer dollars is this.

Speaker 2 The digital revolution caused the lasting recession in publishing, media, academia, and even law and science. These fields used to support upper-middle-class wages.
Now they do not. They don't.

Speaker 2 But the people who work in those fields still believe they deserve that kind of money. They do.
And I've had talks with, as you know, Jack,

Speaker 2 talks with

Speaker 2 20 years, things like what we're doing now, podcast.

Speaker 2 I used to have a podcast, and it was under the aegis of the Hoover Institution. It was very prestigious, but it had nothing to do with my market value, right?

Speaker 2 And that was what podcasts were. They were the Time magazine podcast or the Atlantic Monthly.

Speaker 2 And then people realized that with a computer, you could go out there in the open arena like a Joe Rogan, right?

Speaker 2 And you could compete with these brand names, and nobody cared about the brand name. They cared about the quality of the podcast.
The same thing with publishing. Oh, I, you know, when I first wrote a,

Speaker 2 it was 2000, Jack, 2004.

Speaker 2 The Chicago Tribune, really good guy there, asked me to write a weekly column. And I've never missed one week since two, in 20 years.
Not one. You never missed any deadline.

Speaker 2 I've never missed any national review

Speaker 2 twice and then once a week. I've never missed a single American Greatness one since I started 2021.

Speaker 2 And that was through long COVID or, you know,

Speaker 2 sinus operations, yeah, or bike accident or anything, kidney stone operations, ruptured appendix. But anyway, what I'm saying is that

Speaker 2 when I started, I had to go to the Chicago Tribune and they had to interview me. So I was at Hillsdale teaching my first year, and I drove over there to Chicago,

Speaker 2 completely lost. I went to the Tribune building.
They took a picture of me. I had to go in and meet six of the editorial board and then get this.
When I went back,

Speaker 2 they wanted me to see if I could write productive ideas in 700-word columns without running out of ideas. So I had to send them an op-ed for seven days in a row, a different one,

Speaker 2 before they took me on.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 that syndicated column, if you look at the number of magazines,

Speaker 2 excuse me, newspapers that are in existence, about half the newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News or the Bendor, they're not there anymore, or

Speaker 2 their editorial pages have shrunk to nothing. So I've gone from maybe 60 newspapers down to very few.
At the same time, that is happening, these traditional outlets.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it used to be if you were a New York Times columnist, a James Reston or somebody like that, or William Sapphire, you could govern and lord over, or you were on CBS News and you were Eric Severide, you came on for

Speaker 2 10 minutes, or you were John Shea, you were God.

Speaker 2 And then all of a sudden there's Substack or there's free press or there's all of these wild prairie fire outlets. And it's based on,

Speaker 2 I keep using that term, lucha libre, just a free struggle out there in the marketplace of ideas.

Speaker 2 Now, a lot of people say, well, they don't have the criteria. They use foul language.
They're stupid. They're just trying to...
That's what the elites say.

Speaker 2 But the voice of the judgment of the people is ultimately in the page views or,

Speaker 2 you know.

Speaker 2 I've been asked to write a, I mean, to do a five-minute video. I think you're on the board of the Daily Signal, aren't you?

Speaker 2 Of the Foundation, yeah. Yes.
Oh, yeah. Well, Rob Louie asked me to do it, wonderful guy, and so I'd done it for a month, and we were discussing compensation.

Speaker 2 My attitude was, it depends, you know, I'll take the offer you offered me, but ultimately that offer will either be inspired or not inspired.

Speaker 2 It'll be too generous or not generous enough, depending on the response.

Speaker 2 So the response is off the chart, by the way, listeners. Yeah, we're getting about 500,000 viewers per five minutes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we have about 10 million since I did it. But my point is,

Speaker 2 I didn't want to say I want this amount of money because I'm going to wait after a year if I can still do it to see whether it's in their interest and my interest. But that's based on what we.

Speaker 2 But the old paradigm that you're at a flagship, big name, and you get a big $300,000 salary or something, and it's not based on your readership is out the window. And the same thing about CNN.

Speaker 2 If you're, oh, I'm Manderson, who gives a blank? It doesn't matter. And the same thing with network news and prestige.
And they don't understand that. Same thing with universities now.

Speaker 2 I'm a professor of English literature at Stanford University. And who gives a blank?

Speaker 2 Given what you're if you give 80% A's and you don't have the SAT and you have racial quotas that say that only 9% of your students are white males, and there's something like Pepperdine or Hillsdale College or Thomas Aquinas or any of these schools that have better students.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that's what matters. That's what people will finally understand.
I think right now a person understands if you're going to interview a Stanford

Speaker 2 history major or a Hillsdale history, you better hire a Hillsdale major. I've seen both of them.

Speaker 2 The other thing is I had a very good friend. It was kind of a capitalist.
He was a wonderful guy.

Speaker 2 I won't name him, but he founded, I mean, he re-founded Dreyer's Ice Cream and Haage-Doss. He was just wonderful.
And I once asked him,

Speaker 2 do you hire Harvard, Yale, Stanford?

Speaker 2 And he said, well, no,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 there is one thing that they're useful for.

Speaker 2 And I said, what are they useful for? Well, they have the SAT and they have comparative rankings of GPAs.

Speaker 2 So if I hire somebody and I know they were admitted merucratically, I know that they have aptitude. I can train them how to do business, but

Speaker 2 I like the idea that they've done my preliminary work. And I said to him at the time,

Speaker 2 I said, well, his name, I'll just give his first name, Gary.

Speaker 2 I said, Gary, what happens if they ever eliminated the SAT or they just said that any A four-point mattered no matter where you went to high school?

Speaker 2 And he said, well, why would I hire him?

Speaker 2 What they learned is of no value, basically. He didn't say it it was of no value, but he said, I'm not interested in what they learn.
I'm interested in what I can teach them to run my business.

Speaker 2 And I can teach them to run my business if they have aptitude.

Speaker 2 And they tell me they have aptitude because they look at these hardworking kids that get 4.0s from good high schools, or if they didn't go to good high schools and they get 4.0s, I can see it on the SAT score.

Speaker 2 But I'm not going to ever do it. And he could not envision what we he passed away, but he would never be able to envision what we're doing now.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So that was really a

Speaker 2 Harvard brat running

Speaker 2 Bud Light into the ground, right?

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 incompetent. Or what

Speaker 2 Mark Andreessen said in that very insightful interview he did with our friend Ross Duthoth. Duthoth, is that his name? Douth it.
Douth it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he said, We were hiring all these Harvard people and in 2012 and 13 they wanted to get ahead and they were bright and they wanted careers and then all of a sudden in 2020 they were all woke and they wanted to destroy our company from the inside.

Speaker 2 And that's why we don't want them anymore. Yeah, but they still, they want the money.
They want the big pay.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so the world is always changing. And

Speaker 2 I said to my wife once,

Speaker 2 we were going over the end of the books, and I said, this is a column I write. This is my salary.
This is

Speaker 2 from speaking. This is from books.
This is from articles. And I always said, this is going to dry up.
And that will dry up because it's a a completely fluid situation we're in now.

Speaker 2 For good or evil, it's no law in the arena.

Speaker 2 So I said, I've got to find a new revenue stream to make up for one of those. And I've always been right about that.
I've had so many things that a person have called me and said,

Speaker 2 you know, we can't do this anymore. We can't do this or something like that.
So you always have to have backups, but it's a very exciting and dangerous time right now.

Speaker 2 And what you're talking about In this business of journalism, opinion, journalism,

Speaker 2 public intellectualism, inquiry, observation,

Speaker 2 there are only

Speaker 2 prerequisite rules.

Speaker 2 You can be a Rhodes Scholar and a Harvard graduate, but if you can't maintain an audience, nobody cares. And that wasn't true 30 years ago, 40 years ago.

Speaker 2 You're damn straight. And by the way, on needing the backups, as

Speaker 2 many of our listeners know, some don't, but I used to run National Review.

Speaker 2 And once upon a time, Victor, we had some significant income streams, cruises, publishing kids' books, used credit cards with affinity credit cards.

Speaker 2 And these things are all gone now as revenue streams. And

Speaker 2 you have to be aware that as you are, these things are not going to last forever. And not only not forever, they may not be here two years from now.

Speaker 2 I think maybe it was because I was farming all those years. I grew up on a farm or with people who were my grandparents who never gone to college.
They were very poor.

Speaker 2 But I was always ingrained with something I would guess you would call market value. They didn't use that term, but it was

Speaker 2 you have value, and that's ascertained by what you put in, what you produce, the results, not your name. I remember my grandfather once said, now when you go into town,

Speaker 2 I've got a good reputation in this community. It was like 3,000 people then.

Speaker 2 And if anybody calls me up and say they see one of those ugly cigarettes sticking on your lip or they find a beer can in your car, you've just shamed our whole thing. So

Speaker 2 that's your obligation. I don't want to hear that about you.
And what he was trying to say,

Speaker 2 you're part of the Davis family, but we don't want you. It doesn't matter.
It's what you do. And I think that's really important.
I always think that at Hoover, I say to myself, am I conducting?

Speaker 2 There was a wonderful director there I could really learn from, John DeRace. I worshipped him, John Raisian, who hired me in 2000.
And he sat me down the first day

Speaker 2 and he said, you're from Cal State, Fresno. I know you got a Stanford PhD, but there'll be people who will be skeptical because we hired you from Cal State.
And there were.

Speaker 2 But we have four obligations, and when you come here and you fulfill these obligations, then you are worth what we pay you. When you don't,

Speaker 2 you're not. I said, well, what are they? He said, I want you to be a public intellectual and write op-eds.
I want you to be doing it. You have to do that.
And I said, okay.

Speaker 2 He said, I want you to write a book in your field every two or three years, or at least a good academic or a popular book every two or three years. I said, okay.

Speaker 2 And then he said, and you must, when I tell you, I want you to go to Palm Beach, I want you to go to Dayton, Ohio to raise money at a retreat, you're going to go.

Speaker 2 You're never going to call me up and say, I don't feel well or this. You get on the plane with me and we'll go.
I said, fine, fine. And then he said,

Speaker 2 you have to have a program. And this is War, Revolution, and Peace.
You're a military historian. In two or three years, I want you to get a big program.

Speaker 2 And he said, to the degree you can do that, then you earn your salary. To the degree you don't, I don't know if I can fire you.
You'll probably be tenured, but you will be marginalized by me.

Speaker 2 I will consider you a mistake.

Speaker 2 And so that was

Speaker 2 a noble man, but I think

Speaker 2 I've seen you. You've done all that.
You have accomplished what John.

Speaker 2 I always say to myself, did I write enough books in the 22 years I was here? Did I write enough columns? Did I have a big enough program? And did I raise enough money? And then

Speaker 2 I can say that I earned my salary. And I helped the institution.

Speaker 2 And I hope you had to help a lot of other people's salaries also. Yeah, well, I helped the institution.
That was my job. He said that to me.
We want to make the institution respect it. And

Speaker 2 I really liked him.

Speaker 2 And I felt

Speaker 2 so what I'm getting, this whole conversation, everybody is kind of drifting off because of me.

Speaker 2 But what it's really about is all of us, according to our station, the old idea of titles and pedigrees and resumes, they operate still.

Speaker 2 But this is a globalized world where you're judged on your results. I kind of like that.
I kind of like the press secretary. She's 27.

Speaker 2 She went to, isn't she from a strong Catholic family? She is and went to St. Sansell College up in New Hampshire.

Speaker 2 And she's only 27, and she is based, she gets up there every day with people in their 50s and 60s that want to destroy her and embarrass her and attack her president.

Speaker 2 And she gets up there without, they ask her, where's your binder? And she said, my binder is in my head. Pissed.
And she gets up there and she goes to war with him. And

Speaker 2 I think she's doing a great job. Aaron Powell, she's, I think, a symbol of the difference of

Speaker 2 Trump 47 and Trump 45. And not to knock John Smicer, but you remember the chaos of the White House press briefing room when Trump was first elected, and now

Speaker 2 the confidence

Speaker 2 is. The big change is Trump said to everybody, and he said this, so I'm not putting words in his mouth.

Speaker 2 I came there without experience of swamp, and I was given names. And there is not a Rex Tillertson in this administration.
There's not an anonymous in this administration.

Speaker 2 There's not even people that I like and respect, like Bill Barr, but disagreed with Trump on major issues.

Speaker 2 Whether you like it or not, these are committed people that are on the same page as Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 So when he goes to work, he does not have to worry about somebody in the Commerce Department or the Transportation or Scaramucci giving a late-night interview saying that Trump is an idiot, or Tillertson saying that Trump is stupid or John Bolton saying that Trump ⁇ there's none of that.

Speaker 2 And that's why it's different. Everybody,

Speaker 2 they get up in the morning, these cabinet and agencies head, and they say, not how can I disrupt, differentiate myself, nuance, ignore Donald Trump, but how can I be a force multiplier?

Speaker 2 And that makes a big difference.

Speaker 2 Whatever you say about Obama, he had, you got to admit, I mean, I was on, as I mentioned before in this podcast, I was on the American Battlefield Monuments Commission.

Speaker 2 It was nonpartisan. And he got elected, and man, I got a letter within days that said, you will surrender your passport immediately.
You are now to resign your position.

Speaker 2 He just cleaned house on anybody that George Bush appointed. And then he went into the DOJ and cleaned it out.
And he never had any internal apostates that went and wrote memoirs. You know, I mean,

Speaker 2 he really didn't. I mean, Gates did it, who the DOD wrote a memoir that was somewhat critical of him, but most of it he didn't until afterwards.

Speaker 2 And then when the Republicans do it, they think that's mean and vindictive, but that's what Democrats do. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 we can round out this

Speaker 2 section of today's episode, Victor. I mentioned already Lee Zeldon and Environment, and I think many folks know, but in case some don't, that the head of the the EPA,

Speaker 2 through the Doge effort, he discovered that the Biden regime had funneled $20 billion

Speaker 2 to Democrat NGOs after leaving office. This was greenhouse gas reduction fund money that went to NGOs.
Why? To fund the salaries of

Speaker 2 activists. And similarly,

Speaker 2 the very interesting piece in City Journal, which is a great publication, one of the best magazines in America. Victor's a contributing editor to it.
It's published by the Manhattan Institute.

Speaker 2 And James

Speaker 2 Meigs writes a piece for it. Trump must undo Biden's environmental justice agenda.
And the same thing, it just ends with so much

Speaker 2 cash

Speaker 2 sloshing around out of public view. It's no surprise that much of it made its way to groups controlled by seasoned Democratic Party operatives.

Speaker 2 And Victor, when that goes to groups, it really goes to people

Speaker 2 who

Speaker 2 want a lot of money to be paid to be activists. And we are we are the taxpayers have bankrolled these these these

Speaker 2 this style, this high life of of uh leftist activists. So um anything else

Speaker 2 yeah, it's about this talk about market realities.

Speaker 2 When you have things that do not have market reality, and the greatest example of that is wind and solar power for the most part, that shut down at night and are expensive and they have to wave environment.

Speaker 2 Then you have to make exceptions. And if you make exceptions, you've got to lie about it or be less than transparent.

Speaker 2 I think that Lee Zeldin said there was a memo where somebody called these gold bricks off the Titanic.

Speaker 2 In other words, this departing administration was just throwing out all of this funny money to all of these activists that had no market value.

Speaker 2 And they were going to push these projects like Selendra that would never work and we didn't need or would hurt the economy, but would keep them active and critical and left-wing and feeling good about themselves, and otherwise they were unemployable.

Speaker 2 And that's everybody wants to know why these people hate Trump so much and hate Musk so much when they're doing things that they know needed to be done.

Speaker 2 Even that Pod Save America crew of Obama potters I was listening to the other day, they said, and I saw clips as well, that they should have done that.

Speaker 2 They should have done more than that. And remember, Obama created the Simpson Bowles Committee, a commission, to reform

Speaker 2 the tax code and

Speaker 2 suggest cuts to get us to a balanced budget.

Speaker 2 And had we done that and he accepted their 2009 recommendations, we would be almost, I think I saw the figures the other day, we'd be about an $8 trillion deficit right now. That would be it.

Speaker 2 And we'd be slowly but surely going to not only balance budgets, which we already would have obtained, but paying down the debt. And yet

Speaker 2 Biden's attitude is, I don't care about the welfare of the country. I just want to print a bunch of money and to help my left-wing friends.
Or maybe I shouldn't say Biden, Dr.

Speaker 2 Jill's or the Obama's attitude. And again,

Speaker 2 remember, everybody, when you get a president like that or programs like that, that they start wasting money and throwing it away when they know that it won't be put to good uses, they do that not just because they're selfish and greedy, but they want people to pay for what they're spending.

Speaker 2 And that involves

Speaker 2 circulation or

Speaker 2 redistribution of assets. And remember, throughout history,

Speaker 2 I can

Speaker 2 cite chapter and verse in Roman history, whether it's the Catiline conspiracy or what Sallas wrote about it or Solon. and the Sesectia, the shaking off of debt.

Speaker 2 If you have debt and it is unsustainable, and it happens, it happened in Germany, there's only three ways to get rid of it at a certain point.

Speaker 2 One is to print more money and pay off your creditors in worthless cash. And that's what Germany did in the 1930s.
Another one is to renounce the debt.

Speaker 2 And countries like Argentina and others have done that. where you just tell foreign investors, well, we got valuable stuff here.

Speaker 2 We've got oil, we've got farmland, but screw you, we're not going to pay what we owe you.

Speaker 2 And then they'll say, well, if you don't pay what we owe you and you confiscate my property, your federal, I have all these U.S. bonds, and you're saying you're not going to

Speaker 2 remunerate them.

Speaker 2 And you say, well, you'll come back.

Speaker 2 And that's the second thing. And the third is you go into the private sector and confiscate capital.

Speaker 2 And we've always seen Elizabeth Warren, I think, and Bernie Sanders say, Wouldn't it be nice if all these billionaires and high millionaires that we just said to them, after a certain amount of money, we're going to take it from you and we'll give you credit in the Social Security.

Speaker 2 Take your IRA. For every $100,000 you have in an IRA, give it to the government to bail out Social Security, and we'll give you two years of Social Security credit.
Something like that.

Speaker 2 And we're going to get close to any of those three remedies if we don't control spending. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Plus, scrow the energy economy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Hey,

Speaker 2 Victor,

Speaker 2 again, it's February 16th. I'm looking out my window here.
All I see is snow, ice.

Speaker 2 It's cold. But just because it's cold outside doesn't mean, dear listener, you need to stop grilling.
Not if you have the right grill, and that would be a solar infrared grill.

Speaker 2 Solar infrared grills heat up in just three minutes, perform equally well in the cold of winter as in the heat of summer, and grill food much faster. The solar infrared grills, Victoron's one,

Speaker 2 heat your food directly, not the air around the food like conventional grills do.

Speaker 2 The intense heat also results in the juiciest food you will ever taste from any kind of grill, gas, charcoal, or otherwise.

Speaker 2 To get the great taste, it's all the heat in Solar Infrared from Best Hotgrill.com. It gets hotter than anything you've ever experienced during the season.

Speaker 2 Try the Solar Infrared Grill Now with the demo program. Don't be left out in the cold.
Learn more about the USA-made SolAIR Infrared Grills at best hotgrill.com. That's best hotgrill.com.

Speaker 2 And we thank the very good people from Solair for sponsoring the Victor Davis Sanson show.

Speaker 2 Victor,

Speaker 2 I want to get back to a Pambondi thing with Bowdoin College, but let's do a little political, quick thing first because we have to take another

Speaker 2 break. And you mentioned

Speaker 2 Obama. We've mentioned Obama a lot.
And there's a headline here. If I can only keep my papers in order, Victor, so we're not torturing the good listeners of this show.

Speaker 2 It has to do with his ⁇ well, I'll just say it - his. Oh, Joggin,

Speaker 2 it has to do with Presidential Library, I'm really, isn't it? It certainly does.

Speaker 2 There seems to be some. It's a world project, of course.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah,

Speaker 2 he confiscated a choice spot from a very popular park, and nobody wanted him to build it there in Chicago.

Speaker 2 And then he got a postmodern architect and built something like the Tower of Babel, one of the ugliest buildings in the world. Oh my gosh.
It's horrific.

Speaker 2 And it's typical Obama. It has to tower over everything else so you can see it from a distance and be reminded of its ugliness.
And so then he,

Speaker 2 the thing about exemption and the idea of Pennett's exemption is that once you give people exemptions, they take advantage of it. So when he told us he was a community organizer and he was DEI,

Speaker 2 that meant he didn't have to follow what he was saying. So now we're learning that a lot of the

Speaker 2 DEI employees and contractors that have toiled so hard for this ugly monolith haven't been paid correctly, or they have

Speaker 2 higher points. Yeah, there's a $40 million racially charged lawsuit filed against the museum or whatever the hell it is by a minority contractor.
Kind of sweet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so

Speaker 2 the DEI is boomeranging a little bit on Barack. I wonder if

Speaker 2 you're not a bad guy. Belmonti had a DEI,

Speaker 2 his

Speaker 2 Oahu, Oahu, Oahu, his

Speaker 2 Honolulu, outside of Honolulu. Where was it? The beach.
He built that beautiful home right on the beach. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Why does he always like beachfront property like Martha's venue when he told us they were all going to be underwater in 10 years?

Speaker 2 And I hope he had DEI contractors on that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 the cost of this monstrosity, Victor, it sounds like the same people who budgeted the California train line budgeted this initial cost of $350 million. It's now standing at $830 million.

Speaker 2 The whole concept of these massive presidential libraries,

Speaker 2 I just find it perverse.

Speaker 2 No, it's testimony to vanity. We should stop that whole idea, and then we have to pay for it, and we help pay the foundation.
It's just

Speaker 2 you don't really need it. You really don't.
Maybe they should just make a huge thing in Kansas called the Museum of the Presidents and make a big rotunda and then each person gets a slot.

Speaker 2 But you can all go there.

Speaker 2 And I like the Reagan Library and everything, but

Speaker 2 Nixon Library, da-da-da-da. But I don't see the point in it.
I really don't. All right.
Well, one other quick item before our break, and then we'll have

Speaker 2 another topic or two. But But Victor, here's a headline from the Daily Mail: Washington, D.C.
housing market plummets as Doge lays off thousands of federal workers.

Speaker 2 In November, according to the Daily Mail article, in November, the median home in the nation's capital was worth $699,000. By February, that has dropped to

Speaker 2 20%, bringing the price down to $560,000.

Speaker 2 Where are they going to go? I guess are they going to leave Northern Virginia? I don't know. I don't know how you could afford to leave.
75,000 workers have been laid off. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They never tell us why. I mean, they never tell us were these people that were headed for retirement anyway in a couple of years.

Speaker 2 Were they going to be transferred to other jobs? They don't tell us. So instead, we just get all of these.

Speaker 2 Fox News had

Speaker 2 their roaming reporter on the street interviewing Washington, D.C. people by random.
He asked what they thought of the layoff. What did he think they were going to say?

Speaker 2 Everybody in Washington is a federal employee. They were not happy.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 Victor, it's the one area in the country that when other parts of the country take hits on

Speaker 2 the housing economy, it doesn't. And it's your tax dollars, fair listeners, are making

Speaker 2 that happen. I was just thinking some I look at my check where I work, or I get my estimates I have to pay on

Speaker 2 non-payrolling income. I just think if I was not living in California,

Speaker 2 the amount of money I would have extra,

Speaker 2 and then I'd say, but yeah, but you get

Speaker 2 wonderful public school, no, but your transportation, no,

Speaker 2 but it's so safe here, no, but you have no homeless problem, no,

Speaker 2 but you have wonderful fire protect, no, but the police are ample and good, no,

Speaker 2 so what do we get from it? Nothing.

Speaker 2 Except a beautiful paradise he turned into purgatory.

Speaker 2 So it's

Speaker 2 Gavin Newsom is going to go down. I mean, I have no intrinsic dislike of him, but he's going to go down as not even a tragic figure, as a failed figure.

Speaker 2 He thought he was going to get on his little surfboard and ride the progressive wave and just do nothing. He didn't understand that the wave was collapsing beneath him.
Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, he's,

Speaker 2 yeah, he has, for all the

Speaker 2 time he's spent on

Speaker 2 as a headlines and the debate with DeSantis and the attention he's gotten and his interest in being the next president of the United States. Victor, there's a poll out.

Speaker 2 I don't know who put it out, but I saw this online.

Speaker 2 If the 2028 Democrat presidential primary was being held today, for whom would you vote? They gave about 18 names. Kamal Harris is the first at the 36%.

Speaker 2 This is about

Speaker 2 450 people voted.

Speaker 2 Pete Boutigej is the next in line. He's the savior of the Democratic Party, I hope.
I hope he's.

Speaker 2 And then Tim Wall's at 9%. And Gavin Newsom, just aforementioned, is at 6%.
And I mean, I don't know who the hell is their bench, but Gavin Newsom is certainly not resonating with

Speaker 2 the Protestants. Everything's not working out for Gavin.
The debate with DeSantis did not go well for him. The feud with Trump did not go well with him.

Speaker 2 There was the sense that the LA fire was poorly handled and the paradise fire, the campfire under his directorship were disasters. The farming group doesn't like him.

Speaker 2 The Silicon Valley people think that

Speaker 2 California is over-regulated and over-taxed, and they're drifting rightward.

Speaker 2 No one really likes him. And

Speaker 2 because he represents something that's antithetical to the demography of California, which is, I think, it's 16% now Asian and 45% or 50% Hispanic and a lot of poor whites,

Speaker 2 and he represents privilege and elitism.

Speaker 2 I don't think that goes well demographically. And then he's from an area of this, when they look at that area of that Bay Area nexus and the zip codes, they think, what do those zip codes give us?

Speaker 2 Let me think. They gave us Senator Barbara Boxer.
They gave us Senator Dianne Feinstein. They gave us Nancy Pelosi.
They gave us Jerry Brown. They gave us Camilla Harris.
They gave us Willie Brown.

Speaker 2 They gave us Gavin Newsom. And what did they all do? They over-regulated, raised taxes, gave us woke, DEI, etc.

Speaker 2 And maybe we need something different than that. At least Silicon Valley people want to make money and they adjust.

Speaker 2 But politicians are immune from that. So Silicon Valley is going.
Silicon Valley, there was a triad like that. And I wrote about it and we discussed it in the new criterion.

Speaker 2 Stanford University and Berkeley gave this area their intellectual fee days and they trained the professional class. And then there was the Bay Area politician machine.

Speaker 2 that had taken over from Los Angeles and the Chandler newspapers and all that. And then there was Silicon Valley money, $9 trillion in market capitalization.

Speaker 2 And that gave us the present California tragedy.

Speaker 2 And now it's all broken apart because all of those Bay Area politicians, Sherry Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Diane Barbara Bach, they're all ossified.

Speaker 2 And the people that came after them are total nencome poops.

Speaker 2 Whatever you say about Diane Feinstein or Jerry Brown, they were smart people.

Speaker 2 You can't say that about Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom. So they have no bench.

Speaker 2 And then you look at Stanford and Berkeley, and they're really under the gun now, whether it's overcharging the government or DEI or racial anti-Semitism on campus, they're under the gun.

Speaker 2 Then you look at Silicon Valley and they are drifting,

Speaker 2 slip-sliding away. to the right

Speaker 2 because they say we can't do business in this state. We can't compete with Austin.
We can't compete with the Research Triangle, not with these rules.

Speaker 2 So we either got to relocate or tell these crazy people they have to change, but we're not going to give them any more money.

Speaker 2 Your lips to God's ears. Victor, we have

Speaker 2 one or two more things to get your opinion on, and we will do that when we come back from these final important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. Thanks for listening, folks.
We are recording on the 16th of February, and this particular episode will be up on February 20th.

Speaker 2 I mentioned several times now about Bondi, and this has

Speaker 2 Bowdoin College, and some of the shots fired across the bow by the president with his executive orders, and threats by the Attorney General. And

Speaker 2 it's caught the attention of some people. So Bowdoin College,

Speaker 2 the headline, Bowdoin College students suspended over Palestinian protests.

Speaker 2 And just a couple of chunks from this piece, Bowdoin College has suspended eight of the students involved in an on-campus protest over the weekend related to Palestinian rights.

Speaker 2 Roughly 80 students set up an encampment at the college's Smith Union Hall on Thursday.

Speaker 2 According to a student who is a member of the steering committee of Students for Justice in Palestine, the encampment prompted the college to take the student ID numbers and threaten discipline.

Speaker 2 Long story short, eight of them, they were given a deadline and eight of them missed the deadline and the school is now throwing them out of the school.

Speaker 2 Shocking.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the biggest story there is a subtext. I use that term a lot, but this time it's very apt.

Speaker 2 If you were to poll these college presidents privately, you hate Donald Trump or like him, they would say they hate Donald Trump, but if you really got them to speak the truth, they would say Donald Trump has given them a great

Speaker 2 boon. In other words, he is the monster that they can use to keep their.

Speaker 2 He's the boogeyman. So what basically happens on these campuses, these radical pampered students from upper middle class and very wealthy families in the Middle East come over here.

Speaker 2 and they wear their scarves and their flags and they scream and yell. And then these useful idiot American students feel that they're part of the DI

Speaker 2 culp set and they follow them. But now what Donald Trump is, and the university deans, provosts,

Speaker 2 presidents, and faculty are not necessarily by nature a very brave, courageous bunch. They're timid.
They put their fingers in the wing, but now they have plouts.

Speaker 2 So all they have to do is they call in the Palestinian protesters and said,

Speaker 2 you went after that person

Speaker 2 or what they did at Bodon,

Speaker 2 but what they did at UCLA. They went after students, just went after a Jewish member of the Board of Regents.
They went to his home and they defaced it and screamed and yelled. And so the UCLA

Speaker 2 president, Chancellor, we'll see if he's telling the truth, says they're going to be held accountable. But what that means is

Speaker 2 the dean or somebody calls them in and says, Look, I really don't want to do this, but I'm forced to by this horrible Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 He's a right-wing, fascist, Hitler, racist, but nevertheless, we have a new rule, and that says that anybody here on a U.S.

Speaker 2 Federal State Department student visa who is currently not in school shall be deported.

Speaker 2 So you broke the rules, and you're gonna I'm gonna have to list put you on suspension, and you're not gonna have a visa for a semester.

Speaker 2 And I just hope and pray that that racist, monstrous Donald Trump doesn't find out about it, but he might just do that. So then the idea is that that guy goes back and says, oh my God,

Speaker 2 I might have to go back to my beloved Syria. Oh my gosh, I might have to go back to Tripoli.
Oh, I don't, I love Cairo. I just don't want to live there.
And I might have to go back because of this

Speaker 2 visa stuff. And that's what's changed everything.
And I keep saying, you know, I walk across the Stanford campus. It's quiet as a mountain lake.

Speaker 2 It was so boisterous and noisy, and all these tents and all this Hamas protesters would get in your face and all that. It just vanished.

Speaker 2 And I think it's because Donald Trump had an executive order about anti-Semitism and breaking student rules or committing felony.

Speaker 2 So if you commit, if you're here in a student visa and you commit a criminal violation

Speaker 2 outside of campus, then you're going to be deported.

Speaker 2 If you are here on a student visa and you are suspended for violating a campus statute and you're no longer currently a student, you're probably going to be deported. And they know that.

Speaker 2 And the weird thing about it is they love they being immigrant students, visitors, whatever term. They love to come over here and they love to say that they're outsiders and victims.

Speaker 2 And under the DEI protocols that, you know, we're gone beyond affirmative act, they're victims. So they try to make people feel guilty.
They scream in yellow.

Speaker 2 They adopt all these left-wing platitudes. And they think that the host is so stupid and weak and timid that they allow it and the students join them.

Speaker 2 But they know it's a fraud. And all it takes, it's like the emperor has no clothes.
It just has somebody's little kids that they're all naked. The emperor has no clothes.

Speaker 2 He's he's stark naked, buck naked. And so all people say is, Wait a minute, you're a visitor.
I didn't know that. You're a visitor.

Speaker 2 And you keep saying how great the Arab world is and Jordan, you love it and the West Bank, but you really don't because you're here. And you're a visitor and you're a guest, you're in my house.

Speaker 2 So you have to be nice to the host, but you're not. So why don't you go back home?

Speaker 2 Let us pray.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor, one last quick item.

Speaker 2 I found this on the Bongino report, which is Stan Bongino's aggregator website. For those of people, I think, who used to rely on the Drudge Report.

Speaker 2 The Drudge Report, I looked at it the other day just to see it. It is awful.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't mean awful ideological, just full of lies.

Speaker 2 Trump's

Speaker 2 first

Speaker 2 three weeks, utter disaster, polls dropping, people

Speaker 2 wandering around, complete failure,

Speaker 2 public sick of him. It's all lies.

Speaker 2 Well, for those who want

Speaker 2 aggregating,

Speaker 2 I suggest Bongino report. Also, our good friends at Powerline Blog, and then Real Clear Politics, still

Speaker 2 very solid, very good.

Speaker 2 But Bongino Bongino had a link to a story that says, new evidence in the 2024 American Family Survey found that 37% of conservative women from the ages of 18 to 40 reported being satisfied with their life.

Speaker 2 Only 12% of liberal women in the same group said they felt the same way.

Speaker 2 That's a big difference. That's a big difference, but not

Speaker 2 anything surprising. Anyway, Victor, we can end with your thoughts on that.
I think

Speaker 2 being in academia for 50 years

Speaker 2 and in professional circles, unfortunately, and then juxtaposing that to farm life,

Speaker 2 I would say that the blue state, blue city, blue paradigm

Speaker 2 guarantees unhappiness for women. It tells them certain lies.
It says to them, The more sexual partners you have, the more you'll be sexually satisfied and confident.

Speaker 2 It tells you that there's there's nothing unusual about being promiscuous. It tells you that two or three abortions are normal and

Speaker 2 it's nothing to feel bad about.

Speaker 2 It tells you that you're only going to be fulfilled not by having children, because you can say that they're going to come in as AOC did into a smoky, dirty, carbon-filled atmosphere.

Speaker 2 But not having children will empower you. And you really don't want to be a partner with a man or something like this.

Speaker 2 And you can continue to be youthful.

Speaker 2 The other

Speaker 2 paradigm says human nature hasn't changed since we were born into this planet, and we're all going to age,

Speaker 2 and you're going to need a lifelong partner, or at least a long-distance partner. Children are important.

Speaker 2 Loyalty to your family or your family name is important.

Speaker 2 Roots are important.

Speaker 2 Religion is important.

Speaker 2 And don't buy all this trend that they're this socialist, Marxist, cultural evolution.

Speaker 2 And to the degree that people follow the traditional program, they say, this isn't, he's not saying, I think they're happier. He's saying what they say.
They say they're happier.

Speaker 2 Now, you can say that they suffer from false consciousness or something, the Marxist paradigm. But the people who got everything they wanted,

Speaker 2 the Kim Kardashian mode, I guess, I don't know what it would be, something like that, or the the Hollywood mode, or the academic woman mode, or whatever. They're not as happy.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I won't mention any names. I was in a faculty meeting once, and we had a feminist, I think she had had five or six live-in boyfriends, never married, no children.

Speaker 2 She's deceased now, but at the time she was very young. And this was, I'm talking 40 years, 40 years, 42 years ago.
I had just been hired. I was 29.
I went to my first meeting

Speaker 2 and I said something and under her breath she said, what a F you idiot. What an idiot he is.

Speaker 2 And I didn't say anything and then the next year every time I said something she turned to somebody, what an idiot, she said.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I once I came up to her, I said, you feel like you're an empowered single woman and you say things like that all the time.

Speaker 2 So why don't you just let me think what I

Speaker 2 think I should say what I, you know. So I said what I thought of her.
I said, you are a very failed person. You've never published a single article.
You're a very poor teacher. You're neurotic.

Speaker 2 You are undisciplined.

Speaker 2 You're foul-mouthed. You're promiscuous.

Speaker 2 You're undistinguished. There's nothing other than you can do than speak basically your native language.
And you're pathetic.

Speaker 2 And she started broke down in tears and screamed at me and reported me to the dean and everything and said, that was all mean. This is the person

Speaker 2 after she said all these

Speaker 2 four-letter words. And I said, why are you doing this?

Speaker 2 I thought you were an empowered woman and that you're out in the marketplace and you've got your armor on, you're on Amazon, you're fighting male toxic masculinity.

Speaker 2 But for three years, all you do is whisper in front of everybody that I'm an idiot or use the F-word, and then everybody looks at me.

Speaker 2 And I never, I'm very polite from the old school, you think, but this is what I really think of you, and this is what everybody thinks of you. Even your friends think about this.
She started sobbing.

Speaker 2 The weird thing about it all is that after that all happened,

Speaker 2 for until I left, she was actually much nicer to me. You know what I mean? Hi, Victor.
How are you today?

Speaker 2 How's Classics doing? And so she was not a happy person. And that's a lot of what's going on with those rallies.

Speaker 2 You know, when you see - I know I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but when I see all these trans

Speaker 2 demonstrations, those people that went to that city council, the trans people and screamed and yelled.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And then you see a lot of these

Speaker 2 anti-Musk things where the.

Speaker 2 The female congresswomen get up and they say, F-U-Musk, and you look at the people, and they're not happy people. They're not happy people.

Speaker 2 And maybe this survey reflects that they think they're not happy people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's,

Speaker 2 I don't know. I think everybody has to have some form of stability in their life.
Yeah. Or sometimes I'm not going to just talk, but I'm.

Speaker 2 But you have to have some. You, my friend, are the stability for many people.
You are, indeed. You provide that.
So

Speaker 2 we have come to the

Speaker 2 conclusion of this show, except for the usual business, to thank folks for listening, especially to thank folks who have taken the time on Apple to rate the show 0 to 5 stars.

Speaker 2 Victor's 4.9 plus from 7,000 plus people. Thanks for taking the time to do that.
And for those who leave comments on Victor's own website, the Blade Perseus, or on Apple, and we read them. Here's one.

Speaker 2 It's a little longer. It's from N, and then an underline,

Speaker 2 Kamsa.

Speaker 2 BDH, my favorite Erudite. I love your podcast.
I learn new information from each episode. One of the things I really enjoy is listening to Victor tell stories from his life.

Speaker 2 He tells them in the same manner my father used to tell stories when I was young.

Speaker 2 BDH draws you in and really captures your imagination through his colorful descriptions, like the smell of patchouli incense when his father moved him into the dorm, his beautiful plums that were ruined by the hailstorm, or the little pond his grandmother loved, which has sadly become a

Speaker 2 receptacle for garbage, centritis, and wet diapers, walking upon lovers, quote-unquote, lovers in his orchard, who seem rather perturbed by his rude intrusion. That's a euphemism, lovers, fornicators.

Speaker 2 I hope you'll continue your hilarious impressions of politicians. My husband and I crack up whenever you did imitations of Biden.
Get off my lawn. Too funny.
I love listening to the podcast.

Speaker 2 But I'm excited that you're now producing videos. Lastly, I like the fedoras, Victor.
They look good on you. That's from

Speaker 2 Kamza. So thank you.
Because I don't have hair. Anything looks better than a bald skeletor head.

Speaker 2 You're too much, Victor. Hey,

Speaker 2 I want to thank the people who go to Civil Thoughts. Go there, civilthoughts.com, sign up.
the free weekly email newsletter I do for the Center for Civil Society.

Speaker 2 I share 14 recommended readings, links, and excerpts of great articles I've come across the previous week. I think you'll enjoy it.
So that's me,

Speaker 2 VictorHanson.com. Go subscribe there.
And thanks, everyone, for listening. And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Speaker 2 Much appreciate it.

Speaker 3 It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help.
Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app?

Speaker 3 Some cards are labeled No Ding Decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today.

Speaker 3 Applying for No Ding Decline cards won't hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry, which may impact your credit scores.