Historic Transparency, Theater, and Success

Speaker 2 Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen, welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host with my smiley friend here, Victor Davis-Hanson.
I am still smiling.

Speaker 2 He's the star and namesake of this show,

Speaker 2 which is

Speaker 2 a podcast on Just the News and now video on Rumble. So

Speaker 2 you're getting it one way or the other. If you're on Rumble, you'll see a great-looking new Victor Smith.

Speaker 1 That doesn't sound very good. You're getting it one way or the other.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 that's right. It's like, Castle, this is your medicine.
You're going to take it whether you like it or not. Yes.
I think everybody likes this medicine, Victor.

Speaker 2 We are recording on February 8th, and this is a Saturday where I am.

Speaker 2 We're about to get 10 10 inches of snow, which is not like the, I think, didn't you get 10 feet of snow yourself last year, Victor?

Speaker 1 No, we don't get any snow. We get rain and rain, and for some, it's the weirdest year in the world.
If you go up to 7,000 feet in the central Sierra, there's no snow.

Speaker 1 It's falling high up, but I've never seen anything like it. Very wet down here, but it's warm, warm rain, or it's bypassing the Central Sierra.
All right. So we're in a drought up there.

Speaker 2 No reservoirs to get them either. Well, we're going to talk today about plenty of topics.
Donald Trump's,

Speaker 2 I think, resounding diplomatic, not diplomatic, it's foreign policy victory over Red China in Panama. We had this, as we're recording today, yesterday, the 7th of February, there was a

Speaker 2 nutty standoff outside the Department of Education. And

Speaker 2 there are some test scores from the National Report Card that came out last week. We should talk about LA fires, tariffs, so much more.

Speaker 2 And we'll do all that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Speaker 2 I forgot to mention, Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 And he he has a website, The Blade of Perseus. VictorHanson.com is the address.
More on that later. Victor, I know you've talked,

Speaker 2 we talked a little bit, you've talked with Sammy about Donald Trump's

Speaker 2 actions related to Colombia, Venezuela,

Speaker 2 Denmark, Greenland, etc.

Speaker 2 And Panama. But this is a real blow that the Panamanians have, the government has conceded to Trump's demands, and a big blow to Red China and its program for Belt and Trade.

Speaker 2 You want to talk about that, please, please. Yeah, I do.

Speaker 1 I think a lot of it's due to Marco Rubio. I mean, he went down there and he charmed the Panamanians.
He speaks his native language.

Speaker 1 And I read an account where they were amused by his Cuban-accented Spanish. But

Speaker 1 the head of state is conservative. They use the U.S.
dollar. So after Trump did all this,

Speaker 1 he was the bad cop and they sent the good cop. But the good cop, as bad cop, good cop routine goes, doesn't contradict

Speaker 1 the bad cop.

Speaker 1 The good cop always says, look, I want to help you, but this guy, he's not going to bend. So

Speaker 1 let's find out what's best for you. And that's what he did.
So he said, we can resolve all this very simply. Just go back to the spirit and the law of the Panama Canal Treaty.
And you know what it is.

Speaker 1 I don't have to tell you. You don't bring in our most dangerous rival and plant China at the exit and the entry and then deny us preference.
So we have 700 or 600 ships over there and a U.S.

Speaker 1 warship's got to wait in line. So we want all the U.S.
warships to come through with privilege as was agreed upon. But we're going to add something.
We don't want you to charge them them any money.

Speaker 1 And we do not want you to go through with this remodeling, rebooting of the

Speaker 1 Panama Canal under Chinese auspices. So cancel the Belt and Road and renew your close relationship with us, and we'll be fine.
And that's what they did.

Speaker 1 And it brings up the larger issue that these aren't really tariffs. Tariffs are to protect an anemic domestic industry against unfair foreign competition.
They can do that, but

Speaker 1 every one of them has worked and apparently based on his first term, these countries don't feel that they have to call his bluff because they hit really haven't yet

Speaker 1 because they saw what happened in the first administration. So mister Trudeau whined and

Speaker 1 you know, he went into his little cave and licked his wounds and said, Oh, this is so unfair.

Speaker 1 Then he he authorized a billion dollars of border security and he said he would address in bilateral talks this huge $50 billion

Speaker 1 trade deficit. Then Scheinbaum in her machisma way had to show everybody that she didn't bow to the Yankee dictator and all that crap.

Speaker 1 And then she quietly said, Okay, I'll put 10,000 of our troops on the border like we did last time. You go ahead and build a wall.
We won't call it racist.

Speaker 1 You can

Speaker 1 start bilateral talks to reduce the $170 billion deficit, which we have achieved not because we're more productive than you are, but we're assembling foreign-supplied parts like China,

Speaker 1 Chinese, and we're building cars, computers, cell phone, everything here to get around your tariffs against China. And we know what we're doing, but we're going to try to reduce that.

Speaker 1 We're going to try to

Speaker 1 let you

Speaker 1 close the border so fentanyl cannot come so easily. We have to, if you don't tax the remittances, please, please don't tax the remittances.
That's our $63 billion golden calf that we worship.

Speaker 1 We will close the border. And then he went to the EU and he said, you have a $500

Speaker 1 billion and you know what you're doing. You're a mercantile organization.
You act like you're liberal, but you're screwing us over and I want you to reduce the tariffs on cars.

Speaker 1 I don't know if they're going to buy them or not. Every European I I talk to who says when I ask him about this always says they love American trucks, but they're too big and

Speaker 1 they take too much gas and they wouldn't buy them anyway if they were the same price. I don't know if that's true, but he's working on them.

Speaker 1 Japan just announced, Japan's looking at this and said, oh my God,

Speaker 1 Toyotas and Hondas.

Speaker 1 And we wouldn't let American cars in. And even if we did, we have a cultural disdain, or I shouldn't say disdain, we have a cultural chauvinism for our own products.
But so we better.

Speaker 1 So the Prime Minister's promised to spend $1 trillion

Speaker 1 buying U.S. fuel and products, ag products, et cetera, and to invest in the United States, maybe with Nippon

Speaker 1 Steel, investing with U.S. steel.

Speaker 1 That is going on. He's already had people promising another $500 billion investment.

Speaker 1 And it's all working. And what I'm getting at, Jack, is nobody's talking about it on the left.

Speaker 1 So they're swarming, as you pointed out, the doors of the Department of Education while Trump is spending 20 hours a day trying to help the United States redress all of these lapses that have been going on for years.

Speaker 1 And we've been a big fat target and we've been ripped off. And he's right about that.

Speaker 1 And now he's making enormous progress in just two and a half weeks. You think people in the Wall Street Journal would be happy.

Speaker 1 But when I look at the reporting of the Wall Street Journal, almost every article is negative, almost every one. They said the tariffs wouldn't, this was dangerous,

Speaker 1 they were horrible.

Speaker 1 And then they just go silent when they're proven wrong.

Speaker 1 And they've got a lot of left-wing Molly Ball who wrote that triumphalist, chauvinistic, oh, we really screwed them over in the 2020 election, the tech barons and everybody got together with the Chamber of Commerce and the unions, and we modulated the street protests.

Speaker 1 We got all this billions of dollars. We censored the news.
Ha ha. She's now a Wall Street Journal hack.

Speaker 1 And I was listening to Jennifer Griffin. She's the Pentagon reporter for Fox.

Speaker 2 She got into it with Pete Heckset.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she said that Pete was painting his house.

Speaker 1 Well, what she didn't tell you is that Pete Hexeth

Speaker 1 doesn't have any, I mean, he makes a good salary, but Lloyd Austin lives in a $7 million mansion. And where did he get that kind of money as a four-star general?

Speaker 1 He got that kind of money for working for Raytheon. And believe me, he'll go right back after he leaves and he's left and make more money for either Raytheon or something like it.

Speaker 1 In the meanwhile, the official residence of the Department of Justice was decaying, and the money was already allotted in prior administration.

Speaker 1 So it's sort of like the jobs report. Everybody said, oh my God, there's only 145,000 jobs.
Trump blew it. He was in office 17 days.

Speaker 1 And then they point out that that job report ended for the period January 12,

Speaker 1 eight days

Speaker 1 before Trump entered office. What was interesting is Pete Hexeth called out Jennifer Griffith.
He said, the Democratic media and you, and they're synonymous. And so she was,

Speaker 1 I don't know what she's trying to do,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 there's a lot of pe I think that's why Rupert Murdoch was in the White House.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 I think Trump has said publicly that the Wall Street Journal, some people at Fox News, even the New York Post editorial board, they're anti-Trump.

Speaker 1 I don't know if they're anti-Trump, but they've been very critical of him.

Speaker 2 Well, I know in the New York Post, which I get daily, and I think it's a terrific paper, they have been critical of some of his nominees, in particular, very aggressive, very aggressive against Robert F.

Speaker 1 Kennedy Jr.

Speaker 2 and with the journal

Speaker 2 you know you're right about the reporting side but also the editorial side which we've discussed before we have friends there Bill McGurn who's a columnist one of my dearest friends and there are other people you know not not as well known who I'm friendly with so what

Speaker 2 but I think the general aura is well we are the people who dictate the policy that is to be followed, and many Bibles or semi-bibles on the right have been

Speaker 2 disregarded. And

Speaker 2 those are wounds that need to be licked, ego wounds, I think. So

Speaker 1 I'm at the Hoover Institution. I would say that we have de facto, with the exception of Kevin Hassert, who's probably one of the chief economic advisors for Trump.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 We have zero influence. And I would say Donald Trump does not do what the Wall Street Journal op-ed tells him to do.

Speaker 1 So he has a different sort of influence. It's much more grassroots.

Speaker 1 And he listens to people.

Speaker 1 He listens to probably Joe Rogan or Charlie Kirk or Laura Ingram and Sean Hannity a lot more than he does these official organs of news dissemination, Wall Street Journal and others that are on the conservative side.

Speaker 1 Although he might listen to our former employer, Jack,

Speaker 1 National Review.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, he might. You never know.

Speaker 1 It's still very critical. I looked at it the other day.
It's still very critical of Trump. Rich Lowell has been very fair, I think.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 Rich Lowell.

Speaker 1 He's come around. He's been very empirical.
He's fair.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 A great piece on the NV and attacks on Musk today.

Speaker 2 Victor, I have a point about that with Buckley and Trump.

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Speaker 2 Hey, Victor,

Speaker 2 about two months ago, I wrote a little piece

Speaker 2 for Real Clear Politics on what would Buckley say

Speaker 2 about Donald Trump. But National Review famously, in its first issue, Bill Buckley wrote, Standing Athwart History, yelling, stop.
And the tone and tenor was very aggressive.

Speaker 2 And then the practice of conservatism over the years was very,

Speaker 2 I don't know, business schooly.

Speaker 2 But Donald Trump's

Speaker 2 activism is shocking.

Speaker 2 It's deep, it's broad, it's aggressive, it's cool, it's made you are happy. I'm really,

Speaker 2 and that I think is part of the problem, is that professional conservatism

Speaker 2 has not trained its activism muscles.

Speaker 1 Well, as I said, we were talking about this on Megan Kelly's show, and I said

Speaker 1 if it had been any other Republican

Speaker 1 of the last generation, a Bob Dole, a John McCain, a Mitt Romney, and they were in this position and they wanted to make change. They would have selected a lot of committees for pros and cons.

Speaker 1 They would have had a special advisory they would have brought in, and it would have never been done. Never, never, never.

Speaker 1 And Donald Trump,

Speaker 1 there's about three things going on why he's so successful. Number one is

Speaker 1 it's Donald Trump. He knows he only has four years, and he knows what happened last time.

Speaker 1 He knows that if they lose the the House, he'll never get any legislation through. He knows that.
So he's got to move quickly, mostly with executive orders.

Speaker 1 But I looked at the executive orders the other day, Jack, and if you look at the period from George H.W. Bush, four years, then Bill Clinton, then George W.

Speaker 1 for eight, and then eight with Obama, then four for Trump, then four, they're almost indistinguishable. There's a little bit more with Clinton and Obama.

Speaker 1 And then if you calibrate by day for Trump, maybe a little bit more than Biden. But they're pretty much in a continuum and they're in a dissent.

Speaker 1 The big executive order period in American history was FDR

Speaker 1 and Harry Truman and to a lesser extent Dwight Eisenhower. I mean they went from 300, 200 to 1,000, 900.

Speaker 1 And even

Speaker 1 Ike had about 450. So the use of the executive order has declined radically.

Speaker 1 So my point is that he knows he might lose power, and these people are crazy as you saw in the House with that demonstration

Speaker 1 at the Department of Education. So he's got to push it through.
Number two,

Speaker 1 Joe Biden gave him a lot of precedence. So for example, they want to sue that he's canceling out a USAID, and they know that it was created by an executive order by JFK, so it can be eliminated.

Speaker 1 They also know they're being disingenuous that the actual minority of that budget

Speaker 1 is really

Speaker 1 going to be rebranded under Marco Rubio's State Department. He's ahead of it now.

Speaker 1 And what was the criticism of USAID was three things. Number one,

Speaker 1 it had a socially imperialistic agenda of LGBT so-called queer homosexual advocacies. And far from what Samantha Power said the other day, oh, the Chinese are very happy that we're not aiding.

Speaker 1 No, they're very worried because we were turning off people throughout,

Speaker 1 we were still giving money to the Taliban, but we were, you know, Syria with Sesame

Speaker 1 Street and the Middle East. We were going in traditional...

Speaker 1 Islamic societies and forcing down the pride agenda down their throats. And that hurt us, and China was happy about that.
Now they're angry that we stopped that.

Speaker 1 The second thing they were doing, they were fused with the media, AP, Reuters, 8% of the budget of BBC, one of the most anti-American megaphones there is.

Speaker 1 $8 million for Politico? I could not believe that. And Politico was always interviewing Samantha Power.
It was just so insidious. So they were fused with the media.

Speaker 1 $250 million to promote foreign anti-American media. And so that was the second thing they were doing.
The third thing they were doing is to the degree they did

Speaker 1 provide some relief overseas, they were doing it through NGOs.

Speaker 1 And a lot of these NGOs were staffed by former USAID workers who went out in retirement or understood the system and then built their own companies and took a huge cut.

Speaker 1 Kind of like the universities that take 15% of all NIH grants, which Jay Bachari is going to eliminate. And that will cause a big howl.
And so

Speaker 1 what I'm getting at is Donald Trump knows that these things are corrupt. He knows he doesn't have a lot of time.

Speaker 1 He knows he has to use executive orders. And he knows that he's going to press ahead because every objection is absurd.
They said, well, he is not spending congressionally approved money for USAID.

Speaker 1 Well, all he has to say is,

Speaker 1 I put it in the State Department. Now it's in the State Department budget.
I transferred. But if you're talking about illegally compounding approved money, you didn't say a thing about Joe Biden.

Speaker 1 We approved the wall. Congress approved the wall.
He stopped it. And they said that's against the Constitution.
You have to spend money that Congress approved.

Speaker 1 He said, well, we have to have an EPA statement. And that took four years.
And then he remembers

Speaker 1 Ukraine and that famous thing that he related at a session of the Council on Foreign Relations when he was grandstanding, he said, well, what did you think about Ukraine?

Speaker 1 He said, well, I went over there and I think there was a crooked prosecutor. So I said,

Speaker 1 you ain't getting the billion dollars. And then he said, son of a bit B,

Speaker 1 they got what I wanted, and I released, well, Joe, that's what they impeached on Trump for, for not spending money immediately that had been improved. You did the same thing.

Speaker 1 So Trump comes along and he says, sue me. And then see what the courts say after Biden has impounded money both as vice president and as president.
And then finally, they got Elon Musk all wrong.

Speaker 1 The other day, they tried to embarrass Trump during the Japanese prime minister visit. They said, did you see Time magazine? Did you see that, what they said? Did you see Time magazines cover Mr.

Speaker 1 Trump? Elon Musk was sitting in the Oval Office in your desk.

Speaker 1 And now Trump had kind of a soft spot for Time because they made him man of the year, but he said,

Speaker 2 Time?

Speaker 1 I didn't know it was still in existence. I thought it went out of business.
But what I'm getting at here is Elon Musk is sort of like a flytrap. And Trump has hung him up in the Oval Office.

Speaker 1 And all of these insects from the media,

Speaker 1 they're now obsessed with Elon Musk. They're jealous of him.
They hate him. And they're all swarming and getting stuck on him.

Speaker 1 And here's Donald Trump now, and no one's talking about Donald Trump as evil. It's all Elon Musk.
And so Trump then naturally says, Elon's doing a great job.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to make fun of him. He's going to be.
And yeah, and they say, well, he talked to the press. And he goes, yeah, he's great at it.
He loves it.

Speaker 1 But what he's really doing is deflecting a lot of negative press at Trump,

Speaker 1 which he seems to enjoy baiting them anyway.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't know that, does anyone really care what the press has to say anymore? Like we've come through a fever on that,

Speaker 2 having fainting couches and pearl clutching, all those days of rules.

Speaker 1 I saw that with that Afghan reporter was going to ask him an embarrassing question. And he said, I love your accent.

Speaker 1 you have a beautiful voice, but I don't understand.

Speaker 2 One thing you said.

Speaker 1 God bless you and move on.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's kind of kind of.

Speaker 1 I looked at her face. It's like, I have never had a president talk to me like that.
And then we found out almost the same day we're still giving money to the Taliban under USAID.

Speaker 1 It's going to be very hard for them. to support this.
As long as they can get the narrative out, how crooked and corrupt it is.

Speaker 1 And they have to do two things with USAID.

Speaker 1 They've got to get the narrative out that it's corrupt, the vast majority, and that the small areas where they're really going in need, it's better and more efficient for the State Department under Rubio to do it.

Speaker 1 And they already exempted Egypt, for example.

Speaker 1 And the other thing is going to be funny when they get into Medicare and Medicaid, because you can see what they're going to do.

Speaker 1 They're going to scream and yell, and yet everybody knows there's all these scams. We had one with Somalia, you remember about COVID money and Medicaid money and Medi-Cal and Medicare.

Speaker 1 And as long as they talk about the corruption takes away money from the system and it hurts seniors and the disabled. So we are here to make sure you get your Social Security check.

Speaker 1 And he's already said he's not going to tax Social Security. I don't know whether there'll be an income limit on that or not.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 that's going to be tricky, but there is a lot. If you want to get waste and fraud, that's where you have to go.

Speaker 2 I think some of this corruption just with AID, never mind what we're going to find out with Medicaid America, will be equivalent to the economy of a recognizable European nation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's staggering. Hey, Victor, we have.
The funny thing about it, just before you go, is the person who really

Speaker 1 I keep getting back to Bill Clinton. I mean, Bill Clinton had that

Speaker 1 agency for government efficiency,

Speaker 1 and he tried to impound funds, and he did all of this.

Speaker 2 Cut the federal workforce by 12 percent. That's what he wanted to do.

Speaker 1 He did, and he did. And

Speaker 1 he balanced. He got higher taxes, and Ginrich got him to cut, but he cut himself.
So a lot of the stuff that they're angry about, Bill Clinton set the example.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, we mentioned

Speaker 2 the show outside of DOE, and I think it would be good to talk about that a little more. And more importantly, the horrific test scores that came out, I think, about 10 days ago, the national

Speaker 2 report card. And

Speaker 2 I didn't bring this up ahead of time, Victor. I don't know if you spoke with Sammy about the DNC's committee meeting and the lunacy that went on there, but if we did, we can.
You did? Okay. Well,

Speaker 2 we'll talk about Maxine Waters trying to get into the DOE and more when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Saturday, February 8th. This particular episode will be up on Tuesday, February 11th.
Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

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Victor,

Speaker 2 three things intersect here.

Speaker 2 The test scores from the national

Speaker 2 report card. It's just

Speaker 2 well, I don't know that anyone's shocked anymore, but the

Speaker 2 might have thought, well, we got through the bad news about COVID and

Speaker 2 we will make up for that. There's no makeup.
The standards for the fourth grade testing and the eighth grade testing and the proficiency in math and English continue to decline.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump called that out the other day.

Speaker 2 So we have that as a backdrop, and you may want to talk about that. And then also, again, this one dude with the glasses over his head holding off,

Speaker 2 I think it was 70 conference led by Maxine Ward. Funny thing, Victor, Maxine Ward Waters demanding of this guy, show me your ID, show me your ID.
Can you imagine if something

Speaker 1 the first time?

Speaker 2 He did, but can you imagine if someone said that,

Speaker 2 an election worker asking some voter to show the ID? You know, Maxine Water is a little bit of a data.

Speaker 1 If she had been white

Speaker 1 and he had been black, if a white congressman had done that, a white male congressman, to a black security guard, they would have officially censored him in the Congress for that.

Speaker 1 Because not only did they berate him and they kept trying to physically intimidate him, getting in his face, they said that he had reminded, he was standing in the door of the school like George Wallace, you know what I mean, that he was a racist.

Speaker 1 And that was just

Speaker 1 I don't know what's happened to the black caucus or the black leadership on the left, but they,

Speaker 1 I think part of their anger is that 26% of black males voted for Trump.

Speaker 1 And so that their argument that Trump is a racist and he's horrible and he's this and that, they're really telling one quarter of all black men, you're a racist, you voted for a racist.

Speaker 1 That's not a sustainable argument. So they're very frustrated.

Speaker 1 About that, there's a subtext to, so Trump said when they threatened, when he's threatened to, I think he will try to eliminate most of the Department of Education.

Speaker 1 And people said, you know, this is terrible. And he said, well, of the top 40 industrial nations, essentially, 40 were number 40 in

Speaker 1 actual test scores or performance, and we're number one or two in the amount of money we spend per pupil.

Speaker 1 A lot of that is for two or three reasons. One is the teachers' union, and that has, people forget the subtext of this teachers' union.

Speaker 1 Teachers' union is a place because of the dumbing down of standards as an undergraduate and the politicalization of the schools of education.

Speaker 1 This is a place where left-wing mediocrities go to because they feel they can make social change and they don't have to meet any standards. And the alternatives that would keep them honest

Speaker 1 are threefold. Number one, you could turn it over to the states.
And believe me,

Speaker 1 A guy like Ron DeSantis would

Speaker 1 that would be over. He would have all sorts of programs that would compete with the public schools and keep them honest.

Speaker 1 And charter schools, parochial schools, private schools do, but they're always after them.

Speaker 1 The second thing is if you got rid of the of the schools of education, most states without federal pressure would allow you to have a master's degree for one year and that would substitute for a teaching credential.

Speaker 1 So you would just bypass the school of education.

Speaker 1 And some of the states have already talked talked about, in terms of higher education, that they would have an exit score conditional on the bachelor's degree. So you have to have an SAT to get in.

Speaker 1 Maybe you have to have an SAT to get out. My suspicion of looking at undergraduate education for 50 years is half the students would score worse on the SAT after four years.

Speaker 1 because they've taken these horrible courses and they've forgotten what they learned in high school, if anything. But his main main point was: we're doing everything wrong.

Speaker 1 We're going on the back end. So we have affirmative action, we have DEI, and we're lowering standards at the top.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 going back to people like Tom Soule, they said it would never work. They warned us 30 years, 40, 50 years ago.
You have to start the kindergarten level.

Speaker 1 And you have to compete with the public schools. You've got to go into the inner city.
And we're trying to do that and say to black parents: here is a parochial school, here is a charter school,

Speaker 1 here is a public school, and here is a private school, academy. And you can choose anything you want, you get a voucher.
And

Speaker 1 the unions try to stop that because they know there's no accountability.

Speaker 1 And teachers, if they were a public school teacher and they lost enrollment and they went to go work for a Catholic school or a private school or an academy or a public charter school, they wouldn't be hired.

Speaker 1 They wouldn't want them. And so it's a jobs program for mediocrities, and it's got the wrong emphasis.
And Donald Trump is basically saying, how could you do any worse? Turn it over to the states.

Speaker 1 And then you would have competition between each state.

Speaker 1 Nevada would say, well, California may be bigger, but we're number five in test scores among the 50 states, haha. And you would have that competition.

Speaker 1 And of course, California has been doubling down now.

Speaker 1 Gavin Newsom ran to the White House, kissed Donald Trump's ring, please give us billions of dollars of aid for Los Angeles, flew back home, and then immediately joined the we're going to have a special Sioux Trump fund.

Speaker 2 Speaking of the fires, Victor,

Speaker 2 it was announced earlier, I think today, maybe late yesterday,

Speaker 2 Steve Soboroff, who is a former police commissioner in Los Angeles, and he's very tied in with Mayor Communist Mayor Karen Bass,

Speaker 2 and he's getting paid $500,000 for three months of work to be the recovery czar.

Speaker 2 I feel

Speaker 2 after Donald Trump's appearance out there, I thought it was a galvanizing moment.

Speaker 2 The leadership of the area has not been galvanized. No surprise.

Speaker 1 They have to do what they did after the Loma Linda earthquake. They started giving incentives.
So were that big overpass collapse on five as you come into Los Angeles?

Speaker 1 They gave them the contractors day-by-day incentives. If you get done by day 30 with this part, day 40.

Speaker 1 So, all they, if Silverov really wanted to rebuild Los Angeles quickly, he would say to the excavators and the refuse haulers, Here, here's the first 30 days.

Speaker 1 If you get all the lots clean within 60 days, then for each day you,

Speaker 1 you know, it should take 70 days. You get a $5 million bonus each day you beat it.
And then look over so they're not cheating. And that would do it.
But

Speaker 1 there's a lot of suspicion that

Speaker 1 when they talk about they want to do it the right way, rebuild it. They're talking about more high-density

Speaker 1 housing and bus lines, bike lanes, high-speed rail links. And if they get into that, they'll never rebuild it.
As I said before,

Speaker 1 when I go to Pepperdine once in a while, I drive through there, and

Speaker 1 it was one of the most beautiful places in the world, those single-family ranch-style and older homes. It was kind of California classic 1920s stucco, white stucco,

Speaker 1 big homes with red tile, wolves, beautifully cypress trees, palm trees, landscape. They were just stunning.
And

Speaker 1 to not rebuild that would be a tragedy. It was really beautiful.
And so they're going to have to really, Trump's going to have to condition.

Speaker 1 I don't know if Rick Grinnell's going to do it, but if he does it, he's a pretty tough guy. I think he will have incentives on time and the nature of rebuilding.
And they can do it very quickly.

Speaker 1 If they have all the

Speaker 1 if they would just, one of the things that would make it very quickly, we've run out, I think it's 30 timber companies in California. We only have three timber mills left.

Speaker 1 And yet we have the fourth largest

Speaker 1 timber

Speaker 1 resource in the United States. I think Georgia has the, you know, hardwoods

Speaker 1 and deciduous mostly, not all. It has pines, but

Speaker 1 California, Oregon, Montana, Washington, if you would just Oregon is sort of

Speaker 1 lax compared to California, but not as lax as Montana

Speaker 1 and Wyoming. But if you would allow these states to reopen, we wouldn't even need to import.
Trump was right about that timber. They're going to need a lot of building materials for Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we need to really go full bore in allowing us to produce them, plywood, shingles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I recommend to our listeners to check out this guy, Soberoff.

Speaker 2 It seems like

Speaker 2 he is plugged in with the wrong people. But before we talk about anything else, Victor, I want to just take a moment for our sponsor, Lean.
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Speaker 2 Victor, again, I'm throwing you a curveball. I did mention this ahead of time, and I'm curious.

Speaker 2 I did not get to listen to you in the great Sammy Wink talk, but did you mention at all Biden's, Trump denying Biden security clearance?

Speaker 1 We did a little bit.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 that was based on three things, I think. Number one is we have that great clip where,

Speaker 1 I don't know if she was CNN or NBC said, are you going to accord Donald Trump a security security clearance?

Speaker 1 And Biden, who had just been elected, was puffed up and he was trying to do the Biden tough guy.

Speaker 1 He goes like this. He always paused.
He said, are you going to ask, are you going to allow Donald Trump? He looked like this.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 He's not dependable. He's too erratic.
And so Donald Trump comes in and says, well, you know, Robert Hur said that he was an older man with a poor memory.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 we remember that what Speaker Johnson said in the last last weeks of the Biden administration, he went in there to say, why are you canceling liquid natural gas export facility projects for Europe since you're a big pro-European?

Speaker 1 And he said, I'm not. And he said, you signed the executive order.
No, he didn't. And he didn't, apparently.
I mean, his hand did, right?

Speaker 1 He's back to John Galt in that Star Trek episode where he's sort of like this, and a guy behind him takes his arm and do that.

Speaker 1 So that's very ironic because they're criticizing Elon Musk for de facto exercising executive authority that he didn't get. And

Speaker 1 they know that Hunter and Dr. Jill were doing it.

Speaker 1 Nobody elected them, and they were running the country.

Speaker 1 Elon Musk doesn't do anything. Not one recommendation can he cut.

Speaker 1 It can only come from Donald Trump. So Elon Musk is an advisor.
He goes in with Doge and he looks at all of these things and he makes a list up and then he presents it to Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 And Donald Trump says, no, I'm not going to, I can't cut Egyptian aid. Or no, I can't cut Christian advisory money.
That's what he does. And so you can criticize Donald Trump, but he's an advisor.

Speaker 1 He gives you a list of cuts.

Speaker 1 And to do that, he has to have access to the budgets, and they're trying to hide the budgets, as we know from the Pentagon, which flunked an audit. And Pete Hexeth has already addressed that.

Speaker 1 And the other thing he said about Joe Biden was that, number one, he did it to Trump, so it's all fair

Speaker 1 love and war. He gets what comes around, goes around, payback as a bitch, so to speak, as they use that term.
Excuse my language.

Speaker 2 You're forgiven.

Speaker 1 Yes. And then, in addition to that,

Speaker 1 he can use

Speaker 1 the special prosecutor who exempted Biden and tried to help Biden by not indicting him for disclosing classified information and taking away files to his ghostwriter.

Speaker 1 Remember, that ghostwriter destroyed the material under subpoena in the Hillary Clinton fashion.

Speaker 1 So that was the second thing he did. And then

Speaker 1 the third is by not

Speaker 1 allowing

Speaker 1 Joe Biden, he's now saying,

Speaker 1 we're going to stop all of this special treatment. We're not going to give 51 intelligence authorities.

Speaker 1 We're not going to get John Brennan, John Clinton, we're not going to get ex-CIA, we're not even going to get ex-presidents, because a lot of these people

Speaker 1 use this information

Speaker 1 for nefarious purposes. And he knows that if Joe Biden gets national security information,

Speaker 1 someone will get it from him and get on ABC and say Donald Trump is risking nuclear war with Iran and because my sources, because my sources, Jack, tell me.

Speaker 1 So if I'm a Washington hack like John Brennan or

Speaker 1 James Clapper or Leon Panetta, and we've seen it so often, and Joe Biden will do the same thing, he did it.

Speaker 1 And they get on television, they get these $300,000 contracts, and they look in the camera and say, well, what do you think about Donald Trump's maximum pressure campaign against,

Speaker 1 is there any worry that we'll only radicalize Turan?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 my

Speaker 1 sources, and I have sources, my sources have informed me that Donald Trump is

Speaker 1 walking a tightrope.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of internal dissension within this CIA, believe me. The State Department is in open revolt.

Speaker 1 And I've talked to my sources tell me that the European heads of state, which I'm in contact with, they're shocked. That's what they do.
And so he just says, no, I'm not going to do that anymore.

Speaker 1 Homie, don't play that game, as they used to say in Living Color. That was a great show.
Remember that? Homie, don't play that game. No, he just says that.
I'm not going to play that game anymore.

Speaker 1 You can say what you want, but I've got four years and I'm not going to be.

Speaker 1 I don't have Robert. There's not going to be an Andrew Weissman.
There's going to be no Robert Mueller. There's going to be no...

Speaker 1 Letita James. There's going to be no Jack Smith.
There's going to be no get me off the ballot, that's all over with, that's done with.

Speaker 1 And I'm moving as fast as I can.

Speaker 1 The left likes to say it's like the hundred days of Napoleon. It is in a way that he came in and tried to

Speaker 1 really change the Bourbon dynasty, the restoration, but

Speaker 1 he's not a dictator. You've got to remember that.
And the reason that these guys have no power and they have none is not because of Donald Trump. It's because they lost it.

Speaker 1 And they lost it not because of Camilla Harris was a black woman, not because

Speaker 1 even that she was mediocre.

Speaker 1 I know that you mentioned the Democratic hierarchy in that convention, and they told them, I think Jonathan Capart said, How many of you, it was like saying, How many of you would like an ice cream Sunday right now?

Speaker 1 How many of you kind of sort of think it was racism and misogyny? And they all said, he said, oh, you passed the test.

Speaker 1 And I'm thinking, yeah, and Joe Biden is black and he's a woman, and that's why he was eight points behind when he pulled out.

Speaker 1 You really believe if Joe Biden had run, he would have defeated Donald Trump. And when he lost, would you say it was because he was a white male? No.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 that was...

Speaker 2 That was really interesting. But that event, Victor, is more than a doubling down of the chaos and problems this party has.

Speaker 1 Oh, when they got that guy, David Hogg, on there and he started screaming and yelling

Speaker 1 about he was young, he's a young idiot. And then

Speaker 1 they had the former retiring guy from the DNC and he was trying to struggle with the

Speaker 1 non-binary this, the transgender this, the black this. And then they had that woman from the southern accent come in and kind of read him the riot act that

Speaker 1 you don't really know the codes of woke. Here's the woke Bible.
Let me read it to you. And the whole thing was anti-democratic.
It was a mess. And it was a

Speaker 1 force multiplier of the nominations were...

Speaker 1 Remember Senator Hermono? Women must be believed. Remember her, that woman?

Speaker 1 She was yelling and screaming, and Elizabeth Warren did the Elizabeth Warren. I'm completely insane.
Look,

Speaker 1 when I remember Elizabeth Warren, I remember two things. One was Pocahontas.
and after she got her DNA back and said she was 001%,

Speaker 1 she said, see,

Speaker 1 I am Native American. And then when she said she never used it, and like in one nanosecond, the internet lit up with a Harvard little catalog with a picture, first Native American professor.

Speaker 1 And then the other one was she had that aborted race for presidency in the Democratic primary of 2020. And she cut a commercial where she opens up the refrigerator and she takes a beer

Speaker 1 very slowly. She goes,

Speaker 1 and she,

Speaker 2 no,

Speaker 1 oh my good beer, tasty. First time in her life she's tasted it.

Speaker 1 So they had that crazy woman, and then they had that crazy Sheldon White House and that Tim Kaine that looked like he was, he put his hand in an electrical socket, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 His hair was out and he's, he looked there. And of course, his son had been arrested in 2017 for trying to let off an explosive or something like that in a riot.

Speaker 1 So it was just a menagerie of crazy people. Then you had that DNC, and then you had the Department of Education, where this poor guy was like stoic.
He became an internet. I didn't realize that.

Speaker 1 I went on the internet this morning. He's a hero now.
Did you know that? There's every type of,

Speaker 1 he's famous because these people insulted him and he just said, no.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I want your ID.

Speaker 1 I give you your ID. Are you going to let me in? No.

Speaker 1 He just stood there, and they were thinking, can we hit him? Can we do this? Can we embarrass him and claim he's George Wallace? Can we do anything?

Speaker 1 He just stayed there. And

Speaker 1 everybody, you know, I did about four interviews yesterday, and almost every host brought this topic up. And they all said the same thing.

Speaker 1 If he had been black and that type of vitriol came from a white male. And so

Speaker 1 they have completely lost their mind. So the confirmation hearings, the DNC conference, these demonstrations, and then

Speaker 1 this,

Speaker 1 I don't know what it is, this hatred of Elon Musk, this social media hatred of him. He went from the beloved Elon that figured out you could have an EV and drive 320 miles

Speaker 1 to Satan or Lucifer, and all because he was an apostate.

Speaker 2 You know, Victor, they're all about theater, and it's it's bad theater.

Speaker 2 And Trump, it's not like Trump isn't about theater, but when his theater is like, I'm going to do McDonald's, I'm going to go in a garbage truck, and it's consequential and funny. There's his.

Speaker 1 And when he attacks people,

Speaker 1 he does it matter of fact. So they say something about, did you see Maxine Waters what she did? He said, well,

Speaker 1 these people don't like America.

Speaker 1 I'm on. That's it.
It's not.

Speaker 1 And that's funny because they say they have lost it. They have no power.
They have nothing. They committed political suicide.
They do not have the White House.

Speaker 1 They do not have the House of Representatives. They do not have the Senate.
They do not have the Supreme Court. They cannot block a presidential appointment.
They don't have the votes.

Speaker 1 They cannot subpoena anybody. They can't override any veto.
They can't do anything.

Speaker 1 Anything. At least until they get they see if they can get the House back.

Speaker 1 And by everybody should be very aware that this next house race will be the most expensive, bitter, nasty fight in our lifetime. Because if they get the house back, they will impeach him.

Speaker 1 They really will. And for all you Republicans in the House, that when Joe Biden was obviously non-compos mentes, and everybody said, you should just impeach him.
And you said, well,

Speaker 1 he'll be acquitted in the Senate. We don't have the vote.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 You impeached Mallorkas, and that was good. He'll be known as a person who was impeached.
But you didn't do it with Joe Biden, and they're not going to show any laxity.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 if they win the House in two years and you say, well, we didn't impeach Joe Biden, they would say, yeah, because you're an idiot and you're weak.

Speaker 1 And I hate to say that because if you read the Federalist papers, they were very, very worried about a president losing the House in his first term and have a political hit job done against him by impeachment.

Speaker 1 And that's why they required two-thirds vote in the Senate for a conviction. But they wanted impeachment to be very rare.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 the Democrats impeached Citizen Trump. So

Speaker 2 there's no question.

Speaker 1 They tried Citizen Trump.

Speaker 2 Tried him.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they impeached him. And then right after he left office, they put him up for trial.
And I got to admire the Republicans. They stood fast.

Speaker 1 And then it was, I can remember those weird days in January. That was the weirdest time of my life.
All of a sudden, Nancy Pelosi was saying that Trump people killed five officers.

Speaker 1 There was an armed insurrection. There was no arms found in the Capitol.
There was no officers killed.

Speaker 1 There was a mysterious Capitol officer who for his life shot and accidentally killed Ashley Babbitt. But we can't tell you who he was because the MAGA people would lynch him or something.

Speaker 1 And then we were told that Parlier was this

Speaker 1 subversive social platform that we needed the good citizens of Google and Amazon and Facebook to destroy. It was weird.
Weird, weird, weird.

Speaker 2 My mic went off there. Lucky for our listeners.
You mentioned Parlier.

Speaker 2 I think when we come back from some messages, Victor, we should talk a little about Parlier and Stanford University.

Speaker 2 You saw that back to AID funding Stanford and one of its projects was

Speaker 2 another project.

Speaker 1 The Stanford Internet Observatory. I'm very familiar.
We had the director of it come to Hoover.

Speaker 1 And I said at the time

Speaker 1 to a number of high-ranking Hoover officials,

Speaker 1 this person

Speaker 1 is not for free speech and open inquiry. He's after punishing people for, quote, misinformation and disinformation, which translates into, I don't like their politics.

Speaker 1 But got to remember in those dark days of January of 2000, we also had George Soros enlist some Hoover people to try to sponsor something together with us. So that was an insane period.

Speaker 1 And thank God it's over and that would not happen again. But we had the Stanford Internet Observatory people all around us.

Speaker 2 Well, we'll get into that maybe a little more. And then you mentioned the hand holding Joe Biden's hand to sign things.
And according to one report in PJ Media, that hand was that of Hunter Biden.

Speaker 2 We'll get to those final matters.

Speaker 1 Wait a minute. You can't have a shaky hand guiding a shaky hand.
Well, maybe he. Which is worse, being suffering from Alzheimer's or lifelong cocaine addiction.

Speaker 2 Well, maybe that was the day Hunter left his cocaine

Speaker 2 in the wardrobe closet. That still hasn't been figured out who did it.
But we'll get to these when we come back, Victor, from these final important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on February 8th.

Speaker 2 And this episode will be up on Tuesday the 11th. I did promise, by the way, somebody, I have to say,

Speaker 2 there's no criticism, Victor.

Speaker 1 I've got a lot of criticism lately. You know what, just to interrupt you,

Speaker 1 on my website,

Speaker 1 I was trying to making a thing like this, and

Speaker 1 someone whose name shall not be mentioned, I had a scene like that, and it was frozen, right? And that was in my Friday Ultra, and I've got all these emails.

Speaker 2 Victor, were you saluting?

Speaker 1 Are you Elon? I said, no, I was going like this.

Speaker 2 It's more waltz move than

Speaker 1 an Elon move. So I get a lot of criticism.
I got a lot of criticism.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, this is

Speaker 2 the folks at Thomas Aquinas College love you. And so one of the guys I said,

Speaker 2 could you ask Victor? Because, you know, you talk sometimes, the three colleges, Pepperdine, Hillsdale. And you've said St.
Thomas Aquinas. And it's Thomas Aquinas.

Speaker 2 And the reason it's important is that there is is a St. Thomas Aquinas College.
So I went on the website.

Speaker 1 I didn't know that. I'm glad you're corrected.

Speaker 2 It's upstate New York. It is so woke.
And it's amazing.

Speaker 1 Is there no connection, is there?

Speaker 2 No, no, no. They're not.
But it's amazing how, and this is not a Catholic podcast, so we're not going to go down this rabbit hole, but there are authentic schools, authentic about classic schools.

Speaker 1 I want to apologize because that was a slur. I didn't mean to say it.

Speaker 2 Thomas Aquinas.

Speaker 1 I went down there for two days with our mutual friend who's on board, and

Speaker 1 I came away just blown away. I mean, everything about it.

Speaker 1 The faculty was wonderful. The students were right out of,

Speaker 1 I don't know where they were. They were.

Speaker 2 One's nicer than the next. Everyone you meet there, like they're just.

Speaker 1 I looked at this beautifully landscaped campus, and there was this kid walking by. He had dirty Levi's on, and he was working on his knees, you know.
And I said, what are you doing?

Speaker 1 He said, We do our own landscaping. We're assigned an area of the college.
And

Speaker 1 there's almost a competition to make. And

Speaker 1 it's in a very beautiful valley, you know,

Speaker 1 out of the San Fernando Valley. It's

Speaker 2 that's how they keep their costs down.

Speaker 2 There are a couple of colleges that are really into that.

Speaker 1 I have

Speaker 1 a 15-year-old

Speaker 1 daughter, who's going to be a 15-year-old granddaughter. Right.
And she's Catholic, And I'm trying to get her to apply

Speaker 1 to three colleges.

Speaker 2 Pepperdine.

Speaker 2 Three total. Okay.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Go ahead. Three total.
Not Stanford.

Speaker 1 Pepperdine, Hillsdale, and Thomas Aquinas.

Speaker 1 And I think she wants to stay next to her family at UC Davis, and I don't want that to happen.

Speaker 1 They live near the Auburn Foothills in Placert County now. So I'm really going to pressure her if she's listening to her.
Her name is is Maeve.

Speaker 1 She's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, and she's very bright.

Speaker 1 She's just a perfect person. And I'd like her to go to Hillsdale or Thomas Aquinas or Pepperdine.
I'm really going to try to. And she has straight A averages in junior high.

Speaker 1 So her credentials won't be a problem.

Speaker 2 All right, Grandpa. Everybody needs a grandpa like Victor.

Speaker 1 I will work overtime to pay for it. I'll do anything to pay for it.
But I do not want,

Speaker 1 I say that not as an imperious,

Speaker 1 intrusive grandfather, because I don't see her a lot.

Speaker 1 I live 220 miles away. But I do it as someone who has been in academia for 50 years.
And I've seen so many kids go into academia and four year, five, or six years later come out.

Speaker 1 not the same.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure that it's a healthy experience.

Speaker 2 But I've seen St.

Speaker 1 Thomas,

Speaker 1 I've seen Thomas Aquinas named after St. Thomas Aquinas,

Speaker 1 and I am so impressed by the students and the faculty and the curriculum and the beautiful place it's at.

Speaker 1 It's only 200 miles from my home.

Speaker 1 And if she were to go there, I would go there and see her all. And Pepperdine is...
It's got a wonderful new president, President Nash, and it's got a wonderful school of public policy.

Speaker 1 You and I know Pete Peterson, wonderful guy. Terrific.
And then we go to Hillsdale. I have so many friends at Hillsdale.
Wonderful President Larry Arne, Mark Kalkoff, Tom Con.

Speaker 1 It's got some of the best people in the world there. Oh, lovely.
Wilfred McClay, all these great people.

Speaker 2 Oh, McClay,

Speaker 2 he is a happy warrior. I love that.
Who's that? Bill McClay. He's just.

Speaker 1 Yeah, William. Yes, William McClay.
I said Wilfred. I'm sorry.
Yeah, and the land of hope is about, I mean, it's just, I'm on the Encounter,

Speaker 1 I'm on the Bradley Board of Directors, but I'm assigned to be the overseer of Encounter Books as we give it quite a large amount of money.

Speaker 1 And I work with the editor, Roger Kimball, so I look at the sales figures. It's just taking off.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And now they've got a new series on world history that's coming out.

Speaker 1 in August. It'll be really wonderful.
And I'll talk about that later. I'm going to have Roger Kimball come on and talk about about it

Speaker 1 on one of our podcasts. But

Speaker 1 Bill McClay is just

Speaker 1 Bradley Prize winner, author of Land of Hope, wonderful teacher,

Speaker 1 happy warrior. His son is a happy warrior who's a classicist there, a professor.

Speaker 2 Is he the Victor Hansen professor?

Speaker 2 Does he bear that?

Speaker 1 I don't want to embarrass him by that.

Speaker 1 I'm very conscious that

Speaker 1 what Jack's referring to is a donor whose name I I won't mention because I don't want to have him bother or anything, but he gave a sizable sum

Speaker 1 in economics and classics,

Speaker 1 endowed professorship if he could use the name of, in this case, Walter Williams and myself or the classics.

Speaker 1 But it's kind of hard. Walter Williams, unfortunately, has passed away, but when you name a professorship after a living person,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 the living person's behavior is scrutinized.

Speaker 1 And it can be an object of advantage or disadvantage to the recipient. In the case of Tom Soule, who was the

Speaker 1 Milton Friedman,

Speaker 1 he is the Milton Friedman. It was a big plus because Milton got better with age.
Every year he was even more sharp and witty and

Speaker 1 everything.

Speaker 2 I love that guy. He came on a few of our cruises.
I came to look at him with him and his

Speaker 2 Rose, his wife, lovely lady.

Speaker 2 I'm sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I debated him in a restaurant, I think I told you, in San Francisco.

Speaker 1 A nice donor put us up there, and we kind of had an in-house debate. It was very good.
He's very polite and everything.

Speaker 2 Yeah, sweet man.

Speaker 2 Not sweet, Vic. There are other people at the aforementioned Stanford Internet Observatory.
Very quickly, the Gateway pundit put out a piece that said

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 Stanford Internet Observatory, a group that that received funding from the National Science

Speaker 2 Foundation, which is in partnership and receives funds from USAID, so what a network, published a report on how they took down Parlor.

Speaker 2 This is

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 nasty ass. Excuse my friendship.

Speaker 1 I was very upset about that because

Speaker 1 I'll be frank, and I want to be very careful, because I don't want to say something that's on toward anybody.

Speaker 1 But one of the two people who were running that spoke on campus, and I was outraged by what they said.

Speaker 1 I didn't know quite what they did by taking down now that I've read these accounts post facto.

Speaker 1 But the majority owner of Parlier, Rebecca Mercer, was one of the most generous contributors to the Hoover Foundation. She has her own, the Mercer family, I should say, Robert Mercer Foundation.

Speaker 1 And they've been so generous to support the Hoover Institution and other places like it. And yet we had this Stanford Internet Observatory person come in

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 1 really

Speaker 1 say things that I didn't think were true. And even if they were true,

Speaker 1 in the sense that it was a conservative effort to balance

Speaker 1 I mean, it was that, but what they said was not true. But the point is, everybody has a right to create a company without having him try to go destroy it with federal funds.

Speaker 1 So he was federally funded. And that's another thing we didn't really mention about the USAID.
Under Samantha Powers, she's being so disingenuous. She's on all the left-wing talk shows.

Speaker 2 Oh, this is so sad.

Speaker 1 All these people are going to die.

Speaker 1 There's not going to be this and that.

Speaker 1 And the Chinese are so happy. I know that.
And foreign leaders are calling up and says, the United States is going to lose its reputation of being magnetic. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 The Chinese, as we said, are saying, oh my God, they're going to get their brains again. There's not going to be a gender studies program at Kabul anymore.

Speaker 1 You're not going to have a gay drag show or transgender. Oh my God, this is terrible.
They were really killing themselves. Now they're not, or things like that.
And one of the things...

Speaker 1 that that money came from was government money to fund an effort to destroy parliament, as you said.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they did. They absolutely did.

Speaker 1 There was a rush to go join it, and it crashed their site. And the next thing they knew,

Speaker 1 they kicked Donald Trump off social media, as you remember, Twitter and Facebook. And he went to Parlier, and then you could not get an app to get on it.
They just Google?

Speaker 1 Is it Amazon?

Speaker 1 Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter?

Speaker 1 No, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Apple.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Apple Store would not, they would not carry Apple App Store and Facebook and Amazon.

Speaker 1 And you couldn't get on it. And so it died.

Speaker 1 And their attitude was, sue us. We have billions of dollars at our behest.
You're just a single wealthy person, but you don't have our resources. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's what I must say still

Speaker 2 of anything that's happened recently, and I'm glad everything that's happening is happening, but see some of these tech bros who were

Speaker 2 suppressors of free speech to be in the front row now.

Speaker 2 It's very funny because

Speaker 1 what is Bill Ackman,

Speaker 1 Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz,

Speaker 1 Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg,

Speaker 1 Elon Musk have in common, besides that they were left-wing and they were anti-Trump, and now they're not.

Speaker 1 And one of it is, as I said earlier, they don't really mind giving their money about redistribution,

Speaker 1 but what they really, on the back end, but on the front end,

Speaker 2 at that

Speaker 1 interview with our former colleague at National Ross Duthot, is that his name, Duthot?

Speaker 1 How do you pronounce Ross's last name?

Speaker 2 Ross Douthett.

Speaker 1 Douthett. Yes.
So Douthett had an interview in which Andreessen said, I woke up one morning and I went in and I discovered and I talked to my CEO that these people want to destroy us.

Speaker 1 We hire these people, they come in, they think we're capitalists, evildoers, and they want to destroy us.

Speaker 1 And then I met with the Biden administration and I understood that they were going to control the whole AI industry. And they were going to pick winners and losers.

Speaker 1 And that was going to be based basically on ideology. And I got out.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 they got out because they saw the other side of the Biden administration, that they were censorous, they were going to rig this system and they were going to reward their friends and punish their enemies.

Speaker 1 They got out of the left because they saw the people within their own companies that were coming out of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal were all being indoctrinated to hate the very systems in which they were being paid and undermining themselves.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they hated the,

Speaker 1 I'll be frank, in the case of Ben Horowitz or Mark Zuckerberg

Speaker 1 or Ackman, many of them were Jewish Americans. And they looked at exactly what the Democratic Party was doing.
They looked at Claudine Gay's testimonies.

Speaker 1 They looked at what was going on at Columbia University. They looked at what was going on at Stanford University.
And they looked at the anemic, pathetic response of the college president.

Speaker 1 And they saw the Biden administration was either doing nothing or

Speaker 1 de facto encourage it. And they said, these people are anti-Israeli, anti-Semites, and I'm not going to subsidize them anymore.
So that was a perfect storm. I don't know how long they're going to be.

Speaker 1 David Sachs was another really good guy. He's a really smart guy.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Trump, it wasn't their money that was important, although it was important in the case of Musk.

Speaker 1 He kind of balanced the billion and a half dollar advantage that Camilla Harris had, but it was their expertise.

Speaker 1 So you've got all these people who are really smart, and they're going to be advising Trump on policy from AI to biotech to lasers to cyber currency, cryptocurrency, cybersecurity, everything.

Speaker 1 It's good, but the Stanford Internet Observatory went out of business. And

Speaker 1 we should have seen the

Speaker 1 parade of

Speaker 1 propaganda, how wonderful it was, and the name was so clever. And they were going to be the observatory, like the Lick Observatory.

Speaker 1 They were going to have their big telescope, and they were going to scan the entire social media day by day, and then they were going to say, uh-oh,

Speaker 1 laptop, New York Post says laptop is authentic, we know it's Russian disinformation.

Speaker 1 Suppress, suppress, suppress, suppress, disinformation, disinformation.

Speaker 1 Joe Biden, subtext, Joe Biden needs to be defended in the next debate by saying 51 authorities say that it's Russian disinformation. So that's what they did.
They did other things too.

Speaker 1 There's spin-offs about you can't use the word patriot, American, all that stuff came out of that movement. Oh, that's right.

Speaker 1 But as I said, I just, I've been there a lot lately at Stanford, almost every day. And I come home on weekends because I've been on some hiring committees.
And

Speaker 1 it's a very different place.

Speaker 1 You walk across, the campus is quiet. There's no Hamas tents.
There's no chalk written on the side, as I said in another podcast. There's nobody defacing property.

Speaker 1 There's a new president, very different president.

Speaker 1 And even, as I said to Sammy, the Stanford Daily Jack reads like the high school newspaper.

Speaker 2 What's your favorite food?

Speaker 1 What's the new iPhone that all Stanford students are using? What's the latest shoe footwear?

Speaker 1 That kind of stuff. Not like, you know, fascist Donald Trump,

Speaker 1 Judge Duncan giving good riddance,

Speaker 1 ridden out of Stanford,

Speaker 1 none of that.

Speaker 1 And it's just

Speaker 1 because of two things. The alumni said, I'm not going to pay for this anymore.
And they stopped giving at least 10 or 20 percent, and they lost a lot of income.

Speaker 1 And number two, and far more importantly,

Speaker 1 to quote

Speaker 1 Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2, when Crassus and Brutus are angry that nobody knows their name. Our name was just as good as Caesar's.
Why don't people know it? And they say, he doth

Speaker 1 strove

Speaker 1 like a colossus, and we,

Speaker 1 as mere mortals, peep around between his legs.

Speaker 2 Well, that's kind of familiar.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what it is. They're scared to death that Donald Trump is going to to tax endowments,

Speaker 1 put strings on government aid that they have to follow the Bill of Rights, et cetera, due process, freedom of speech.

Speaker 2 Title IX, thankfully. Title IX.

Speaker 1 California is not, we're not following it, Jack.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 1 70% of people nationwide, no, excuse me, 79, 80%

Speaker 1 don't want biological males in there. And as I said,

Speaker 1 the biggest thing about that, just to finish,

Speaker 1 I was on a broadcast and there was a guy on there that they ran a clip and he said there was no evidence that any person who was trans had an innate advantage over the other

Speaker 1 people.

Speaker 1 And he was a male, I think, that had transitioned. And of course, there is no case, and this proves the opposite of what he's trying to prove.
There is no case of a biological woman.

Speaker 1 taking hormones, having radical surgery, and then out-competing males. It doesn't happen.

Speaker 1 You can have all the women soccer players in the world. They had a big, I think the women's soccer team lost to a high school team not too long ago.
Boys team.

Speaker 1 Boys team. You can't do it.
And so when you talk about transgendered athletes abusing the system, it is only one type.

Speaker 1 It is biological males transitioning into female sports, where their muscular skeletal size and muscular strength, their DNA, in other words, gives them enormous advantages.

Speaker 1 And it proves the point that they're not the same as biological women, just as the fact that

Speaker 1 transgendered men never win a major sports event because they have different DNA that is female.

Speaker 1 And that's what everybody's been saying.

Speaker 1 They all lie about it.

Speaker 2 Reminds me, there's this terribly, terrible, funny movie in its way called The Ringer. And it was about one of of those guys from that jackass show was performed in the special olympics and

Speaker 2 you know it's it's uh

Speaker 2 there is a there's what is it about leah thomas and others that makes them want to do that it's either misogyny or it's this i don't know i just saw that picture of

Speaker 1 That famous iconic picture of Riley Gaines here, second place, and she's there, and

Speaker 1 Riley Gaines is like this, and he's like a pyramid with huge shoulders and no rear end.

Speaker 1 And he's like two feet taller with a big male muscularity, and we're supposed to believe that this was a fair competition.

Speaker 1 And of course, it wasn't.

Speaker 2 That he believes it's a fair competition is the pathetic thing about it all. Yeah, and

Speaker 1 then you have Megan Rapineau mouthing off during this whole cycle, and

Speaker 1 you think, well, you're at the end of your career. If you were 20 and you were trying to become, as Megan Kelly made that point the other day, if you're trying to become a multi-millionaire

Speaker 1 and you're competing against biological males in soccer, you would have never made it. And so you're just, after your career is over, you're performance art virtue signaling supporting this nonsense.

Speaker 1 J.K. Rowlands was really good.
She had a really good commentary about it. Martina Navatarola, both those people are anti-Trump, and they still really praise Trump for doing that.
He ended it.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's it.

Speaker 1 The funny thing is, Jack, when I was nine years old, 10 years old, 11, there was something called the U.S.-Russian track and field games. You remember that? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they often held them at least one or two years at Stanford University in the old stadium.

Speaker 1 And my mom was a graduate, and et cetera. So we went up there to see it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 my dad and all the people, we were there, and they had some, you remember these two women? They were called the press sisters, Tamara Press, and I think her name was Olga.

Speaker 1 I haven't researched this, so bear with me, everybody. It's by memory, 60 years ago.
But I was a little 10-year-old, and I said, and she was right before us with a hammer throw.

Speaker 1 And my dad, and everybody goes, she's a man. She's a man.

Speaker 2 Everybody was going, boo.

Speaker 1 and it was against and then an usher came and my mother said bill bill bill this is against the spirit of please don't boo and he says she's a man she is a man and then my mother said actually uh they did some saliva test

Speaker 1 and uh i don't think her sister will be

Speaker 1 well the point was they were men yeah and the soviets were cheating on the system for shot put javelin and

Speaker 1 ball and hammer hammer throw yeah and everybody knew it and it was on fair, and they were giving some kind of tests, and they finally eliminated them. But

Speaker 1 we went from there to what we are now.

Speaker 2 I think it used to be about like the East German women swimmers that you would see at the Ural.

Speaker 2 All right, anyway, Victor. Anyway.
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Speaker 2 And we thank the good people at SolAir for once again sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, we're going to take this

Speaker 2 into the around-the-home stretch and over the finish line with Hunter Biden. So here's a piece from PJ Media.

Speaker 2 According to Lynn DeLee, and that's the

Speaker 2 Chinese-American woman who was a big fundraiser for the Democratic Party. So everyone knew she's seen her.

Speaker 1 I really like what she's saying, that she's now threatening.

Speaker 1 I think she threatened the two left-wing senators from Georgia that she said she helped elect with massive fundraising and that if they vote against

Speaker 1 the riot, you know, the

Speaker 1 new immigration bill protect. Yeah.

Speaker 1 If they vote against that, she's going to make sure they're defeated. Well, let us proud.
She was another tech baron that we didn't mention.

Speaker 2 Oh, is that where her doe came from? Well,

Speaker 1 I don't mean tech baron. I mean, she came out of that Malu, Silicon Valley.

Speaker 2 Well, she's got a book out, and let me just say this from PJ Media. The headline is, Now we know who was running the country for Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 Lee alleges that following Biden's disastrous debate drubbing, Hunter, Hunter, essentially took over White House operations.

Speaker 2 Speaking with podcaster Sean Ryan, she painted a picture of dysfunction at the highest level of government. Quote, after the CNN debate, Hunter basically commandeered the White House.

Speaker 2 He sat in on all of the White House top-level meetings.

Speaker 2 We have a former cocaine addict sitting in on the most sensitive meetings of the most consequential and most important government in world history. Does that sit right with you?

Speaker 2 Ryan's immediate reaction, no, reflecting what many surely are thinking. Without security clearance, mind you, Lee added.

Speaker 2 That's

Speaker 1 yeah, not without security. And as they say, facing felony charges.
The left always talks about felony charges. Well, he was facing felony charges.

Speaker 1 And I don't know who's cocaine, but they found a bag of cocaine. Remember, in the

Speaker 1 Secret Service has never released the information about what they found out as far as DNA or anything on the bag.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 that's another thing the left

Speaker 1 doesn't want to talk about.

Speaker 1 They keep talking about Elon Musk not having statutory authority, and he's got a lot more authority than Hunter Biden's ever had or Dr. Jill.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the only thing I'll just finish today's broadcast with something I don't know the answer.

Speaker 1 Joe Biden is deteriorating now, even more so.

Speaker 1 He's completely humiliated.

Speaker 1 James Carville, almost every day in his weird

Speaker 1 podcast,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 says things like, just go away. It's your fault.

Speaker 1 Everybody is, even Nancy Pelosi said the other day

Speaker 1 that she wasn't sure that Joe Biden would have won anyway. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Oh, she said that he might have, may or may not have helped. But the point I'm making is

Speaker 1 there is no support for him anymore. So why would the Hollywood people give him this money and hire him and their talent agents as they do with Obama?

Speaker 1 It's left-wing, so they always Clinton, let me get your image. You'll endorse product.
What product could he endorse that would persuade anybody to buy it?

Speaker 1 What's there?

Speaker 1 Is it kind of like affirmative action? I think, well, we gave all this money to Clinton, Michelle, and Brock, so we can't really.

Speaker 1 So we'll just give him 10 or 20 million bucks so he won't start grifting again. Is that what it is?

Speaker 1 I don't know. But

Speaker 1 what does he bring to the table if you want endorsements?

Speaker 1 Negative endorsements?

Speaker 2 I have a jello.

Speaker 2 Depends.

Speaker 1 I think he's going to do something like this.

Speaker 1 He's going to get on and said, I really want you to buy Trump watches and Trump shoes.

Speaker 1 And he's going to be a negative endorser so that whatever product hires him, he will give an endorsement for their rival.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 And that will help their sales.

Speaker 1 Maybe Miller will say he's the new Bud Beer spokesman, Bud Light spokesman.

Speaker 2 Dylan Mulvaney, and he can appear on ANST. Yes.
All right, Victor, we're at the end. I have two comments I want to read.

Speaker 2 You know, we read wherever comments are about this podcast, Apple, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus. Actually, someone contacted me the other day and said, you know, you never comment about the

Speaker 2 refer to the comments we leave on Audible. So I did not know there were such things.
So I went on Audible, which you can listen, and some people do listen to this show on. And I'm going to read one.

Speaker 2 And then I have another one I want to read. It's titled Victor Should Be Required Listening.
So glad I followed Victor from Fox News to Spotify to his website, The Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 2 His wisdom and wit are endless. It's like becoming a student of modern history with a sprinkling of classics and military expertise mixed in.

Speaker 2 His podcast is my favorite four hours of the week and could only be better if it were seven days a week. Thanks, Victor.
I think you need to see a shrink on that. Thanks.
Thanks, VDH, Sammy, and Jack.

Speaker 2 You're quite a team. And that's from Peggy on Audible.
So we thank you, Peggy, for that.

Speaker 1 That was nice, Peggy, and I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 If you want to know my military history importance, I wrote a seminal article that changed the whole notion of classical military history, and it was on the butt spike.

Speaker 1 I'm serious. It was on the hoplite spear, the butt spike, and I tried to show that the butt spike

Speaker 1 that everybody had thought was to protect it from rotting, you know, the back end, the rear end had a point on it. Right, right.
I tried to go, I went through

Speaker 1 vase painting and showed that the butt spike was used when the spear broke in two, you could flip it over for an auxiliary second chance. And

Speaker 1 that sometimes when you were marching over the defeated enemy that was on the ground, you took this square butt spike and you rammed it through

Speaker 1 the armor of the person on the ground. They couldn't get up.
And that's why when you see armor in museums, every once in a while you see a square hole. That was a seminal contribution, Jack.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 1 I'm not making fun of academics either because a lot of these things are very important.

Speaker 1 So I'm not making fun of myself, but I spent a good month on the butt spike.

Speaker 2 When you first came to National Review long ago, and this is 20 plus years ago, and my brother, who still works there, said, That's that Victor Davis, because he followed you and the hoplite sword and all.

Speaker 2 Weren't you a consultant on the 300?

Speaker 1 I was.

Speaker 1 In fact, if you go to the little book about the making of the 300,

Speaker 1 then you'll see that I wrote it. And if you go to one of the long versions,

Speaker 1 I'll have a little commentary on the

Speaker 1 in those days, the DID.

Speaker 2 The CD or the DVD?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the CD.

Speaker 1 I used to do, I do still do some of that stuff, but not as much.

Speaker 2 I didn't know about the butt spike. Now, we're going to end with this.

Speaker 1 I referred to the butt spike.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 this is a little sad way to end. And this is from

Speaker 2 Apple. It's titled Fan.

Speaker 2 And I think it's very touching. Matthew Cooper, one of your many fans, passed away on Monday, January 27, 2025.
He was 32 years old.

Speaker 2 Matthew graduated from Stanford 2015, spent more than a decade as an electrical engineer for Apple. Matthew was totally blind and accomplished many things during his short short lifetime.

Speaker 2 Matthew recently began a podcast, the Defending Vision podcast, and a website, defendingvision.com. If you have any time, you could honor him by looking and listening to him in his own words.

Speaker 2 Thank you, a proud father missing a wonderful son.

Speaker 1 I will do that, everybody. I will listen to Matthew Cooper's podcast on vision.

Speaker 1 That's terrible. I lost a 26-year-old daughter to leukemia, and it's the worst thing in the world.
It never goes away. You think of it every minute.

Speaker 1 And I have only empathy for Mr. Cooper.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I did check out this website, and I would say lots of pictures of Matthew. I think with this family and sister, and he just seemed every picture beaming.
And so

Speaker 2 to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 When you get in that situation, you think of all the

Speaker 1 education and hard work they do. They go to undergraduate, they go to graduate school, they're at the prime of their life, but you can't look at it that way.

Speaker 1 You just have to look at it that for each moment they were alive was important, then they weren't, we're not judged at where we're going to be, or all the education, and then we're, you can't look at it that way, or you go nuts.

Speaker 1 You just have to look at what they did in this particular life. And we're all, I know we're all going from the alpha to the omega, but if you're,

Speaker 1 it's not that

Speaker 1 college is just a prerequisite to job is a prerequisite, then you get this this big moment. No, no, each moment was important.

Speaker 1 You go back and look at when they're in college, and that is important in itself, is what I'm trying to say. Right, right.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, thanks for that. Thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.
I want to thank people who write to me and say, I love civil thoughts.

Speaker 2 And if you are just, if you're a new listener to this podcast, I write a free weekly email newsletter, civil thoughts.

Speaker 2 I do that for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

Speaker 2 It comes out every Friday and it has 14 recommended readings. We're not charging anything.
We're not selling your name.

Speaker 2 It's non-transactional. I think you'll enjoy it.
So go to civilthoughts.com and sign up. Easy peasy.
Thanks for that. Thanks, Victor.
You've been trying to get away from you. Thank you, everybody.

Speaker 2 We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye-bye.