A Weekend in the Hanging Gardens and in the Troubling News

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No missed calls, no missed customers. Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson show.
This is our Saturday edition where we look at something a little bit different in the middle segment. And today will be the Hanging Gardens at Babylon.
And they are the last of the seven ancient wonders of the world that we're looking at. But before that, we have some news stories to look at.
The New York Times and the Washington Post, a case by Trump against them on defamation is moving forward. And also political and the Associated Press have been paid by USAID.
And we wanted to look a little bit about newspapers before we look at the Hanging Gardens. So stay with us and we'll be back after these messages.
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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor's the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution.
And the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can join him at his website, victorhansen.com.
Come join us there. A subscription for the Ultra material is $6.50 a month or $65 a year, and we'd love to have

you. So, Victor, a case that Trump has brought against the New York Times and the Washington

Post for defamation of character by publishing all sorts of stuff on the Russian hoax that was

not true and that they knew was not true. Their argument against that was, well, two things.
Our writers were opinion writers, so they were publishing opinion and not fact. And the other thing was that they said that nothing that they said has ever been proven wrong, which is interesting.
Yeah, those are both false.

They had actual reporters that were writing these stories that Donald Trump had colluded,

Paul Manafort using him as his campaign manager with the Russians in the 2015-16 campaign cycle,

and then that that continuance followed into his first year. So that was demonstrably false.
And the only evidence that they ever adduced was James Comey's hiring of Christopher Steele, an ex-mediocre British spy who Mr. DeSchenko got some information from him and they created this false dossier.
And then they and it actually started under a republic, the Republicans during the primary to destroy Trump. And then the Hillary Clinton campaign bought the information and then they hid her role in it.
They paid for the dossier and to Christopher Steele through the DNC, one, through Perkins Coie Law Firm, two, and Fusing GPS, three, a consulting firm, and then to Christopher Steele so that nobody could say that she was breaking the law by hiring a foreign national to work in her campaign. We also didn't learn that James Comey was paying Christopher Steele as an FBI informant.
And, of course, he lied on two occasions. One, he said that Donald Trump, to his face face was not the object of a crossfire hurricane investigation, which he was.
Then remember, two, he leaked confidential memoranda of a private conversation with the president through an intermediary to The New York Times. Three, he claimed that the Steele dossier was not a part of a FISA application, and it was.
In fact, it was doctored, that application by Kevin Kleinsmith. So the whole thing was a mess, and that was the base, and it was demonstrably a mess, and yet the Washington Post and the New York Times kept running story after story, as did CNN.
And so, the classic qualifications of a defamation suit is, did they intentionally, not accidentally, did they intentionally try to defame Donald Trump with something that they knew was untrue? And two, did it have an effect on him? And I think that that will be easy to prove. I think they're going to show that there was not any evidence that would justify that.
And they can subpoena internal communications, in which they will, and they don't even have to be internal. There were people in the New York Times, as we know from the Podesta files that were writing Hillary how to help her defeat

Donald Trump. So they were communicating their antipathy for Trump.
Did he suffer actual damage? Yes, he did, because he didn't win the popular vote. And that was one of the reasons he didn't.
And that hurt his credibility that he was elected only through the Electoral College, number one. And number two, no sooner that he was president, in the sixth month of his administration, there was enormous pressure under Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, to recuse himself because he would not be supposedly disinterested.
He should have never done that. There should have never been a special prosecutor.
Then they appointed Robert Mueller, who was part of the administrative state. And next thing we knew, he outsourced the whole thing to Andrew Wiseman, who has a demonstrable record as a Trump hater.
And they were off to the races for $40 million and 22 months. And the Trump administration never recovered from that.
So I think he's got a good suit. And we should put that in context.
George Stephanopoulos, I think on nine occasions, maybe it was 11 in an interview, said that Donald Trump was a rapist. Donald Trump was found not to be a rapist.
You can say he was found to be a sexual harasser or something, but not a rapist. He knowingly did that and ABC settled for $16 million.
And then we had CNN who went after, I think his name was Zachary Young. Is that what his name was? He was a military contractor who was trying to bring out afghan loyalist and american contractors former contractor and he was doing it without and they said he was a grifting profiteering person he wasn't we don't know we know the actual damages to his reputation as company were five million we don't know what theitive damages were.
That was not the close, but there was a juror who on the punitive considerations of damages said that they would have given him a hundred million dollars had they not settled. So that was another one that they lost.
And now CBS is rumored to be thinking about settling because they edited a Kamala Harris interview with 60 Minutes. And if you look at those were released, the elements that they cut under Freedom of Information Act, and they're damning.
I mean, she is just and we are here because of hope and hope comes from truth.

And I want to be president because I believe in hope. And it's really and they cut all that and they didn't really tell people that they did.
So he's they're thinking of settling. And so once you get the momentum going and you get out of a New York, any of these trials that are not going to take place in Washington or New York will win for Donald Trump.
And the mood of the country is people are sick of all this. And so they feel that there has to be a comeuppance for the people who wage lawfare against him.
So this is a-revolution. I mean, we had a Jacobin revolution.
It's very similar to the French Revolution. As I said before, they tried to rename the foundational date like the French did.
1776 became 1619. It was iconoclasm like the French Revolution.
They destroyed statues and imagery. They renamed buildings.
They invented a third sex. They put things, they destroyed the border and tried to destroy the idea of national sovereignty.
They were giving money to people all over the world for political ideological purposes. They destroyed the military.
They lost recruitment. They humiliated in Afghanistan willfully.
And so, this is trying to undo all that. And I must say that if you had a traditional Orthodox Republican, so everybody just think for a second, we've suffered through this.
And then we get Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney or any other normal Republican of the old school, you know what they'd be doing right now? I am setting up a committee to examine DEI. I have problems with it.
It's going to be bipartisan. That's what they'd be doing.
Not just get it out of here. You're fired.
And that's so we're in this very exciting counter-revolutionary moment. I'm not saying that he's Napoleon taking over from the directorate, but there is something that it's very similar.
I had an interview earlier today. And I said it's very similar to that scene in The Wizard of Oz.
We have that scary. I am the Wizard of Oz.
That's D.I. I'm going to counsel you.
I'm going to shadow ban you. I'm going to deplatform you from, oh, no, please.
And then the election is Toto that brings, you know, grabs a curtain. And then you see this little pathetic guy with gears and project.
That was what the reality is. Now, all of a sudden, wait woke it's nothing comedians are back well um super bowl ball super bowl commercials are back there's no dylan mulvaney or whatever his name was there was none of that bud light's getting mr macho commercials comedians are saying whatever they want.
They're not worried anymore. And the more that this counter-revolution is taking us back to the center and normality, the more people like Representative Crockett or Maxine Waters or Elizabeth Warren or Al Green.
How many times has he said, I'm going to introduce articles of impeachment? Four or five times. And you're like, okay, why don't you just boring? And Crockett said, you know, and then this DI, you know, it's all about white boys, white boys.
And I'm the most, I'm a proud black woman. I'm better'm better qualified than anybody I'm getting.
And it's, Oh, come on, man. That is, that's the Robespierre brothers.
They're gone. And it's the Thermador and, and we're going to have a restoration.
I can't wait for it. It's here.
It's starting. It's starting culturally, socially.
The media is getting sued. It's losing.
The DEI has, by the wave of a pin, is going to be eliminated. They're exposing all of the Samantha powers, which we're going to talk about, USAID.
And look at the left. Look what they got them into.
They're nothing. They don't have the Senate.
They don't have the House. They can't stop any nomination of Trump.
They don't have the votes. They can't subpoena anybody.
They don't have the majorities. They don't have the Supreme Court.
They don't have majority support on any of these critical crime, border, energy, foreign policy. They don't have any consensus.
So they're're just a shadow of themselves and they're just strident and that's all they have is their voice their megaphones and their more power they've lost the the angrier they get and spartacus is back cory booker you know they're it's like they're all back out of a time machine i'm spartacus he's yelling about we're gonna hit the streets spartacus we know you will not hit the streets i'm sorry but you're not going out of a time machine. I'm Spartacus.
He's yelling about, we're going to hit the streets. Spartacus, we know you will not hit the streets.
I'm sorry, but you're not going to do 2020. You're going to be like Kamala Harris in 2020 when she said, this is not going to stop.
It shouldn't stop. It's going to go on to election day.
Yeah, Kamala, and then you flew back to Brentwood and that's what he's going to do. So all talk, talk, talk, talk.
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Well, Victor, let's return to our presses. And both Politico, which is an online journal, and Associated Press, which is online and I think it's also in print, I'm not sure.
It's a source for a lot of newspapers, were paid by the administration. So was Reuters.
Reuters was too. Yes.
And then Samantha Powers came on for an interview as she was obviously leaving her post as the head of USAID and got a softball interview from Politico.

So I was wondering your thoughts on the. Well, the reason that they're so angry about USAID is there's a number of reasons.
Number one is if you look at the statute, when it was created in 1961, when Kennedy came into office, it was just aggregating all these different groups, and many of them were CIA trying to overthrow governments. But it was semi-autonomous.
But the statute doesn't say there's going to be a USAID. It says we are going to consolidate foreign aid under such entity that shall be created.
And JFK just said, executive order, USAID. That somehow morphed into a $50 billion monster that's semi-autonomous.
But because it was created by an executive order, Trump just, he can get rid of the whole thing or bundle it into the State Department and let Marco Rubio. So people want to know, why are we spending $20 million for Sesame Street in Syria, Iraq, all these places, Pakistan? Why are we – what is the BBC? I mean, it's a left-wing megaphone.
Why are we giving it 8% of its budget? Do they give us any money? The BBC hates us. And we're giving 8%.
Why are we giving Politico anything for subscribers? They say, well, it's not for us reporting. It's for subscribing.
That's even worse. We were thought that you could go out in the marketplace of ideas.
We were told, Politico's amazing success. It just was created very quickly and it's got amazing subscribe now we learned that they were getting money for it so you know there there's been a lot of attention to the trans and the gay there's a heavy emphasis on transgenderism gayism prideism well more than their number the numbers of those constituencies in the demography.
And the question I have is, this isn't even like British imperialists. At least when British imperialism went into India or Africa, they were able to, in Southe, or they were able to clean the water.
If you look at some of the things they're releasing, they're not doing that.

They are like an imperialistic, chauvinistic power that's trying to push radical feminism, homosexuality, transgenderism into on top of through traditional, often Islamic societies. And it's not working.
People don't like us. If you got rid of USAID, people would like us more than they do now because a lot of the money goes to ex-USAID employees who have mastered the system and they've set up NGOs, nonprofit government organizations.
And what they do is they then know how to get money and they say, well, we'll give electricity to Haiti or we will get a anti-dictatorial program in Ukraine. And then they skim off.
The Haitians say that very few of the hundreds of millions of dollars they ever got to them. And I don't know why we would give any money to the Clinton Health Initiative.
I mean, what is the Clinton Foundation, which is, I guess it's folded under the hill. I mean, people said that Chelsea got it.
She didn't get the money. She's the head of the foundation.
I don't think she profited other than that the foundation and its affiliates, it's the foundation through its affiliates got money. And therefore, you know, it's better for her if they have what she's running, has money, travel, etc.
So she was an indirect beneficiary. And, you know, it's funny, the bulwark was trying to explain that Bill Clinton, I mean, Bill Crystal did not get money.
He did not get two million. He got Defending Democracy Together, and that came from the Rockefeller Foundation.
And the Rockefeller Foundation got some money from USA. Yes, Those are called Hillary Clinton paywall.
And that was so. All these people had their hand in the trough.
And Elon Musk and his team are exposing all of that corruption. I know that.
They're all mad because they're 22-year-old, 23-year-old, and they're all, he calls them the nerds. They're all brilliant geniuses, and they've cracked codes where they tried to decide.
Nothing can be hidden from these kids. They're kind of whiz kids.
And they're all so angry at Elon Musk. You know, it's not like he invented, he basically invented a workable, practical, dependable electric vehicle for the world.
He was, I mean, are they, you're yelling at Elon Musk? I think they're going to say, Elon, how dare you give Starlink to the Ukrainians to help them against the Russians? What do you do? You gave Starlink to all those people flooded out in North Carolina.

And then you put Starlink in cyber trucks and you parked them all over the L.A. fire area so people would have free Internet.
What are you doing? That is so selfish of you. Oh, the latest thing he's doing, he's taking SpaceX and he's trying to go up and save these two astronauts that basically Biden sent a rocket home with nobody on it because I don't think he wanted the accident before the election.
But they've been up there just forgotten about. So that's not going to work going after Elon Musk.
Most people admire him as a renaissance, Da Vinci-like character. Besides, he is exposing so much fraud and corruption that I think the average person is on his side, and the Democrats are not on the side.
They don't have one issue, so think about what they're doing. Just go through them very quickly, the nominations.
They're just Elizabeth, Maisie, Hirona, Shilmer. And they don't ask Pete Hexeth or Pam Bondi or any of these people any questions.
What are you going to do as defense secretary? What do you think about the triad? How are you going to get back military equipment? You have had your list of them cross on your chest. And were you a sexual assault? It was just shrill.
And then they get out, and now they went into the Department of Education. Maxine Waters went up to this poor guy who was just a security person.
And it was kind of racist. She said to him, I want you, hey, boy, I want you to give me this, and you give me that.
and it was just a security person and was kind of racist she said to him i want you hey boy i want you to give me this and you give me that and you get it was just you know and then al green i'm gonna impeach it's just it's weary it's ossified it's tiring the same old and then they go out and they they block 101 and that's going to appeal to commuters, isn't it?

Then all these protesters, many of them undocumented, burning the American flag of the country that they desperately want to stay in. That's a good logic.
And then waving the Mexican flag that they apparently don't ever want to go back to. That's going to win voters.
and then tipping off

Trendaruk and Norteños, Serenos M13, that's going to be popular in the inner city. So what are they doing? What is the Democratic Party doing?

I don't know, but they think they have a new lease on life after the Democratic National Convention appointed a new chairman and a vice chair who is only 24 years old. David Hogg.
Yeah. Probably the least likable person in America.
He's always saying that they should – he's the guy that said the NRA was a terrorist organization. You've got to ban guns.
Nobody – he screams and yells. He says, I'm a young man.
Nobody's young. nobody's young and then they couldn't even they said that a party of democracy and then before they can even vote or during the voting process the guy the chairman of the party and then that woman comes in to correct him or whatever as well we have this binary person non-binary and trans and women and it was just what everybody wanted to say you know you, you guys are a caricature.
This is an epitome why we voted against you. This is why 55% of Hispanic men voted against you.
This is why 26% of African American men voted against you. That's why you lost the Native American vote.
That's why Asians went from about 30 to 44 percent against you. And there is no such thing anymore as the rainbow coalition or intersectionality.
Everybody wants affordable food. They want secure borders.
They want to be clean streets. They don't want the homeless defecating, injecting, urinating, fornicating in front of their kids.
That's very simple. And they can can't do that and all they can do is scream and yell and after all was said and done these two guys are white guys that are leading the democratic national party yeah and the white guy i mean if you look at what he said he said some really crazy things in his past he said he's really a radical minnesota leftist that's really, isn't it? Meanwhile, there's just a better man and they interview him about every day.
And what are you going to do about the nomination? Well, I think that I'm kind of, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't just be, you know, empirical and fair. And if I think the person is qualified, we'll do a good job.

And he votes for them.

One vote.

And the subtext, of course, is John Fetterman saying that they have registered one million Republican vote, new voters in Pennsylvania.

It went for Donald Trump.

The state is turning red, red, red.

And I need to be reelected. And I'm going to run as an old-fashioned blue dog Democrat.
And if you read the article, and I believe it was the Telegraph on this new young, I think David Hogue, yeah, the vice chair of the DNC, everything he said and did in that article, no recognition that they were wrong on all the issues. No, they don't either.
He just said, we need to get the young vote and we're going to go do it on social media like AOC does. Donald Trump, if you look at the 18 to 25 age group, it's about even.
No Republican had ever done that well. And when you looked at that group on the stage of the DNC and they asked a poll that Jonathan Capehart and he said, how many of you think that Kamala Harris lost because she was black and a woman misogyny and racist? every single person, officer, raised their hand.
I thought, okay, she took over because Joe Biden was behind in some polls by three, four, even eight percent. And that was because Joe Biden was a black woman? In other words, a black woman was polling better among Democrats than a white male.
But you just said that she lost because she was black and female. So when Joe, if Joe Biden had retained his nomination, why would have he lost? Because he was white and male.
They're just incoherent, you know, and listen to Representative C crockett was on television she was just i've never seen a more racist rant i mean it's getting weird that she just she used the word white boys white boy you just white boys i'm a proud black woman i am so qualified and another and it and then maxine olson um vaccine oh my godine Olson, excuse me. She was a wonderful person I knew.
Maxine Waters is right back to first term Trump when she was going into, she was saying to go into private entities and harass. Remember that? Harass Trump supporters.
Now she's back again. And it's like never ending story.
And they don't understand that Toto tore away the curtain and the DI machine was a little tiny person with the gears and levers and it's all over. The image is off the wall.
Nobody cares. Comedians are saying what they want.

Commercials in the Super Bowl, they're back to macho.

And DEI people are running and hiding.

And everybody's thinking, well, we got rid of the DEI.

And what happened?

Oh, you saved a million dollars in your budget.

I don't know what's going to happen to all the DEI people. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
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You can find Victor at X. His handle is at VD Hanson and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup.
And there's a very nice group on Facebook, Hanson's fans, I think it is. Anyways, the fans of Victor Davis Hanson.
And we're not affiliated with them, but they do a lot of good work digging up old stuff. So it's good to check out their Facebook page.
So, Victor, I haven't heard a whole lot about the Hanging Gardens of Avalon. That's because we saved them for the last.

So we did the two in Greece, the Colossus of Rhodes,

and the gigantic sculpture of Zeus and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

We did the two in Turkey, the Haliconarsus of King Mausolus,

the mausoleum, and the huge temple of Artemis at Ephesus on the coast of modern-day Turkey. We did the two in Giza with the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the now-destroyed lighthouse at Pharaoh's at Alexandria's Harbor.
The other one, though, is weird because no one in antiquity had ever seen it. So when the Hellenistic compilers made this list, it was all based on kind of an oral tradition.
Strabo and Josephus mentioned that Nebuchadnezzar, some 600 years before Christ was born, 2,600 years ago, in the capital of Babylon, and that's where the mythical Tower of Babel was, that there had been some type of inner court, huge, with four sides. and the inner and outer sides were terraced.
And they had rows of trees, figs, olive trees, palm trees, and they were very high. So it would look to the observer as the legend went that when you walked into Babylon and And you went through the gate of Ishtar, which Saddam reconstructed, it looked like a natural mountain range with trees.
They were so foliage. And the question was, and I think Strabo discussed that, how did they get the waterway up there? And the answer was, they didn't know whether there was an aqueduct that came in and dropped it, trickled it down layer to layer to layer.

Some people have found some type of coal tar that they might have coated the channels so that the water didn't just destroy the stone.

But it looks, there's claims that they had kind of a precursor to the Archimedes screw, you know, that goes around and it takes water up, up, up. And so today there was a big controversy because it was a world site, the United Nations historical site.
And then in the 80s, Saddam Hussein, there was not much left. He decided to rebuild Babylon, which is about 50 miles outside of, as I remember, outside of Baghdad.
I went to Baghdad twice and embedded in Iraq twice. One time I wasn't really in bed.
I was just flying on a Black Hawk for three days, three or four days. But we went over the top, and then I went there with somebody, and two guys in a Humvee were going out there on a Saturday, and I went for about two hours.
How sure are they of the actual site? You know what a site is? And they even think that they know where if there were gardens, they found some things they think might have come from it. But he built a massive wall of the city of Babylon, and he put the Ishtar Gate.
Babylon was destroyed by Alexander the Great in the 320s BC. But he's built this big, ugly gate, and then he's got this huge wall around it, and the bricks are stamped with his name.
And you know how they have freeze courses where the Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, where they have lions. Well, his face is in those.
That's really strange. I think they're still there, in fact.
And then they had murals were there. And then, so he made an artificial mountain right next to it, oversees it with one of his palaces.
I stayed overnight in the big palace inside the green zone. What they did is the U.S.
military who bombed it, they fixed up the dome, and then the typical democratic approach to aristocracy, they took his huge palace and they made little carols, like dozens of them. So there was a dentist office, a doctor's office, cots, you know, for like a dormitory and then a cafeteria.
And they just made plywood inside there. And then they had Romex, you know, it was very practical.
And then they had this pond, you know, with these, I don't know what they were. They were some kind of Amazon carnivorous catfish or something that would crawl out.
And I noticed that one of the officers shot him with his, shot the fish with his handgun. And the next thing we knew, like six of his comrades came out of the water and devoured or were biting it.
But they were a type of fish that could almost crawl on their fins.

Did you see that yourself?

Yes, I stayed out for three or four days with these officers. They had barbecue out on the lawn outside and beer and cigars.

And then there was this pond.

And the rumor was, I don't know, I have not taken the effort to confirm it,

that he threw people in here. There was a huge pond.
It was really decrepit. The filter system was broken.
But these creepy eel-like creatures, and it was terra so they could go out on a ramp. They would come out of the water.
And apparently for some long periods of time, they could breathe. And they were scavenger fish.
So they would throw the garbage and they would come out and eat. And then they got close and one person shot the fin off or something and then they just went after him.
So maybe they did go after people. But he built something like that is what I'm getting at right across from Babylon.
He made an artificial hill and then he built a huge palace. You could still see it.
And I think it's been ruined today. And it was really sad because the suburbs of little satellite villages outside of Baghdad are now all around the site.
And it has to be, if they were going to get the money and they had security, they'd have to tear down all of what he did. He built an archaeological replica that was flawed and inexact as a testament to himself.
And it would all have to be, and it's right on top of the site. You go in there and there's kind of like a maze.
It's weird. It's ahistorical.
And that's the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But in his defense, it was the one of the seven wonders of the world that was always questionable or mythical because there had been no evidence of it in antiquity.
It was gone. So the geographer Strabo is the only one that has talked about it or said anything.
I think Josephus did too, and they refer to earlier authors. So anyway, that's the seven wonders of the world.
I think we'll start next Saturday on great momentous decisions of the 20th century. What changed history in a day or two of a decision? I think we'll start with the decision to build the Panama Canal.
We'll look at, in the first 20 years, we'll look at the, it was a disastrous decision in 1913 to implement an income tax. We never had one.
We'll look at Teddy Roosevelt's disastrous Bull Moose third-party run in 1912 that gave the election, defeated the incumbent Taft, his protege, and gave the election to a progressive, Woodrow Wilson. The guns of August of 1914, the start of World War I.
Talk about some of the theories. So that'll do a decade every month or so.
Could I return just for one second, though, to the gardens? Do you think that the gardens at Tivoli, I believe it is in Italy, are any reminiscent or near as grand as these? Well, I think everybody in antiquity hadn't heard the mythologies that there had been great walls and they had terraces built into the walls. And there they had not just bushes, but entire forest of trees and that they had methods of irrigating and taking water uphill

and they let them grow to a degree where it looked like a mountainside there's all these mythologies uh that simranus semi-armus and all of these mythical not they're historical people but in Babylonian history were connected with it.

But it's... All of these mythical, not their historical people, but in Babylonian history, we're connected with it.

But it's like the Tower of Babel.

They found a foundation of the Tower of Babel not too far away.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they have outside of Babylon.

I don't mean it's some, you know, empire state building, but they found evidence that people in antiquity thought that it had been a monumental building.

And anyway, it was.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take another break and then come back and talk a little bit about the current news.

And we'll look at the court case going against Cooper Union. Stay with us, and we'll be right back.
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So, Victor, remember the Jewish students that were trapped in the library? They ran in there, and they were blocked in there and people were on the glass door windows, hitting the windows.

Yes, and they brought a court case against Cooper Union, which was the university where that took place. And the university is arguing that the student should have gone upstairs and hid and hightailed it out the back way and that it was okay to just lock the library doors and then nothing else was done.
Like punishing the people that were threatening these students, for example. Again, we're in a counter-revolution and that argument's not going to work anymore.
We're going to see, we're seeing dozens of lawsuits. They're the university, they're the counterpart in the university to what Trump and the defamation supes are doing.
We're going back to normality. And all of these college presidents that lost their mind and allowed these Middle Eastern students and their enablers to destroy property, deface veteran cemeteries, beat

up Jews. They're going to have a reckoning because they know what they did and it's on video and there's a new Department of Justice and they're going to have – he's already announced an anti-Semitism initiative.
And this is the side, does not, this is, it's not the same thing, but the subtext of it is the Department of Education, because of things like this, is looking at the university. And what do I mean by that? They're thinking of charging income tax on the endowment income.
That wouldn't be a big game changer. They wouldn't have any money to hire DEI and all this stuff.
And they are looking at to get out of the federal loan business, which is $1.7 trillion. Now it's outstanding and 20% of the loans are not performing.
And that would say to the universities, you cannot charge tuition higher than the rate of inflation. Because you're not going to get an automatic backup by the federal government.
If you're a student and you want to go to college and you don't have the money, then you go to the university and say to Harvard or Yale or Ohio State, can you back my loan? And I guarantee you, if they back their loan, the whole question of moral hazard changes. And they will say to you, you're going to graduate in four years.
And we're not going to have an ethnic, black, Chicano, Asian, peace, green energy major. We just can't do it because you'll graduate with that and you will not get a job that can pay us back our loan.

So there's going to be responsibility. And I think the universities are.
I walked yesterday from my apartment on the Stanford campus to my office at the Hoover Institution. And it was like space travel.
just a year ago at this time, I would have passed in the free speech area, illegal camping where there was students, even though the ordinance said you cannot stay out, stay longer than 24 hours. They had tents.
Of course, they had signs. Be quiet.
Do not disrupt. Do not wake up protesters who were sleeping.
And they had their tents and everything, and they were tearing down posters of the Jewish hostages. And there was a counter demonstration with the Jewish students for a very small group, but they were very polite.
They would talk to you. These guys would come up and scream and yell.
They would take chalk and ride over everything. They stormed the president's office, vandalized it.
This all came a couple of years after they went into the law school and shouted down Judge Duncan and the trans students said that they hoped his daughter would be raped. The DEI law school official hijacked his lecture and took over and blamed him.
All of that was going on. That's what my point is.
And then the Stanford Daily, the quasi-official organ of Stanford, was publishing all these left-wing, you know what I mean, just all left-left-wing. And then the Faculty Senate left and nothing.
I walked through. It's calm.
No tents, no protest, no chalk, no vandalism. I went by the sandstone colony.
There's none where they went in and tried to deface these historic columns. I've talked about it with spray paint.
And the students who destroyed the president's office or tried to destroy it are still up on felony charges. And I guess the answer is that the new president has let it be known to his provost and deans who have let it be known to the faculty chairs, who have let it be known to the faculty, who have let it be known to the students.
We are losing money. We have had a big fall off in alumni donations.
We are losing constituents. Silicon Valley that hired our graduates, sight unseen.
I'm a Stanford PA in coding. I'm a Stanford.
They don't want us anymore. So we have to go back to basics.
So from now on, Stanford University, they will have a SAT requirement. If you get a 4.0 from where I went to school, it will not be as valuable as somebody who got a 4.0 at Palo Alto High School.
It was much more rigorous. And we are not going to just let in 9% white males.
We're going to be demographically representative. So this is what they're doing.
And the sub-subtext of this subtext is, Mr. Trump, we're trying.
Please don't tax our endowments. Please don't get rid of the federal student loan program.
Please don't cut off federal funds to Stanford's $700 million because we don't follow the Constitution. We suppress free speech, and we don't give accused the rights guaranteed under the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.
Don't do that. Please.
We're good. Nail them, Trump, because they would be right back at it if they had the right administration.
No, they're bullies. They would go after everybody.
I don't feel... I mean, somebody said to me the other day, wow, you're smiling on campus yesterday.
And I said, yeah, I feel like if I write something, nobody's going to go to the faculty senate, you know what I mean, and try to censor you or my colleague Scott Atlas. If I walk across campus, somebody doesn't walk the other way.
You know what I mean? It was an oppressive Stalinist atmosphere that they created. And the Stanford Internet Observatory, I think they're going to be very culpable.
They ran some of these stories and suppressed the news.

And they were like deified three or four years ago.

They were the people after January 6th that were rooting out disinformation and misinformation.

I think one of their grandees was at Hoover even.

And they have disbanded.

And there's going to be a lot of lawsuits against them for suppression of the truth and defamation, from what I can tell. Yeah, well, I wish those students at the Uber you were.
There's no pronouns. There's nobody at Stanford saying, this is a new edict, and we're trying to tell you you can't use the word patriot, you can't use the word American.
None. It's gone.

Zoom. Gone.
No pronouns. I got these.
You get these official emails, you know, that sis or they or their or whatever it was. There's nothing there.
Nothing. Didn't Trump ban those? I don't know if he banned pronouns.
Yeah. Oh, good.
Yeah. And the federal.
I mean, he can't ban them anywhere else. So little Toto, the Toto was the election that grabbed his teeth and pulled away the curtain.
And then Trump was 10 man who looked over the lion or the scarecrow looked over and said, you're nothing. You bully.
You're just a big bully. A little tiny man projecting that image of strength and terror on that screen or maybe the better metaphor is the 1984 commercial at the super bowl which is coming up where the woman is running and there's that orwellian and it's 1984 and they're all like mesmerized at this big screen and it's big brother and then she it's an apple commercial the apple would free you from ibm and microsoft and she runs up and swirls the ball and throws it in the screen it just shatters and then everybody get comes back to normal and that's what's happened we've all woken up from our coma some of you listening all of you listening we're not in your coma, but people around you were in a coma.

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sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. So, Victor, the one thing that I liked this week

and was very happy with was Trump signed his executive order that federal funds will not be

going to biological men in female sports. And he's rejected the whole gender identity as his subject to or as a provision by Title IX.
And so very happily, anything associated with that. There's that iconic picture, remember, of Leah Thomas.
He's towering with those huge shoulders and small hips, and there's Riley Gaines next to him. Yeah, and he won.
They had a guy on, excuse me, a trans person on CNN. It was just, I've never heard such a lie.
He said, there is no evidence, no evidence that there's any difference in athletic

performance between a trans athlete and a biologically male or female. And I thought, your nose is growing.
That is an abject lie. And I can prove it to you because there is some 900 medals that have been won by biological males who have transitioned to women and gone into women's sports with a muscular skeletal body that is male in volleyball and boxing and wrestling and every sport, baseball.
But when you are a biologically built woman and you transition, there is almost none when they go into male sports and they very rarely do. So, Mr.
Transsexual, you're telling us what? That it's only one way? Why would it be one way? Why would men who say they're women dominate when they do participate women's sports, but women who say they're men have no success whatsoever in male sports? It couldn't be because you have a biologically different body, and that gives you enormous advantages if it's male against women, and it gives you enormous disadvantages if you're female versus men. And so what's the result of this? Why not just have a third category called transgenderism athletes and have your own, we have Special Olympics, have the Transgender Olympics.
And they don't want to do that because there's no shock value in trying to take the hard-won work of women for 50 years to get parity in all these sports. And then you get people like Megan Rapinoe, the soccer woman, she and her, what's the word, fiancé are bashing this.
And I'm thinking, you're 40 years old. You never had to compete against big, tough men.
Would you like, when you were 20 and 21 and you were trying to make a name for yourself or get a scholarship when you were 18, would you like to compete against a big soccer player? You don't think they'd have any advantage over a little tiny Megan Rapp? I think they would. so he just threw that he threw that ball and chain into the

glass tiny Megan Rapids. I think they would.
So he just threw that ball and chain into the glass screen and it blew apart and now everybody's going yep, that's right. Everybody's going woohoo.
We're back to normal. Yeah, that was a cheap fake like what Corinne Karen Jean-Pierre said.
Everything is back. I mean, they're still trying.
It's like they have no power and they're still trying to act as if they do. So they take the New York magazine, takes a picture of the inauguration festivities, and then they deliberately cut out African-Americans and then they say it's a white supremacist type of celebration.
I think they're going to be sued for that, because anybody in that picture who was libeled as white supremacist and engaging in apartheid will say that there were African Americans. You deliberately took them out, and you deliberately did that to defame me.
And I think they're going to have redress from the courts. This is so ironic, because that's how the left got a lot of power through the courts.
And now the courts are saying, you know what, you, sorry, we can't do it anymore for you. People are crazy.
You're just absolutely insane. And they have no power, As I said, they can't subpoena.
They can't nominate. They can't do anything.
And then they get that tired old class. I thought, wow, who is the new leader? Maybe it's Spartacus.
No, he's calling for people to go out in the street. Maybe it's Hykum Jeffrey.
We're going to fight and we're going to go out in the street. You're not Hykum.
He's a nephew of Professor Jeffrey's who gave us the theory of the ice people and the sun people, you know, that racist, genetically white inferior. He's the nephew of him.
And then we've got 85-year-old Nancy Pelosi, 74-year-old Chuck Schumer, 82-year-old Joe Biden. So this is the face of the Democratic Party.
Nancy Pelosi has kind of disappeared. She was there on TV yesterday.
Was she? She was. They ask her, Jill Biden is very angry at you, and you're having a feud with Jill.
Excuse me, Dr. Jill.
And what do you have to say about that? And she said, I think I think she said something to the effect it might have been better just to keep Joe Biden. What is she going to say? She was the one that engineered his demise.
But she said that was necessary because he was behind the polls.

So then we had to nominate a complete.

Can I say it?

Ignoramus.

That's who she was.

Kamala Harris.

Did you see her talk about the L.A. fires?

That word salad?

It's just you know what it is?

I was listening to her about the L.A. fires.
I was listening to the excerpts that they cut from the 60 minutes. And you know what it is? Her whole life, she's never had to be held accountable.
And she understands that we live in a therapeutic society. You just have to talk sweet, nice things that are empty platitudes.

And if you're a black woman and she's half black, that she will get concessions. So she sounded like, I don't know what she sounded like, a child, the way she speaks, no syntax, no grammar, no vocabulary, just, you know, wash, spin, repeat, da-da-da-da-da, word salad.

And she always got away with it.

Willie Brown paved her career.

Then Barack Obama said she was really good attorney general, good-looking attorney general.

And she just walked into things, always playing the race card.

And nobody ever said, can this woman educate her? Can she speak? And the answer was no. The electorate, however, proved her wrong because they didn't want to hear empty platitudes.
They wanted real policy and they got it. Everybody will say to me, if you say that, they'll say, well, Victor, it wasn't a landslide.
They came in, they only lost by about two points. And 312 in the Electoral College is decisive, but it's not a landslide.
Yes, but they had something. They had the moderators and the debates.
They had 60 minutes. They had the administrative state.
They had the entire media. They had over a billion dollars more than Donald Trump did.
How did he ever win when they were rigging the debates and CBS 60 Minutes? And remember David Muir? And then they were fact-checking Donald Trump and they were wrong in their fact-checks. And they did everything to stop him.
They had all that money. And now we learn that they were paying Barack Obama to appear.
That the Harris campaign got all of this billion dollar plus. I think if you add in the PACs, it was a billion point five, all the different.
And they paid Oprah. They paid Cardi B.
They paid, I think they paid Barack Obama $100 a hundred thousand dollars they were just they paid al sharpton they were just buying endorsements and that really hurt the obama brand when he came out there that iconic scene when he was in front of those earnest black uh young men that were trying to do the right thing they thought and. And they were just, they were very inoffensive.

They weren't hurting anything.

And he said, you know, it's just, I don't know where you're going.

And you're just suffering.

You know, you're just misogynistic.

And I don't know if you know it, but you're racist.

I.e., Dr. Obama ventures down from one of his four mansions, flies on his private jet to tell young African-American men that they're stupid and they don't know what's good for them.
That's not a good way to win an election. And they did not win the election.
No, they did everything wrong. The last topic today is China.
And so back to a little bit international to finish up the weekend. We all know that they have the Belt and Trade Initiative.
And so they have a big presence in the Mediterranean ports in Africa, even Latin America. We've had the Panama ports on both sides of the Panama Canal.
But I just read an article by Gordon Chang on China and Cuba.

And so he says that they have four intelligence gathering installations in Cuba, and they are negotiating with Cuba for joint military training facilities. They're trying to get into what was,

we call the Monroe Doctrine Zone into Panama,

into the Caribbean,

right off 90 miles off the coast.

And their,

their strategy is when we take Taiwan,

we have methods of pressuring you.

So we can shut down the Panama Canal.

We can have commandos or whatever come in from the

Thank you. So we can shut down the Panama Canal, we can have commandos or whatever come in from the Caribbean, we're going to control this area.
And the problem is that Trump is systematically weak in them. And so what, I mean, almost every aspect, so we didn't even talk about the USAID disclosure that, well, I want to preface it.
Anthony Fauci told everybody the following. Well, now that you caught me lying, I did give $600,000 to Echo Health, Peter Daszak.
And yes, he did give the money to the Wuhan, but it wasn't gain in function. And then the subtext was, well, what is $600,000, a multimillion dollar lab? Now we learn that they were routing money through USAID and it was $40 million.
So when they say we don't want to reform, much less dissolve USAID, I like one of these people who says that on the left say, yes, we can't get rid of it because we have to keep subsidizing the People's Liberation Army's control over the Wuhan biology lab so they can experiment on more coronaviruses because we only lost a million. Big deal.
We might listen to a couple, you know, we might break a few eggs, but we'll help the Chinese. But they're very paranoid now because Donald Trump is in, and they know certain things.
If they send another spy balloon, I guarantee you it will be blown up. And they thought they had Panama and China were playing a cute little game where they were violating the treaty.
And they thought the Chinese were going to control the whole Panama Canal and make Panama rich. And Donald Trump just said to him, look, you have no army.
You have no economy other than the Panama Canal. And you're using the U.S.
dollar as your national currency. So whether you like it or not, you're parasitical on us, and it's going to stop.
You're going to go back. He may have said, I'd like to get back, but he's not going to invade.
What he's saying is we have methodologies to hurt you if you continue to allow the Chinese and then act stupid and act dumb and say, I don't know what they're doing. I invited the Chinese.
Oh, my gosh. They put a huge cargo plaza at the entry and exit of the Panama Canal.
They're going to build a bridge. Oh, my gosh.
Does that worry you? They knew exactly what they were doing. And then the worst is he got out of the Paris Climate Accord that Biden put us back in after he got out the first time.
And now that's starting to stampede. All these other countries are saying, hmm, the United States is out.
Good, I can get out. And China is so angry.
It's saying this is terrible, climate change. And the subtext, I don't even think it's a subtext.
What China is saying is we're building one or two coal plants a month. We pollute more than any other country in the world.
And we had this scam going called the Paris climate. So we went and joined and said we were going to work with you because you knew that if you could make us reduce our climate, fossil fuel footprint, that solves the problem because we're the biggest polluter.
But we're not going to do that. We want cheap energy so we can compete and destroy your markets.
So under this little fake thing that we're green, we got the United States and Europe to go into wind, solar, you name it, all these inefficient subsidized fuels while they were sitting on this bonanza of European North Sea oil and East Med pipeline oil in the Mediterranean and the United States. Biden put off 600,000 acres.
And now Trump is saying, I know it's exactly it's a new green scam. It's a scam.

It's a Chinese engineered plot so that they're going to worry about climate change. And while they are the biggest climate change polluters in the world, and they're going to appeal to stupid Westerners and guilt ridden grandees, and they're going to reduce the efficiency of their own industries by using high-priced, unworkable solar and wind and biofuel or biodiesel, why we're just going to get the cheapest thing and beat them in the marketplace.
And Trump said, no, no, no, no, no. We're done.
And so, God, the Biden administration was like, it was like a big turkey they carved up. You know what I mean? It was like, he just delivered America on a plate.
And they said the Chinese, it's medium rare, just eat it. That's us.
And they devoured us in every aspect. And now...
And they kept talking about how much they liked it so much better that they could do that to the United States. But just to be the devil's advocate, if I were the Chinese, I would just be thinking, we'll just wait this out for four years.
We'll placate, make a few changes to humor them. Well, they are going to, they'll try to influence to influence the election they always do nobody talks about what they do with cyber and and they're oh talking about the wuhan virus was racist it was racist what you did saying that it was the chinese it was racist otherwise you know hwo they control that but uh that.
But no one's understanding, appreciating this counterrevolution. I think the Chinese for four years are going to be in bad trouble.
Bad, bad trouble. And no one's talking about the military.
They were so happy with DEI. They thought, wow, you guys are so racist.
You had the yellow peril and you've got to make up for it. Oh, DEI.
Yes, that's what you have to. Now, we have a million Uyghurs in a camp.
And right after COVID, we expelled as many Africans and students as we could because we are a uniracial racist party. However, we can appeal to your stupid Western guilt and your military under DEI was falling apart.
And now they just, it's had the highest daily recruitment. I think it's 365 recruits a day times that by 30.
You're getting 10,000 recruits a month. And so the Pentagon won't have to play this little game they play when they're 40,000, 30,000, 50,000.
And they say something like, well, we're not short. We just did some calculations and revision.
We found we didn't need 40,000 So, we met our goals. Olin West has a great

co-authored piece about that. But, you know, I think I mentioned on this broadcast, I've talked

to a couple of very high-ranking generals and they kind of act like I'm a naughty boy. They've

come up to me because I've written about this a lot. And they said, you should stop writing about

recruitment problems. It's not because we have DEI.
It's not because we were humiliated in Kabul. It's none of those.
It's not because General Milley said anything about Professor Kendi. It's not because they said they were going to investigate white rage, privilege, supremacy.
It was because of obesity. It was because of tattoos.
It was because of drugs. It was because gangs.
It was because of competition with private. No, it wasn't.
And now we know the truth because Donald Trump threw that ball and chain into the screen. It shattered.
And now there is no DI. And all of a sudden, people want to join the military again.
And we know what group is joining because another thing they don't want to disclose, they were almost, if not meeting their Latino, black, Native American, trans, gay woman quotas. And they are quotas.
They talk about it. But they were not meeting their normal recruitment of white middle class kids.
And now I think the data will show that those are the people who feel there's a chance for them to have an even playing field in the military. Yeah, well, to that end, Victor, you received, actually, a letter from a very nice woman who is 81 years old right now.
And she was thanking you for your education, knowledge, and experiences are extraordinary, but your wisdom stands out. But then she said something about herself.
She says, I'm an 81-year-old, married 62 and a half years to my husband, a mother of seven, a grandmother of 50, and the little greats are now coming along. All our children, ages 61 to 44, are God-loving, country-loving, family-loving people.
We are a strong military family with the Navy, Marines, Army, and Air Force represented. Plus, we have a grandson who graduated from West Point and another who is a Marine Corps and a Green Beret.
We too are hopeful for our country and future. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.
And her name is, and thank you, Anne Tormannan. Anne, you're the backbone of this country.
If it wasn't for people like you, we would be in bad trouble. Imagine seven children and so many of them in the military.
Amazing. And it's not people like me that are academics or I don't know what I am, but it's people like you that build the country.
And as long as we have people like you, we're going to be indomitable. And there's just people all over the country like that.
I think the biggest myth that we've been sold is that this new aberration of the AOC model, we're not going to have kids because of climate change, we're doomed. A woman just said that the Michigan legislature got sterilized because she didn't want to bring a child in under Donald Trump.
Yeah, I did see that. And that is the abnormal.
Leah Thomas is the abnormal. Representative Crockett is the abnormal.
So it's a return to normality. It's a return to stability.
And it's not going to take that long. There's a lot of repressed energy in this country.
People are raring to go. You can see it with those Silicon Valley people.
The apostates, that's my new name for them. The apostates, Andreessen, Horowitz, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Elon.
They all went from being deified and giving millions of dollars to our leftist causes. And now they've seen the other side of that one-eyed jack.
And they didn't like what they saw. Yeah, I think small business is really raring to go to even that, strangely, that TikTok advertisement about all the small businesses that make it on TikTok.
I don't know if that's true or not, but the whole idea is there's lots of small businesses. You can see it out here in the San Joaquin Valley.
I mean, I've been to almost every Mediterranean similar climate place in the world, Italy, Spain, southern France, Greece, Turkey, and they had the same climate. I've been to Libya where you have the Atlas Mountains that irrigate, you know, sort of like the Sierra, and there's nothing like the San Joaquin Valley.
Even in this hostile, over-regulated, left-wing climate, these guys are geniuses. The way they farm, they're like artists.
When you look at these almond orchards, and I'm looking at one right now, they're beautiful. They look like gardens.
They're very productive. You look at wheat, cotton, tomatoes, grapes, plums, peaches, nectarine.
And they have counterparts in oil, gas, mining, timber. If they would just bring back – we lost 60 million trees in California to three major forest fires the last five years.
If they had brought back the timber companies and the timber mills who scientifically used to select and clean out the forest, we would have a thriving

timber industry right now. And we could rebuild Los Angeles.
We wouldn't need Canadian timber.

Trump was right about that. We have more timber in Oregon, Washington, California, Georgia,

Arkansas, Alabama, Montana than anywhere almost in the world. And we can do, but we don't use it.

And now Trump is saying we're going to flex our, he's making a wealth fund.

Did you see that?

So that all of the concessions are going to, so if you want to be a timber person,

you pay your leases to the federal government or oil, and they're going to put it into a big fund,

investment fund.

So then you can invest in critical things like, I guess, missile defense or something like that. Well, hopefully our world will get back to, I wanted to just show everybody, you're not going to be able to see it, but the beautiful script with which Anne wrote, and it is perfectly punctuated and all the writing.
I get people like that every single day.

I get letters like that.

They're always the same.

They come on beautiful stationery.

The people of the middle class, they have beautiful calligraphy, beautiful syntax,

beautiful punctuation, beautiful vocabulary, coherent, logical.

And their message is very similar as I'm a voice out in the wilderness and I am not alone.

And no, you're not alone.

There's people like you in the majority.

And that was proven on this election.

And everything the left did to destroy Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, whether it was impeachment twice, trying him as a private city, raiding his home, going into the underwear drawer of millennia, five lawfare civil and criminal suits, 91 indictments, deplatforming him, the Russian collusion hoax, the laptop disinformation hoax, you trying to kill him twice, Hitler, Trump, Hitler, Trump. It didn't work.
The people like this that wrote that letter, they were too smart and too commonsensical. And how they survived all that, I don't know.
And educated a long time ago when education made sure you could function well.

I know that.

I know that my grandfather never went to college. And I can tell you his bachelor's degree is worth about a master's degree.
I came home from college the first year I was taking a class in Roman history. And he'd had it in high school in 1906.
And the first thing he said to me was, well, the only way they got Hannibal out of Italy was go down to Africa and attack at his rear, Victor. And I didn't even know that.
I was just taking the class. The next thing he said to me was, and I was taking Latin.
But I was 18. He learned that when he was 14 in Salma High School.
And now that's impossible. Well, we'll see how much good the Trump administration can do in our education system.
Yes, I think it's, you know that scene, I'll just finish. You remember when in the,

you know, if you're a white male,

you're not supposed to talk about

the Tolkien trilogy

because that's,

remember they're using Palantir,

the Seen Stones,

and Anderil,

the Sword of Aragon.

So you're not supposed to use the imagery

because that's supposed to be a tip off

your right-wing Catholic nut or something.

But that Minds of Morea,

when they go in there

and they see that grandeur of the dwarves and it's all been shattered. The orcs have taken it off.
Well, that's what the United States is. It's like this huge edifice that we inherited that was so wonderful.
And now we're trying to reclaim it. I'm not saying the left are like orcs.
But what I am saying is everything had been in decay. The army, the military in general, the educational system, it was still grand because of such an inheritance.
But now we're starting to rebuild it and reinvest in it. And maybe it will come back the way it is.
I hope.

I hope.

Well, we'd like to thank our listeners for listening. And thank you, Victor, for just wonderful today, all the discussion of Babylonian gardens.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to talk about key moments of the 20th century that changed our lives. Yeah.
Historically. When you said that, you gave me an idea like maybe we should also do a show on massive

capital projects in different

civilizations. Well, there is

such a thing as the seven

modern wonders of the world.

Hoover Dam,

the Big Creek Project in California.

We can talk about that.

Alright, thanks to everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we are signing off. Thank you, everyone.
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