Historic Transparency, Theater, and Success

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, with my smiley friend here, Victor Davis Hanson.

I am still smiling.

It's a star and namesake of this show, which is a podcast on just the news and now video on Rumble.

So you're getting it one way or the other. If you're on Rumble, you'll see a great-looking new Victor Stiles.
That doesn't sound very good. You're getting it one way or the other.
That's right. It's like, Cass, this is your medicine.
You're going to take it whether you like it or not. Yes.
I think everybody likes this medicine, Victor. We are recording on February 8th, and this is a Saturday.
Where I am, we're about to get 10 inches of snow, which is not like the, I think, did you get 10 feet of snow yourself last year, Victor? No, we don't get any snow. We get rain and rain, and it's the weirdest year in the world.
If you go up to 7,000 feet in the central Sierra, there's no snow. 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. No reservoirs to get them either.
Well, we're going to talk today about plenty of topics. Donald Trump's I think resounding diplomatic

not We're going to talk today about plenty of topics. Donald Trump's, I think, resounding diplomatic, not diplomatic, it's foreign policy victory over Red China in Panama.
We have this, as we're recording today, yesterday, the 7th of February, there was a nutty standoff outside the Department of Education. And 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. And we'll do all that when we come back from these important messages.
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I forgot to mention victor is the martin and ely anderson senior fellow at the hoover institution and the wayne and marsha busky distinguished fellow in history at hillsdale college and he has a website the blade of perseus victorhanson.com is the address more on that later victor i know you've talked um we talked a little bit, you've talked with Sammy about Donald Trump's actions related to Colombia, Venezuela, Denmark, Greenland, etc. 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.
You want to talk about that, please? Yeah, I do. 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.
And I read an account where they were amused by his Cuban-accented Spanish. But the head of state is conservative.
They use the U.S. dollar.
So after Trump did all this, 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 the bad cop.

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

So 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.
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. 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 any money. And we do not want you to go through with this remodeling, rebooting of the 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.
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 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 really haven't yet because they saw what happened in the first administration.
So Mr. Trudeau whined and, you know, he went into his little cave and licked his wounds and said, oh, this is so unfair.
Then he authorized a billion dollars of border security. And he said he would address in bilateral talks this huge $50 billion trade deficit.
Then Scheinbaum in her machismo way had to show everybody that she didn't bow to the Yankee dictator and all that crap. And then she quietly said, OK, 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.
you can 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 supply parts like China, 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.
We're going to try to let you close the border so fentanyl cannot come so easily. We have to, if you don't tax the remittances, please, please don't tax remittances.
That's our $63 billion golden calf that we worship. We will close the border.
And then he went to the EU and he said, you have a $500 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.
I don't know if they're going to buy them or not. Every European I talk to says, when I ask them about this, always says they love American trucks,

but they're too big and 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.
Japan just announced,

Japan's looking at this and said, oh my God, Toyotas and Hondas, and we wouldn't let American

I'm going to goas and Hondas. 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, so the prime minister's promised to spend $1 trillion buying U.S.
fuel and products, ag products, etc., and to invest in the United States, maybe with Nippon Steel, investing with U.S. Steel.

So that is going on.

He's already had people promising another $500 billion investment.

And it's all working. And what I'm getting at getting at jack is nobody's talking about it on the left so they're swarming the 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 and we've been a big fat target and we've been ripped off.
And he's right about that. And now he's making enormous progress in just two and a half weeks.
You'd think people in the Wall Street Journal would be happy. But when I look at the reporting of the Wall Street Journal, almost every article is negative, almost every one.
They said the terrorists wouldn't, this was dangerous. It was, they were horrible and free.
And then, then they just go silent when they're proven wrong. 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.
We got all this billions of dollars. We censored the news.
Ha ha. She's now a Wall Street Journal hack.
And I was listening to Jennifer Griffin. She's the Pentagon, you know, reporter for Fox.
She got into it with Pete. Yeah, she said that Pete was painting his house.
Well, what she didn't tell you is that Pete Hexeth 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 journal? 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. And meanwhile, the official residence of the Department of Justice was decayed.
And the money was already allotted in prior administration. 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. And then they point out that that job report ended for the period January 12th, eight days before Trump entered office.
What was interesting is Pete Hexeth called out Jennifer Griffin. He said, the Democratic media and you, and they're synonymous.
And so she was, I don't know what she's trying to do, but there's a lot of people. I think that's why Rupert Murdoch was in the White House.
Because I think Trump has said publicly that the Wall Street Journal, some people at Fox News, and even the New York Post editorial board, they're anti-Trump. I don't know if they're anti-Trump, but they've been very critical of him.
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, particularly very aggressive, very aggressive against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And with the journal, you know, you write 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 not as well known who I'm friendly with, so what? 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 disregarded.
And those are wounds that need to be licked, ego wounds, I think. Well, I mean, 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. Right.
We have zero influence. And I would say that Donald Trump does not do what the Wall Street Journal op-ed tells him to do.
So he has a different sort of influence. It's much more grassroots.
And he listens to people. He listens to probably Joe Rogan or Charlie Kirk or Laura Ingraham 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.
Although he might listen to our former employer, Jack, National Review. Okay, well, he might.
You never know. It's still very critical.
I looked at the other day. It's still very critical of Trump.

Rich Lally has been very fair, I think.

Yeah, Rich has been terrific. He's come around.
He's been very empirical. He's fair.

Yeah, a great piece on the envy and attacks on Musk today.

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

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Paper, paper, pen. Call 1-888-615-8047.
Or visit VictorLovesGold.comcom call 1-888-615-8047 again 1-888-615-8047 and tell them victor who loves gold sent you victorlovesgold.com we thank the good people from american alternative assets for sponsoring the victor davis hansen show hey victor um i guess about two months ago i wrote a little piece um for real clear politics on what would buckley say uh about donald trump but that national review famously in its first issue bill buckley wrote standing a thwart history yelling stop and the tone and tenor was very

aggressive and then the practice of conservatism over the years was very uh i don't know business schooly uh but donald trump's um uh um activism is shocking uh it's it's deep it's broad it's aggressive. It's cool.

It's made you happy.

I'm really...

And that, I think... It's deep, it's broad, it's aggressive, it's cool, it's made you happy.

I'm really, and that I think is part of the problem is that professional conservatism has not trained its activism muscles. well as I said

we were talking about this on

Megyn Kelly's show

and I said

if it had been any other Republican 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. They would have had a special advisory they would have brought in, and that would have never been done.
Never, never, never. And Donald Trump, there's about three things going on why he's so successful.
Number one is, it's Donald Trump. He knows he only has four years, and he knows what happened last time.
He knows that if they lose the House, he'll never get any legislation through. He knows that.
So he's got to move quickly, mostly with executive orders. 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. 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.
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.
The big executive order period in American history was FDR and Harry Truman and to a lesser extent Dwight Eisenhower. I mean, they went from 300, 200 to 1,000, 900.
And even Ike had about 450. So the use of the executive order has declined radically.
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 at the Department of Education.
So he's got to push it through. Number two, 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.

They also know they're being disingenuous that the actual minority of that budget is really going to be rebranded under Marco Rubio's State Department. He's ahead of it now.
And what was the criticism of USAID was three things. Number one, it had a socially imperialistic agenda of LGBTQ so-called queer homosexual advocacies.
And from what samantha power said the other day oh the chinese are very happy uh that we're not a no they're very worried because we were turning off people throughout uh we were giving we're still giving money to the taliban but we were you know syria with sesame c street in the East. We were going in traditional 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. 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.
$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.
$250 million to promote a 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 provide some relief overseas, they were doing it through NGOs. 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, 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 what I'm getting at is Donald Trump knows that these things are corrupt. He knows he doesn't have a lot of time.
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 well all he has to say is I 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.
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. He said, well, we have to have an EPA statement.
And that took four years. And then he remembers he went over to Ukraine and that famous thing that he related at a session of the Council on Foreign Relations when he was grandstand.
He said, well, what did you think about Ukraine? He said, well, you know, I went over there and I think there was a crooked prosecutor. So I said, you ain't getting the billion dollars.
And then he said, son of a bee. 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.
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. 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 magazine's cover, Mr. Trump? Elon Musk was sitting in the Oval Office in your desk.

Now, Trump had kind of a soft spot for time because they made him man of the year. But he said, time? I didn't know it was still in existence.
I thought that went out of business. But what I'm getting at here is Elon Musk is sort of like a fly trap.
And Trump has hung him up in the Oval Office. And all of these insects from the media, 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. 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. I'm not going to make fun of him.
He's going to be, and yeah, and they said, well, he talked to the press and he goes, yeah, he's great at it. He loves it.
But what he's really doing is deflecting a lot of negative press at Trump. And which he seems to enjoy baiting them anyway.

Yeah.

I don't know that,

does anyone really care what the press has to say anymore?

No.

We've come through a fever on that,

having fainting couches

and curl clutching.

We saw that when that Afghan reporter

was going to ask him

an embarrassing question,

and he said,

I love your accent you're

so you have a beautiful voice but i don't understand one thing you said god bless you and move on yeah it's kind of kind she looked 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.

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. Right.
And they have to do two things with USAID. 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. They already exempted Egypt, for example.
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. They're going to scream and yell, and yet everybody knows there's all these scams.
We had one with Somalia, you remember remember about COVID money and Medicaid money and Medi-Cal and Medicare. 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.

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. But that's going to be tricky.
But there is a lot. That's if you want to get waste and fraud, that's where you have to go.
I think some of this corruption just with AID, never mind what we're going to find out with Medicaid and Medicare, will be equivalent to the economy of a recognizable European nation. It will be staggering.
The funny thing about it just before you go is the person who really – I keep getting back to Bill Clinton. I mean, Bill Clinton had that agency for government efficiency, and he tried to impound funds, and he did all of this.

Cut the federal workforce by 12%. That's what he wanted to do.

Yeah, he did.

And he did.

And he balanced.

He got higher taxes, and Genrich got him to cut, but he cut himself.

So a lot of the stuff that they're angry about, Bill Clinton set the example.

Well, um... taxes and gendrich got him to cut but he cut himself so a lot of the stuff that they're angry about bill clinton set the the example well um you know we mentioned the um the show outside of doe and i think uh would be good to talk about that a little more and more importantly the horrific uh test scores that came out i think about 10 days ago, the national report card.

And I threw, 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. Yeah, we did.

You did? Okay.

Well, we'll talk about Maxine Waters trying to get in the DOE and more when we come back from these important messages.

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Victor, three things intersect here. The test scores from the national report card.
It's just, well, I don't know that anyone's shocked anymore, but they might have thought, well, we got through the bad news about COVID, and we will make up for that. There's no make up.
The standards for the fourth grade testing and the eighth grade testing and the proficiency in math and English continue to decline. Donald Trump called that out the other day.
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.
I think it was 70 congressmen led by Maxine Waters. Funny thing, Victor, Maxine Waters demanding of this guy.
Show me your ID. Show me your ID.
He did. He did the first time.
He did. But can you imagine if someone said that, an election worker asking some voter to show the ID? If she had been white 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. Because not only did they berate him, and they kept trying to physically intimidate him by 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.

And that was just...

I don't know what's happened to the black... the school like george wallace you know i mean that he was a racist and that was just uh

i don't know what's happened to the black caucus or the black leadership on the left but

they i think part of their anger is that 26 percent of black males voted for trump

and so that their argument that trump is a racist and he's horrible and he's this and that they're

really telling 20 one quarter of all black men you're you're racist you voted for a racist

Thank you. 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. That's not a sustainable argument.
So they're very frustrated. 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.
And people said, you know, this is terrible. And he said, well, of the top 40 industrial nations, essentially 40, we're number 40 in actual test scores or performance.
And we're number one or two in the amount of money we spend per pupil. A lot of that is for two or three reasons.
One is a teacher's union, and that has, people forget the subtext of this teacher's union. Teacher's union is a place because of the dumbing down of standards as an undergraduate and the politicalization of the schools of education.
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 are threefold.
Number one, you could turn it over to the states. And believe me, a guy like Ron DeSantis, that would be over.
He would have all sorts of programs that would compete with the public schools and keep them honest. And charter schools, parochial schools, private schools do, but they're always after them.
The second thing is if you got rid 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. So you would just bypass the school of education.
And some of the states have already 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.
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 because they've taken these horrible courses and they've forgotten what they learned in high school, if anything.
But his main point was, we're doing everything wrong. We're going on the back end.
So we have affirmative action. We have DEI and we're lowering standards at the top.
But going back to people like Tom Sowell, they said it would never work. They warned us 30 years, 40, 50 years ago.
You have to start the kindergarten level and you have to compete with the public schools. You 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.
Here is a public school. And here is a private school, academy.
And you can choose anything you want. You get a voucher.
And the unions try to stop that because they know there's no accountability 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 charge school, they wouldn't be hired. 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.
And then you would have competition between each state. Nevada would say, well, California may be bigger, but we're number five in test scores among the 50 states.
Ha ha. And you would have that competition.
And of course, California has been doubling down now. 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 sue trump fund speaking of the fires victor um it just it was announced earlier i think today maybe late yesterday steve sober off who is a former police commissioner in los angeles and he's very tied in with Mayor, Communist, Mayor Karen Bass, and he's getting paid $500,000 for three months of work to be the recovery czar.
I feel after Donald Trump's appearance out there, and I thought it was a galvanizing moment, it was the leadership of the area has not been galvanized no surprise 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 they gave them uh the contractors day by day incentives if you get done by day 30 with this part, day 40. So if Soborov really wanted to rebuild Los Angeles quickly, he would say to the excavators and the refuse haulers, here, here's the first 30 days.
If you get all the lots clean within 60 days, then for each day you, 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 there's a lot of suspicion that when they talk about they want to do it the right way, rebuild it.
They're talking about more high-density 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, when I go to Pepperdine once in a while, I drive through there, and 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, big homes with red tile roofs, beautifully cypress trees, palm trees, landscape.
They were just stunning. And 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.
I don't know if Rick Grenell'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. If they have all the, if they would just, one of the things that make it very quickly, we've run out, I think it's 30 timber companies in California.
We only have three timber mills left. And yet we have the fourth largest timber resource in the United States.
I think Georgia has the, you know, hardwoods. Right.
Deciduous, mostly. Not all.
It has pines. But California, Oregon, Montana, Washington, if you would just, Oregon is sort of lax compared to California, but not as lax as Montana 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. And we need to really go full bore in allowing us to produce them.
Why would shingles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.
I recommend to our listeners to check out this guy, Soberoff. It seems like he is plugged in with the wrong people.
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That's code VICor20 at take lean.com that's code victor20 at take lean.com and we thank the good people of lean for sponsoring the victor davis hansen show um victor again i'm throwing you a curveball i didn't mention this ahead of time and i'm curious uh i did not get to listen to you in the great sammy wink talk but did did you mention at all Biden's Trump denying Biden security clearance? We did a little bit. But that was based on three things, as I think.
Number one is we have that great clip where the I don't know if she was CNN or NBC said, are you going to accord Donald Trump a security clearance? And Biden, who had just been elected, was puffed up and he was trying to do the Biden tough guy. Right.
He goes like this. He always paused and said, are you going to ask, are you going to allow Donald Trump? He looked like this.
No, 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. And we remember that what Speaker Johnson said in the 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? 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? 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 so that's very ironic because they're criticizing elon musk for de facto exercising executive authority that he didn't get and you know that hunter and and dr jill were doing it well nobody elected them and they were running the country elon Musk doesn't do anything.
Not one recommendation can he cut. 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.
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. He gives a list of cuts.
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 hexath has already addressed that so uh and the other thing he said about joe biden was that number one he did it to trump so it's all's fair love and more he gets what comes around goes around payback as, so to speak, as they use that term.

Excuse my language.

You're forgiven.

Yes. And then in addition to that, he can use 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.
Remember that ghostwriter destroyed the material under subpoena in a Hillary Clinton fashion. So that was the second thing he did.
And then the third is by not allowing Joe Biden, he's now saying, we're going to stop all of this special treatment. We're not going to give 51 intelligence authorities.
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 use this information for nefarious purposes.
And he knows that if Joe Biden gets national security information, someone will get it from him and get on ABC and say, Donald Trump is risking nuclear war with Iran because my sources, because my sources, Jack, tell me. So if I'm a Washington hack like John Brennan or James Clapper or Leon Panetta, and we've seen it so often, and Joe Biden will do the same thing, he did it.
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 is there any worry that will only radicalize toran well my sources and i have sources my sources have informed me that donald trump is uh he's walking a tightrope there's uh and there's a lot of internal dissension within the cia believe me. The State Department is on open revolt.
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. 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.
You can say what you want, but I've got four years, and I'm not going to be. 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 Latita 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.

And I'm moving as fast as I can.

Duh.

The left likes to say it's like the hundred days of Napoleon.

It is in a way that, you know, he came in and tried to really change the Bourbon dynasty, the restoration. But he's not a dictator 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 and they lost it not because of kamala harris was a black woman not because that even that she was mediocre uh I know that you mentioned the democratic hierarchy in that convention and they polled them.
I think Jonathan Capehart said, how many of you, it was like saying, how many of you would like an ice cream sundae right now? How many of you kind of sort of think it was racism and sojourney? And they all said, they said, oh, you passed the test. 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. 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.

And so that was really fun. That event, Victor, is more than a doubling down of the chaos and problems this party has.
When they got that guy, David Hogg, on there and he started screaming and yelling about he was young. He's a young idiot the woman the they had the former retiring guy from the dnc and he was trying to struggle with the 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 you don't really know the code codes 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 force multiplier of the nominations.

Remember Senator Hirono?

Women must be believed.

Remember her, that woman?

She was yelling and screaming. And Elizabeth Warren did the Elizabeth Warren I'm completely insane look.
When I remember Elizabeth Warren, I remember two things. One was Pocahontas and after she got her DNA back and said she was 001% she said, see, 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 and then the other one when she had that aborted uh 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. Oh, right.
She goes, no. Oh, my good beer.
Tasty. First time in her life she's tasted it.
So they had that crazy woman. And then they had that crazy Sheldon Whitehouse and that Tim Kaine that looked like he was, he put his hand in an electrical socket.
You know what I mean? His hair was out and he looked, and of course his son had been arrested in 2017 for trying to let off an explosive, something like that in a riot. So it was just a menagerie of crazy people.
Then you had that DNC and then you have the Department of Education where this poor guy was like stoic. He became an internet.
I didn't realize that. I went on the internet this morning.
He's a hero now. Did you know that? There's every type of...
He's famous because these people insulted him and he just said no. Yeah.
I want your ID. I gave you your ID.
Are you id are you gonna let me in no 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 he just stayed there and all of everybody you know i did about four interviews yesterday and almost every host brought this topic up, and they all said the same thing.

If he had been black, and that type of vitriol came from a white male, and so they have completely lost their mind. And so the confirmation hearings, the DNC conference, these demonstrations, and then this, 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 uh to satan or lucifer and all because he was an apostate you know victor They're all about theater and it's bad theater whereas and trump it's not like trump isn't about theater but when his theater is like i'm gonna do mcdonald's i'm gonna go in a garbage truck and it's consequential and funny there's this and when he attacks people he doesn't he doesn't matter of fact so they say something about did you see max, what she did? He said, well, these people don't like America.
Come on. That's it.
It's not. 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.
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. They cannot subpoena anybody.
They can't override any veto. They can't do anything, anything, at least until they see if they can get the house back.
And everybody should be very aware that this next house race will be the most expensive bitter nasty fight in our lifetime because they if they get the house back they will impeach him they really will and for all you republicans in the house that when joe biden was obviously non-compos mentis and everybody said you should just impeach him. And you said, well, he'll be acquitted in the Senate.
We don't have the vote. Exactly.
You impeached Mayorkas, 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.
And if you say in two years, 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. 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.
that's why they required two-thirds vote in the senate for a conviction but they wanted impeachment to be very rare well the the democrats impeached citizen trump so there's there's no question they tried Citizen Trump. Yeah, they impeached him.
And then right after he left office, they put him up for trial. And I admire the Republicans.
They stood fast. 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.
There was an armed insurrection. There was no arms found in the Capitol.
There was no officers killed. There was a mysterious Capitol officer who for his life shot and accidentally killed Ashley Babbitt.
We can't tell you who he was because the MAGA people would lynch him or something. And then we were told that Parler was this subversive social platform that we needed the good citizens of Google and Amazon and Facebook to destroy.
It was weird. Weird, weird, weird.
My mic went off there. Lucky for our listeners.
You mentioned Parler. I think when we come back from some messages, Victor, we should talk a little about Parler and Stanford University.
You saw that back to AID funding Stanford and one of its projects was an objective. The Stanford Internet Observatory.
I'm very familiar. We had the director of it come to Hoover.
Yeah. And I said at the time to a number of high-ranking Hoover officials, this person 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. But got to remember, in those dark days of January of 2002, we also had George Soros enlist some Hoover people to try to sponsor something together with us.
So that was an insane period. And thank God it's over.
And that would not happen again. But we had the Stanford Internet Observatory people all around us.
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 Bideniden we'll get to those final matters wait a minute you can't have a shaky hand guiding a shaky shaky hand well maybe which is worse being suffering from alzheimer's or lifelong cocaine addiction well maybe that was the day uh hunter left his cocaine in the in the check in the wardrobe. 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. At Fairfield Subaru, we believe that cars are not just about safe transportation, but about the people who ride in them.

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Fairfield Subaru, where love meets the road. We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on February 8th.
And this episode will be up on Tuesday, the 11th. I did promise, by the way, somebody, I have to say, there's no criticism, Victor.
I've got a lot of criticism lately. You know what, just to interrupt you, on my website, I was kind of making a thing like this and someone whose name shall not be mentioned, I had a scene like that, and it was Frozen, right? Yeah.
And that was in my Friday Ultra, and I've got all these emails. Victor, were you saluting? Are you Elon? I said, no, I was going like this.
It's more a Tim Walz move than an Elon move. So I get a lot of criticism.
I got a lot of criticism. Okay.
Well, this is the folks at Thomas Aquinas College love you. And so one of the guys I said, could you ask, Victor, because, you know, you talk something about the three colleges, Pepperdine, Hillsdale, and you've said St.
Thomas Aquinas. And it's Thomas Aquinas.
And the reason it's important is that there is a St. Thomas Aquinas College.
So I went on the website. I didn't know that.
I'm glad you corrected me. It's upstate New York.
It is so woke. There's no connection, is there? No, no, no, they're not.
But it's amazing how, and this is not a Catholic podcast, so we're not going to down this rabbit hole but there are authentic schools uh authentic about class i want to i want to apologize because that was a slur i didn't mean to say it thomas aquinas i went down there for two days with a mutual friend who's on the board and uh i came away just blown away i mean everything about it. The faculty was wonderful.
The students were right out of, I don't know where they were. One's nicer than the next.
Everyone you meet there, they're just... 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 he said we we do our own landscaping we're assigned an area of the college and yeah it was there there's almost a competition to make and it's it's in a very beautiful valley you know in the sand out of the san fernando valley it's um that's how they keep their costs down're very. There are a couple of colleges that are really into that.

I have a 15 year old daughter who's going to be 15 year old granddaughter.

Right.

And she's Catholic.

And I'm trying to get her to apply to three colleges.

Pepperdine. Three total.
OK. Yes.
Go ahead. Three total.
Not Stanford. Right.
Pepperdine, Hillsdale, and Thomas Aquinas. All right.
I think she wants to stay next to her family at UC Davis, and I don't want that to happen. They live near the Auburn foothills in Placer County now.
So I'm really going to pressure her if she's listening to her.

Her name is Maeve.

She's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet.

And she's very bright.

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.

So her credentials won't be a problem.

All right, grandpa.

Everybody needs a grandpa like Victor.

I will work overtime to pay for it.

I'll do anything to pay for it.

But I do not want.

I say that not as an imperious, intrusive grandfather because I don't see her a lot. Right.
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 or five or six years later come out not the same.
Right. I'm not sure that it's a healthy experience.
But I've seen St. Thomas.
I've seen Thomas Aquinas named after St. Thomas Aquinas.
And I am so impressed by the students and the faculty and the curriculum and the beautiful place it's at. It's only 200 miles from my home.
And if she were to go there, I would go there and see her all. And Pepperdine, it's got a wonderful new president, President Nash, and it's got a wonderful school of public policy.
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 Arn, Mark Kalkoff, Tom Conn. It's got some of the best people in the world there.
Oh, lovely. Wilford McClay.
All these great people. Yeah.
Oh, McClay, he is a happy warrior. I love that guy.
Who's that? Bill McClay. Oh, yeah.
Yes, William McClay. Actually, Wilford, I'm sorry.
Yeah, and the Land of Hope is a better. I mean, it's just yeah a will william yes william mcclay i should will from sorry

yeah and the land of hope is about i mean it's just i'm on the encounter uh 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 and i work with the editor roger kimball so i look at the sales figures it's just taking off.

Yeah.

And now they've got a new series on world history that's coming out. And I work with the editor, Roger Kimball.
So I look at the sales figures. It's just taking off.

Yeah.

And now they've got a new series on world history that's coming out 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 it on one of our podcasts.

But Bill McClay is just a Bradley Prize winner, author of Land of Hope, wonderful teacher, happy warrior. His son is a happy warrior who's a classicist there, a professor.
Is he the Victor Hansen professor? Does he bear that? I don't want to embarrass him by that. I'm very conscious that.
What Jack's referring to is a donor whose name i won't mention because i don't want to have him bother or anything but he gave a sizable sum uh in economics and classics uh endowed professorship if he could use the name of in this case walter will Walter Williams and myself are the classics.

But it's kind of hard.

Walter Williams, unfortunately, has passed away. But when you name a professorship after a living person, then the living person's behavior is scrutinized.
And it can be an object of advantage or disadvantage to the recipient. In the case of Tom Soule, who was the Milton Friedman, 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 everything.
I love that guy. He came on a few of our cruises.
I know he did. Him and Rose, his wife, lovely lady.
He was so short. Yeah, I debated him in a restaurant, I think I told you, in San Francisco.
Yes. A nice donor put us up there, and we kind of had an in-house debate.
It was very good. He's very polite at everything.
Yeah, sweet man. Not sweet, Victor.
There are the people at the aforementioned Stanford Internet Observatory. Very quickly, the Gateway Pundit put out a piece that said that the Stanford Internet Observatory, a group that received funding from the National Science Foundation, which is in partnership and receives funds from USAID, so so what a network published a report on how they took down parlor this is a really a nasty ass excuse my french i was very upset about that because um i'll be frank and i want to be very careful because i don't want to say something that's on toward anybody.
But one of the two people who were running that spoke on campus, and I was outraged by what they said. I didn't know quite what they did by taking down now that I've read these accounts post facto.
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.
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 and really say things that I didn't think were true.
And even if they were true in the sense that it was a conservative effort to balance, 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.
So he was federally funded. And that's another thing we didn't really mention about the USAID.
Under Samantha Power, she's being so disingenuous. She's on all the left-wing talk shows.
Oh, this is so sad. All these people are going to die.
So there's not going to be this and that. And the Chinese are so happy.
I know that. And foreign leaders are calling up and saying, is the United States going to lose its reputation of being magnetic? No, no, no, no, no, no.
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.
You're not going to have a gay drag show or trans drag. Oh, my God, this is terrible.
They were really killing themselves. Now they're not or things like that.
And one of the things that that money came from was government money to fund an effort to destroy Parler, as you said.

And they did.

They absolutely did.

They made it in any, there was a rush to go join it and it crashed their site. And the next thing they knew, they kicked Donald Trump off social media.

As you remember, Twitter and Facebook.

And he went to Parler and then you could not get an app to get on it they just Google was it Amazon? was it Amazon? Amazon, Facebook and Twitter? no, Amazon, Facebook Apple yeah, the App Store would not they would not carry the app the Apple App Store and Facebook and Amazon and And you couldn't get on it. And so it died.
And their attitude was, sue us. We have billions of dollars at our behalf.
You're just a single wealthy person, but you don't have our resources. Yeah.
That's what I must say. Still, of anything that's happened recently, and I'm glad everything that's happening is happening, but to see some of these tech bros who were suppressors of free speech to be in the front row now, gnaws a little bit.
It's very funny because what is Bill Ackman, Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk have in common besides that they were left wing and they were anti-Trump and now they're not. And one of it is, as I said earlier, they don't really mind giving their money about redistribution.
but what they really on the back end but on the front end at that uh interview with our former colleague at nationally ross dutha is that his name dutha how do you pronounce ross's last name ross douthat douthat yes so douthat had an interview in which andreessen said i woke up one morning i went in and i discovered i talked to my ceo that these people want to destroy us we hire these people they come in they think we're capitalists evildoers and they want to destroy us 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 to pick winners and losers. And that was going to be based basically on ideology.
And I got out. And so they got out because they saw the other side of the Biden administration, that they were censorious, they were going to rig the system, and they were going to reward their friends and punish their enemies.
They got out of the left because they saw that people within their own companies that

were coming out of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, were all being indoctrinated to hate the very systems in which they were being paid and undermining themselves. and they hated the, I'll be frank, in the case of Ben Horowitz or Mark Zuckerberg 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. 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.
And they saw the Biden administration was either doing nothing or de facto encouraged 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. David Sachs was another really good guy.
He's a really smart guy. And Trump, it wasn't their money that was important, although it was important in the case of Musk.
He kind of balanced the billion and a half dollar advantage that Kamala Harris had, but it was their expertise. 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, cyber security, everything.
It's good, but the Stanford Internet Observatory went out of business.

And we should have seen the parade of propaganda, how wonderful it was,

and the name was so clever, and they were going to be the observatory,

like the Lick Observatory.

They were going to have their big telescope,

and they were going to scan the entire social media day by day, then they were going to say uh-oh laptop new york post says laptop is authentic we know it's russian disinformation suppress suppress suppress suppress disinformation disinformation 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 their spinoffs about you can't use the word patriot american all that stuff came out of that movement that's right yeah but as i 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 it's a very

different place.

It's, 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. There's a new president, very different president.
And even, as I said to Sammy, the Stanford Daily Jack reads like the high school newspaper. What's your favorite food? What's the new iPhone that all Stanford students are using? What's the latest footwear? That kind of stuff.
Not like you know, fascist Donald Trump, Judge Duncan giving good riddance written out of Stanford. None of that.
It's 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. And number two, and far more importantly, to quote Julius Caesar, Act One, Sing Two, when Crassus and Brutus are angry that nobody knows their name.
Our name is just as good as Caesar's. Why don't people know it? And they say, he doth strove like a colossus and we as mere mortals peep around between his legs.
Sounds kind of familiar. Yeah, that's what it is.
They're scared to death that Donald Trump is going to tax endowments, put strings on government aid that they have to follow the Bill of Rights, etc., due process, freedom of speech. Yeah.
Title IX, thankfully. Title IX.
Yeah. California is not – we're not following it, Jack.
Well, well. 70% of people nationwide, no, excuse me, 79, 80% don't want biological males in there.
And as I said, the biggest thing about that, just to finish, 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 people. 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 taking hormones, having radical surgery and then out competing-competing males? It doesn't happen. You can have all the women's soccer players.
I think the women's soccer team lost to a high school team not too long ago. Boys team.
Boys team. You can't do it.
And so, when you talk about transgendered athletes abusing the system, it is only one type.

It is biological males transitioning into female sports, where there's muscular skeletal size and muscular strength. Their DNA, in other words, gives them enormous advantages.
And it proves the point that they're not the same as biological women, just as the fact that transgendered men never win a major sports event because they have different DNA that is female. And that's what everybody's been saying.
They all lie about it. It reminds me, there's this terribly, terrible, funny movie in its way called The Ringer.
And it was about one of those guys from that jackass show performed in the Special Olympics. And, you know, 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 that famous iconic picture of Riley Gaines here, second place.
Right. And she's there.
And Riley Gaines is like this. And he's like a pyramid with huge shoulders and no rear end.
Right. And he's like two feet taller with a big male muscularity.
And we're supposed to believe that this was a fair competition. And, of course, it wasn't.
That he believes it's a fair competition is the pathetic thing about it all. Yeah.
and then you have Megan Rapinoe

mouthing off during this whole cycle,

and 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

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, your performance art

Thank you. competing against biological males in soccer, you would have never made it.
And so you're just, after your career is over, your performance, art, virtue, signaling, supporting this nonsense. J.K.
Rowlands was really good. She had a really good commentary about it.
Martina Navarro, both those people are anti-Trump, and they still really praise Trump for doing that. He ended it.
I mean, that's it. 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. And they often held them at least one or two years at Stanford University in the old stadium.
And my mom was a graduate and et cetera. So we went up there to see it.
And 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. I haven't researched this, so bear with me, everybody.
It's by memory, years ago. But I was a little 10-year-old, and I said, and she was right before us with a hammer throw.
Yeah. And my dad and everybody goes, she's a man.
She's a man. Everybody was going, boo.
And it was against it. And then an usher came, and my mother said, bill, bill, bill.
This is against the spirit of, please don't boo. And he said, she's a man.
She is a man. And then my mother said, actually, they did some saliva test.
And I don't think her sister will be. Well, the point was they were men.
And the Soviets were cheating on the system for shot put, javelin, and ball and hammer throw. Yeah.
And everybody knew it, and it was unfair, and they were giving some kind of test, and they finally eliminated them. But we went from there to what we are now.
I think it used to be about, like, the East German women swimmers that you would see at the Uribe. All right, anyway, Victor.
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And we thank the good people at Solaire for once again sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, we're going to take this, excuse me, into the around the home stretch and over the finish line with Hunter Biden.
So here's a piece from PJ Media. according to

Lin DeLee

and that's the

Chinese American under Biden. So here's a piece from PJ Media.
According to Linda Lee, and that's the Chinese-American woman who was a big fundraiser for the Democratic Party. I really like what she's saying.
She's now threatening 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 the right, you know, the new immigration bill to protect. Yeah.
If they vote against that, she's going to make sure they're defeated. Well, let us pray.
She was another tech baron that we didn't mention. Oh, is that where Joe came from? I don't mean tech baron.
I mean, she came out of that Malou, Silicon Valley. 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.
Lee alleges that following Biden's disastrous debate drubbing, Hunter essentially took over White House operations. 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. He sat in on all of the White House top-level meetings.
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, Ryan's immediate reaction? No, reflected what many surely are thinking.
Without security clearance, mind you, Lee added. Yep, that's...
Yeah, not without security, and as they say, facing felony charges. The left always talks about felony charges.
Well, he was facing felony charges. And I don't know who's cocaine, but they found a bag of cocaine.
You remember, Secret Service has never released the information about what they found out as far as DNA or anything on the bag. But that's another thing that left doesn't want to talk about, that 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. And the only thing I'll just finish today's broadcast with something I don't know the answer.
Joe Biden is deteriorating now even more so. He's completely humiliated.
James Carville almost every day in his weird broadcast, you know, says things like, just go away. It's your fault.
Everybody is, even Nancy Pelosi said the other day that she wasn't sure that Joe Biden would have won anyway, that, you know what I mean? Oh, she said that he might have, may or may not have helped. But the point I'm making is 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? It's left wing. So they always get Clinton.
Let me get your image. You'll endorse.
What product could he endorse that would persuade anybody to buy it? What is there? Is it just as is it kind of like affirmative action? I think, well, we gave all this money to Clinton, Michelle, and Barack, so we can't really, so we'll just give him a 10 or 20 million bucks so he won't start gripping again. Is that what it is? I don't know.
But what does he bring to the table if you want endorsements? Negative endorsements? I have a... Jell-O.
I just... Depends.
I think he's going to do something like this. He's going to get on and say, I really want you to buy Trump watches and Trump shoes.
And he's going to be a negative endorser so that whatever product hires him, he will give an endorsement for their rival. Yeah, right.
And that will help their sales. Maybe Miller will say he's the new Bud Light spokesman.
Dylan Mulvaney and he can appear on Anstis. Anyway.
I have two comments I want to 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... refer to the comments we leave on Audible.
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, 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.
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.
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, VDH, Sammy, and Jack.
You're quite a team. And that's from Peggy on Audible.
So we thank you, Peggy, for that. That was nice, Peggy, and I really appreciate it.

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.
I'm serious. It was on the hoplite spear, the butt spike.
And I tried to show that the butt spike 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 a 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 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 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.
Well, I, listen, I'm not making fun of academics either, because a lot of these things are very important. So I'm not making fun of myself, but I spent a good month on the butt spike.
When you first came to National Review long ago, and this was 20 plus years ago, and my brother who still works said that's that victor davis because he followed you and uh the hoplite sword and all weren't you weren't you a consultant on the 300 i was i was uh in fact if you go to the the little book about the making of the 300 uh then you'll see that i wrote it. And if you go to one of the long versions, I'll have a little commentary on the, in those days, the disc.
On the CD or the DVD? Yeah, the CD. I used to do, I do still do some of that stuff, but not as much.
I didn't know about the butt spike.

Now, we're going to end with this.

I referred to the butt spike.

Well, this is a little sad way to end.

And this is from Apple.

It's titled Fan.

And this, I think, is very touching.

And Matthew Cooper, one of your many fans, passed away on Monday, January 27, 2025.

He was 32 years old. Matthew graduated from Stanford in 2015, spent more than a decade as an electrical engineer for Apple.
Matthew was totally blind and accomplished many things during a short lifetime. 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. Thank you.
A proud father missing a wonderful son. I will do that, everybody.
I will listen to Matthew Cooper's podcast on vision. 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. And I have only empathy for Mr.
Cooper. Well, I did check out this website, and I would say lots of pictures of Matthew, I think, with his family and sister, and he just seemed every picture beaming.
and so

you have to

when you get in that situation

you think of all the 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.
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. 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, it's not that college is just a prerequisite to job as a prerequisite, and then you get this big moment.
No, no, each moment was important. 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. 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.
And if you are just, if you're a new listener to this podcast, I write a free weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts. I do that for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.
It comes out every Friday, and it has 14 recommended readings. We're not charging anything.
We're not selling your name. It's non-transactional.
I think you'll enjoy it. So go to civiltoughts.com and sign up.
Easy peasy. Thanks for that.
Thanks, Victor. You've been doing it.
Thank you, everybody. Thanks, everyone.
We'll be back soon with another episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show. Bye-bye.
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